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The points raised here were not discussed elsewhere in this volume, either for want of an appropriate context or for the fear of their being submersed in a host of other detail. They may not be well connected to each other, albeit important points to ponder.
CONCEPT OF HOLISTIC MEDICINEHOLISTIC APPROACH TO HEALTH CARE
HOLISTIC RESPONSE OF THE BODY TO A DRUG
HOLISTIC ACTION OF ALL THE INGREDIENTS OF A MEDICINE
SIDE EFFECTS OF MEDICINE
A much repeated and significant charge against modern medicine is that it is fraught with serious side effects and the defense of traditional medicine is that it has no side effects.
A side effect of a medicine is the one other than the therapeutic effect desired in a particular context.
All medication, whether modern or traditional, operates on the basis of chemical compounds administered eliciting chemical responses from the body. Diseases and their symptoms are also manifestations of chemical interactions.
A single chemical compound would have several effects on the body and we aim at using the most appropriate effect in a given context (disease state). Aspirin is an analgesic that may cause gastric bleeding, in some people. The factor that is responsible for gastric bleeding was found to reduce the risk of a heart attack. In the context of pain relief, gastric bleeding is a severe side effect and but the same phenomenon gives a therapeutic benefit in the context of a heart attack. Vincristine, an alkaloid from Catharanthus roseus, is severely cytotoxic and mitostatic. If vincristine is employed for its traditional effect of controlling diabetes, the severe side effects are cytotoxicity and mitostaticity, which are the very foundation of the functioning of vincristine as possibly the only effective drug against leukaemia, but vesication is a side effect here. Consequently, a side effect in one context may actually be the desired therapeutic effect in another, where there may be some other undesirable effects.
Side effects are also caused by the administration of an improper drug or by a wrong dosage. All drugs have certain contraindications, when they should not be used.
Iatrogenic (drug induced) diseases arise more out of misuse and abuse of drugs than due to factors inherent in the drugs.
Since the action of all drugs, whether modern or traditional, is rooted in chemical interactions between the drug and the body, all drugs, from whatever the system of medicine, have side effects, small or big. One needs to understand the complete picture of action the drug in each case to avoid, or at least minimise, the side effects and derive the desired therapeutic benefits.
What is being emphasised here is that even traditional medicine is not totally devoid of side effects. When abused or misused, even food has its own, sometimes dangerous, side effects. The severity of the side effects of traditional medicine is probably very much less, than that of allopathic medicine, or for that matter Homoeopathy, for the following reasons:
a) The traditional medicine is never a single purified chemical compound. It is a combination of several chemical compounds even when it is from a single species and when more species are involved the number of compounds is that much more. All these compounds act simultaneously with antagonistic and synergistic interactions. Probably this complex interaction reduces the side effects, provided the medicine and the dosage are appropriate.
b) The concentrations of different chemical compounds in traditional medicine are very low, as the bulk of the medicine is vegetal matter of cell walls, fibres, etc. It requires a tonne of leaves of Catharanthus roseus to extract a gram of vincristine. To obtain five mg of vincristine, the weekly dose at two mg per sq. m. of body surface, one has to consume an impossible quantity of five kg of vinca leaves. The purified compounds of modern medicine are highly concentrated compounds and so produce more acute reactions.
c) A number of traditional medicines are administered along with adjuvants, which probably reduce the severity of the drug’s side effects, like we dull the effects of coffee by adding milk and sugar.
d) A general study of Ayurvedic formulations indicated that, a formulation has one or two (or a few) strong acting drugs while several others in the formulation are rather mild on the body. Probably, the formulations were designed on the basis of a balance of toxic and non-toxic contents.
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