Why India’s Pandemic Response Is Tipping Towards Pseudoscience

Bachchan’s diagnosis is markedly different from Hanks’s (though perhaps not so much Charles’s) in one significant respect, however: In the months leading up to his infection, including during India’s draconian lockdown, the Bollywood star promoted homeopathic and pseudoscientific remedies for the coronavirus. His comments on the subject attracted the ire of medical experts on social media, where he was mocked for being anti-science and for potentially, given his outsize influence (he has nearly 80 million followers on Twitter and Facebook combined), encouraging other Indians to turn away from modern medicine in search of treatments for COVID-19.

Read: The callousness of India’s COVID-19 response

Still, pointing the finger solely at Bachchan—who deleted some of his posts but nevertheless tapped into the issue of the use of long-standing alternative medicines—for publicizing these practices risks missing both their complex historical and political context and the more urgent problem of the Indian government’s willingness to suggest that so-called traditional medicine can address the coronavirus.

Alternative and traditional medicines exist on the same spectrum of treatments, and India is not unique in its use of them. Many countries that trace their history to ancient civilizations allow systems of treatment rooted in those bygone eras to be practiced today. Traditional Chinese medicine dates to about 3,000 years ago, whereas India’s own Ayurvedic tradition stretches back more than 5,000 years. These traditional systems have made significant contributions to modern medicine. Ancient Egypt, for example, is known to have influenced the Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos—considered the father of modern Western medicine, and the person after whom the Hippocratic oath was named. Ancient Egyptians used dried myrtle leaves to treat aches and pains and Hippocrates prescribed an extract of willow bark for fevers long before European scientists synthesized the active ingredient in both, salicylic acid. That helped lead to the development of one of the oldest, most effective scientifically proven drugs in human history, one that continues to be a popular pharmaceutical product today: aspirin.

And though traditional medicines have often been caricatured in the West as fringe or universally harmful, many countries—with the support of the World Health Organization—continue to use them. In a 2019 report, the WHO said that 179 countries (nearly 90 percent of its member states) acknowledged relying on traditional medicine in some form. Back in 2014, it outlined a strategy to help nations validate these practices. “Traditional medicine is an important and often-underestimated part of health care,” Margaret Chan, the organization’s then–director general, said at the time. “It is found in almost every country in the world and the demand for its services is increasing.” The strategy sought to formulate clearly defined national policies that ensured safety, quality, and regulation. The WHO would help countries develop standards that validated traditional remedies while integrating them with modern medicine, seeing them as affordable, low-tech interventions in underserved areas.

India offers an example of precisely this integration. Whereas homeopathy and traditional medicine are sometimes seen from afar as hawked in the shadows, in India they have offered an antidote to the rising cost of health care and the severe shortage of treatment facilities in rural and semi-urban areas. In the mid-’90s, India’s government formed a department within the health ministry to regulate traditional medicine, including homeopathy. (Though often lumped in with traditional remedies and associated most closely with India, homeopathy was in fact founded by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann in the 18th century, and introduced in India, then a British colony, by a doctor, John Martin Honigberger. It was legalized in 1948 and had backing from intellectual giants such as Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi.) In all, six different types of traditional medicine are institutionalized in India, and taught in more than 500 medical colleges. As of January 2018, nearly 800,000 traditional-medicine doctors were registered with the health ministry, compared with 1.1 million allopathic doctors. Even Indian medical professionals trained in Western-style programs will often prescribe homeopathic treatments, illustrating how bound together traditional and modern medicine can be in the country.