KOCHI: Experts attending the Amrita Samyogam here on Tuesday said the Centre needed to formulate a national policy on the integration of ayurveda with allopathy so that India took its rightful place as the global leader in integrative medicine.Amrita Samyogam, a two-day international conference on integrative ayurveda and modern medicine, is being organised in collaboration with Amrita University’s School of Ayurveda at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences.
Around 60 experts and 1,000 delegates from across the globe are participating. Rajesh Kotecha, special secretary, Ministry of AYUSH, inaugurated the conference.“The government is very serious about promoting a model where experts from different domains contribute to health sciences and share their knowledge across the streams,” Kotecha said, adding, “The Indian healing systems are holistic and intuitive - by definition, they cannot fully fit into all the parameters demanded by western medicine.”
He said the government was setting up a nationwide AYUSH grid connecting all hospitals and research labs to record case histories and observations so that a huge amount of evidence can be generated through data analytics on ayurveda’s efficacy. “While robust research is being conducted into ayurveda, the problem arises in the implementation of integrative medicine at the public health level because the allopathic community still does not accept ayurveda as a science,” Kotecha said.
He promised Centre’s full support to Amrita University’s initiative on integrative medicine. P Ram Manohar, research director, Amrita Centre for Advanced Research in Ayurveda, said despite having a pluralistic healthcare system, India lacked a national policy for integrative medicine.