The sheer number of advertisements for herbal and alternative remedies in Kerala is a sure sign of government laxity and regulatory inertia reminiscent of Victorian Britain and the days of Carlill vs Carbolic Smoke Ball Company.
In 1893 British society was changing dramatically due to rapid industrialisation. This was a time ripe for unscrupulous business men to sell their wares ranging from creams, douches and ointments to smoke balls. One can easily see parallels to this era in today’s Kerala.
Herbal remedies have a ring of ‘the natural’ and the innocuous to them. But reality is far murkier. Unlike modern medical preparations herbal remedies seem to be immune from regulatory rigour. Like the carbolic smoke balls of 1893 Britain which purported protection from influenza, today’s herbal remedies in Kerala promise cures for asthma, psoriasis, baldness, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, high cholesterol, erectile dysfunction, piles and an endless array of other seemingly incurable medical conditions.
To make things worse, these companies appear to have the money and the clout to get celebrity endorsements and prime time advertisement slots for their products. Most of us would remember the scene from a Malayalam movie where the actor Jagathy is dressed up as a purveyor of herbal remedies selling his mixtures in a market square. His ‘block buster’ drug is a cough remedy which cures cough by making the patient cough till his lungs cannot cough up any more phlegm!
Although the movie clip is funny, some of the remedies advertised on television today are eerily similar. Modern medicine in itself has also evolved over the last two hundred years through a system of trial and error and progressive refinement.
Many of today’s lehyams, thylams and choornams have sprouted up yesterday and they possibly would not withstand scientific scrutiny. This is not only in terms of their efficacy but also with regards to their side effect profiles. It is hard to see why big pharmaceutical multinationals would not buy and patent these remedies if they really worked.
Also, unlike modern drugs that have to undergo multi-phase clinical trials these herbal remedies and homeopathic medications seem to have found some loophole in the system to avoid them.
There are always people out there to make a quick buck through nefarious means, be it adding melamine to milk powder or methanol to ethanol. Dysfunctional drugs regulators and lack of food safety implementation create a vacuum where anything and everything goes. Some of these drugs are being sold to pregnant women, children, the elderly and obviously to the sick whose bodies are already ravaged by illness.
The sad bit is the fact that many of these things that we consume without a care in the world come back to bite us in the form of serious side effects only after many years, usually when it is too late. This is not to say that all herbal remedies are a waste of money. At least some of them might still hold untapped potential in the form of hitherto unknown compounds which might prove to be invaluable in curing some ailments. If they are not deleterious to human health then they might at least act as placebos. Having said that, does the enlightened public of Kerala want to be guinea pigs at the hands of these villains and their pseudo-science?
(The author is a medical practitioner in British National Health Services and a postgraduate in Biomedicine, Bioscience and Society from the London School of Economics. The views in the article are the writer’s own).