AYURVEDA AND COVID: Remarks by the Signatories: We had requested the signatories to enter their opinion and experiences of using Indian Systems of Medicine, especially in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19 in the remarks column of the form of consent. Nearly 170 signatories have entered such remarks. We have compiled all of the substantive remarks. You may please read these here. A large number of the Remarks are from practitioners of ISM. It seems nearly all of the practitioners who have signed this Appeal have personal experience of successfully treating Covid patients. Some of the signatories have treated very large number of patients in the course of the pandemic. Vaidya Pranava Dave of Ahmedabad says that he has treated 1,200 patients, many of them serious co-morbidities, with no mortality. Vaidya Yogesh Uprade of Nagpur says that he has treated 500 Covid patients and gives the case-study of one particular patient who seems to have developed serious disease as measured by modern parameters. Vaidya Nithya Sivan describes her experience of treating hundreds of Covid positive patient in Dr. Girija’s clinic and hospital at Chennai that we have mentioned in the text of the Appeal. Besides these, many other signatory Vaidyas have described their experiences. All of them seem greatly confident of managing the disease without taking recourse to the heroic measures that modern medicine often requires. While reading through the comments of the ISM practitioners, one gets a strong feeling that this is emerging as a large, wide-spread, greatly confident and vibrant community of professionals. Many of them have specialized in different fields of ISM, including in surgery, gynecology and obstetrics, and in rasa-shastra, etc. The community seems poised to play a much larger role in the healthcare systems of India. This gives us hope that the requests that we have made in this Appeal to the Hon’ble Prime Minister shall have to be ultimately granted. Other significant remarks are from the lay users of Indian Systems of Medicine, of whom many have described their personal experience of recovering from serious disease, including Covid, through the ISM interventions. Among these lay users of ISM, there are many from the community of scientists and technologists; and there are also several belonging to the high elite of Indian society. For many of them, access to ISM has been both a life-saving and life-changing event and they have passionately talked about their experience. A couple of fairly high practitioners of modern systems have also expressed their opinion in favour of the integration of ISM with the modern medicine in the Indian healthcare systems. Among the commentators, there are also a couple of young students, who after their exposure to ISM have chosen to adopt becoming a good Vaidya as their goal of life.
AN APPEAL TO THE HONOURABLE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA:
Further Developments