Whose ’erbs are they Anyway?
04/05/2011 in Uncategorized
Whose ’erbs are they Anyway?
The EU has just blocked access to many herbal medicines.
From the currrent Avaaz Campaign:
“As concerned EU citizens, we call on the Commission to amend the THMPD Directive, suspending the draconian measures against herbal medicines and removing all barriers to traditional remedies with a long history of use inside and outside Europe. We further call on our governments to refuse to comply with this Directive until it is amended. We have a right to choose among all remedies and medicines that can keep ourselves and our families healthy.”
Are we wasting our time signing petitions?
shantam said on 05/05/2011
Why the hocus pocus things should not be banned? With good advertisement one can even sell cardamom-flavoured dog urine as better alternative than cow´s.
sannyasnews said on 05/05/2011
Shantam, do you really think herbs are hocus pocus? That would disregard all the herbs used in Ayurveda..?
Just curious.
Dharmen
shantam said on 05/05/2011
As far as I know from my study of Ayurveda and its marketing, I can say with honesty, 10% is reality, rest is marketing and the fascination for something exotic. In India people laugh at the gullibility of the West, who swear by Ayurveda. In India one can see in any chemist shop that hardly one or two shelves are for over-the-counter Ayervedic products, and this seems to be reasonable.
Herbs grown in any country, not just in India, have some medicinal quality, mostly preventative in nature, resistance-boosting capacity, but too much hype simply nerves me. this much nationalist I am not who always thinks the little thing in his trousers is bigger than others!
If Ayurveda wants to survive in the West, the practitioners and the manufacturers of such products must pass through the clinical trials like the mainstream medicines.
I will be glad when ‘Herbal Life’ kind of American rackets are also busted and banned; in that sense why just focus on Ayurveda?
Parmartha said on 08/05/2011
Shantam displays a sort of Indian mentality again. Has he never considered that the drugs and remedies ‘of the West’ are arguably more dangerous than the herbs of his ancestors?
All these “approved” medicines that come from those profit-obsessed western companies (it is they who have managed to get the herbal stuff banned cos it competes with their own widely suspect ‘drugs’) are also largely rubbish and have many untold side-effects.
The truth about medicine is that many people die because of its remedies, whether eastern or western, just because medicine is only just really beginning as a ‘real’ science.
Many types of recorded ‘healing’ are actually the body curing itself.
Frankly, I wouldn’t trust either side of the coin unless death beckoned and as a last chance. Give me the old daily yoga, meditation and light aerobic exercise as a cure-all any day, for both body and mind – and nil side-effects.
shantam said on 09/05/2011
In accordance with the viewpoint of Parmartha, one swami in India, Baba Ramdev (check him in google) has become the most successful Yoga master of all times. His breath in/breath out brand value even makes Osho look hotmail compared to facebook!
Parmartha, for the experiment sake, follow your yoga, aerobics, meditation as always, but drop your NHS health insurance card for 6 months, and watch the inner reaction!
I think somewhere it was UG, whose sentence I remember now: it is not love but fear and greed which bind us together. Greed and power is one of the biggest motivations, medical industry and spiritual industry are no exception.
Many times it makes me smile to see that the trucks bringing bio food are not a bit less noisy and smokey than the other trucks!