The Daily Dose: India’s traditional medicine

Science & Theology News - Quincy,MA,USA

According to Soutik Biswas of BBC News, India is taking steps to catalogue its thousands of years of expertise in traditional forms of healing:
In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts and keying in information.
These doctors are practitioners of ayurveda, unani and siddha, ancient Indian medical systems that date back thousands of years.
One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit.
"Soon the world will know the medicine, and the fact that it originated from India," she says.
With help from software engineers and patent examiners, Ms Kala and her colleagues are putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopaedia of India's traditional medical knowledge, the first of its kind in the world.
One motivation for doing so is to head off those who want to patent these cures:
The sheer wealth of material that has to be read through for information is enormous — there are some 54 authoritative 'text books' on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old.
Then there are nearly 150,000 recorded ayurvedic, unani and siddha medicines; and some 1,500 asanas (physical exercises and postures) in yoga, which originated in India more than 5,000 years ago.
Under normal circumstances, a patent application should always be rejected if there is prior existing knowledge about the product.
But in most of the developed nations like the United States, "prior existing knowledge" is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database — not if it has been passed down through generations of oral and folk traditions.

For more on traditional medicine, see our
Science & Religion Guide on mind/body medicine.

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