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How Not to Modernise Alternative Medicine Systems
The implications of the Maharashtra government's permission to homeopathic practitioners to prescribe allopathic drugs are manifold. This form of "modernisation" not only threatens the identity of the alternative systems but also hampers their most important characteristic, namely, healing, which has helped most of the medical systems to stand the test of time.
The Maharashtra government’s permission to homeopathic practitioners to prescribe allopathic drugs has serious ethical implications. Maharashtra had passed an earlier policy that made prescription of allopathic drugs by ayurvedic practitioners legal (Bal 1999; Kadam 2013). There have been several experiments with alternative systems of medicine across the world exploring ways to integrate themselves into the national health services systems and which have also led to debates about the implications of such integration. India too has initiated the mainstreaming of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy (AYUSH) under the aegis of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM).
Forms of Integration
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