It's Time We Took a Look At The Alternatives

Professor B. M. Hegde

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article3291415.ece

What with a plethora of evidence appearing against the outcomes of modern medical hi-tech interventions in the long-run and the adverse drug reactions taking a heavy toll of human life, time has come to talk of the future management strategies to preserve the well segment of the population in a healthy state as long as they could.

Study after study shows that the final outcome of modern medical claptrap in the long-run is only human misery. There is, at the same time, a growing forest of alternative and complementary whole person healing efforts afoot which existed from “times out of mind.” Let us audit those methods along with the noise that modern medical establishment keeps making.

Mary Tinnetti from Yale feels that the era of disease-based medicine has come to an end. “The time has come to abandon disease as the focus of medical care. The changed spectrum of health, the complex interplay of biological and nonbiological factors, the ageing population, and the interindividual variability in health priorities render medical care that is centred on the diagnosis and treatment of individual diseases at best out of date and at worst harmful. A primary focus on disease may inadvertently lead to undertreatment, overtreatment, or mistreatment,” wrote Mary in theAmerican Medical Journal in 2004.

All these alternative systems, wherever they originated from, have relied heavily on the prowess of the inbuilt human immune system, which modern medicine, unfortunately, totally ignored. Consequently, these alternative systems should be more natural for the human body; and do not totally rely on outside help for every deviation from the normal function. One example here is the Panchakarma process in Ayurveda, which deals mainly with building the immune system to fight diseases.

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