February 03, 2019 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Misunderstood Ayurveda
Ayurveda in its pharmacopeia has the usage
of alcoholic beverages, opiates and cannabis in addition to the use of animal
products such as milk, bones and gallstones.
There is nothing surprising or wrong about
having these chemicals in your arsenal of medicines; in fact it is expected.
Yet this is not what the consumers of
Ayurveda identify this alternate form of medicine with; in fact the general belief
is that these substances are only associated with modern or western medicine
and not with the naturalistic ayurveda.
With such wide diversity of substance of
use in Ayurveda it is not surprising that laboratory experiments do find some
substances that are effective in the treatment of certain diseases at some
times but there is of yet no evidence that ayurvedic prescribed medicines are
effective as such.
Much has been written about the surgical
achievements of the Hindu ancients documented in treatises such as Sushruta Samhita
or The Compendium of Susruta that includes surgical procedures such as
rhinoplasty and couching method of cataract surgery.
Susruta in Devanagari script means “renowned”
is the claimed author of the text.
There is no doubt that for its time and era
of evolution of human civilization the text was a masterpiece of both medicine
and surgery but it is also true that such masterpieces in technical subjects
tend to get outdated.
And that too pretty quickly multiple times
over within a person’s life time in today’s speed of progress.
One of the many surgical accomplishments for
which Ayurveda and The Compendium of Susruta has been acclaimed for is their
pioneering work in getting a person rid of blindness due to cataract.
Today the term for this surgery or rather
surgical procedure is “couching” which has been described as “pushing away the
obstructing phlegm from the field of vision using a jabamukhi salaka” which is
essentially a sharp curved needle.
Though it is often touted as a great
surgical achievement, and perhaps it was for its day, today any ophthalmologist
would be appalled at the very thought of it.
It is perhaps the worst kind of trauma that
can be inflicted upon a normal eye having a cataract.
Couching is undoubtedly the most primitive
form of cataract surgery where the cataractous lens was not even extracted out
from the eye and hence it cannot even be labeled as “cataract extraction”.
The white ripe or mature natural
crystalline lens was simply pushed back into the eye into the vitreous cavity
with a sharp unsterile needle via the pars plana route.
It has now been well established that this
natural crystalline lens and the eye in general is one of those sites in human apes
that is endowed with immune privilege.
This means that right from the time of its
embryonic development the eye along with its myriad of antigens has been sheltered
and physically isolated from the body’s immune system.
Evolutionarily there is an advantage to
such organs.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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