A 159 year old traditional remedy of offering “fish medicine” to cure asthma has been challenged in the Indian courts. The Indian Medical Association has questioned the secrecy surrounding the ingredients of the medicine, invoking the provisions of the Drugs and Magical Remedies Act 1954.
Thousands of people with asthma travel to Hyderabad for the annual gathering where the medicine is delivered free to the patient in the mouth of a live fish.
“Any substance other than food used for curing [people] falls under the category of a drug and its ingredients must be disclosed to the consumers,” says Dr C L Venkata Rao, secretary of the Charminar branch of the Indian Medical Association in Hyderabad, who filed the writ in the Hyderabad High Court.
The herbal medicine is placed in the mouth of a 5-7 cm long murrel fish and the patient is made to swallow the live fish, repeating this ritual annually for three years. The medicine's ingredients have been guarded zealously by the Bathini Goud family, which claims a saint gave its formula to their ancestor Veeranna Goud in 1845 forbidding them from making the ingredients public.
“The medicine would lose its efficacy if we broke the pledge and it will fall prey to unbridled commercialisation,” Bathini Harinath Goud said. “We have been offered unlimited money in the past in return for disclosure of the formula by pharmaceutical companies, but we prefer to spend money from our savings and give the medicine free to all the patients,” said Mr Goud.
“Hundreds of thousands of people have been completely cured of asthma with this medicine,” claims Mr Goud. He said that some 650 000 patients with asthma took the medicine this year, a figure disputed by Dr Rao, who says that according to official records only 52 000 fish were sold.
Figure 1.
The herbal medicine is placed in the mouth of a murrel fish before it is given to the person with asthma to swallow
Credit: WWW.FISH-MEDICINES.ORG/HOME.HTM
“There is no evidence that it works,” Dr Ajit Vigg, head of respiratory and critical care medicine at Apollo Hospital, Hyderabad, said. “On the contrary, we have seen 10-15% patients whose condition has worsened.”
Dr Vigg says they had sent some dozen chronic asthma patients to be treated with fish medicine a few years ago and monitored variables such as their forced vital capacity and forced expiration volume before and after the treatment but found no improvement. “In my practice of 20-25 years, I have not seen a single patient whose condition has either improved or who has got completely cured with fish medicine,” he said.
Both Mr Goud and the critics concur that there are no records to verify the claims and counterclaims.
Under the court order, samples of the medicine have been sent to three different laboratories for analysis. The laboratory reports have to be filed by 1 July. Dr Rao says his association has demanded that the contents of the fish medicine be made known to the recipients. It has also called for prosecution of the Bathini Gouds for violating the provisions of the Drugs and Magical Remedies Act and a ban on government spending in promoting fish medicine.
Dr Rao added that as the medicine was administered without using gloves to a large number of people, communicable diseases could be spread.