On Anandayya's Ayurvedic medicine.

It has been a week since Anandayya's Ayurvedic medicine has picked up unparalleled craze amongst people of rural Andhra Pradesh and its surrounding states. This has happened after some videos and pamphlets of testimonies came out, claiming the "miracle cure" of the drug. News channels and local politicians, including MLAs, people belonging to the same caste of Anandayya and many other people have beelined to this claim to get their share of goli, forming long queues and violating every single covid protocol at every turn possible. Barricades have been set up, WhatsApp forwards of unconscious people becoming perfectly alright in 10 minutes of this drug usage went rampant. But where does Anandayya's Ayurvedic cure stand when it comes to Science? Can we trust its efficacy now or should we wait for some more days for the air (and possibly the crowd) to get clear? Read on. 

1.Clinical trials

Any medicine or a drug should go through stringent tests in lab, administered by a "group" of researchers where they check it on animals such as docile lab rats or monkeys and then on the actual groups of people to see what exactly drug does to their body. This has to be done multiple times,readings and results to be tabulated and debated over, taking feedback and improving the drug wherever possible to have very less/ no ill effects. Anandayya's Ayurvedic medicine went through no such clinical trails or no results tabulated whatsoever. It just came into public,overnight!

2. Diagnosis 

This is perhaps the most important part of making a drug. Without actually knowing what causes illness in the first place,it is next to impossible to manufacture any medicine for it. Corona virus,for example has spike proteins which helps the virus to enter into the host cells where it gets multiplied and spreads onto other cells to do the same. A schematic diagram of this process is shown below.

 Source: www.nature.com/aps

It is because we know what are the properties of virus and where it targets the host cells in which part of the body we are able to come up with probable symptoms and tests such as rapid antigen swab tests to determine whether or not virus exists in our body in the first place. Then we have X-Rays and CT scans to estimate the damage caused by the virus,to human lungs. 90% of the people gets cured and only 10% people have serious combordities, breathlessness and possible chance of death. So far the fatality rate has not crossed 2% which means 98/100 people who gets covid are being cured by the medical facilities we have. And also thanks to the virology studies,we already know the spread of virus can be dramatically altered down if we wear a mask around nose and mouth and prevent microdroplets through nose and mouth reach other person in vicinity. Many nations such as New Zealand and Australia, including China have been successful in implementing this even before vaccine came into existence and now are almost covid free. So the risk aversion is not completely in the hands of "miracle cure" or medicine but a single piece of protective cloth and social distancing. So far they work best,with 98% success rate.

Anandayya's Ayurvedic medicine is not made taking account of any form of diagnosis technique. I wonder if he/Ayurvedic drug makers have any idea onto how this virus looks,how the virus is transmitted,what are its functions to take any necessary actions upon it. Moreover how come the concoction ingested through the eyes can raise oxygen levels in blood, within minutes.? Can these people prove that their medicine is capable of releasing exorbitant amount of oxygen upon contact with tears or tissues in the eyes.? A simple chemistry experiment with a test tube, few droplets of tears and the medicine would do the job. But they cannot do it. 

3. Double blinded test: 

The ultimate conundrum gets answered here. Any drug, especially life saving has to go through double blinded test inorder for us to claim its efficiency over placebo. To mellow it down what it is, consider you manufactured a drug for flu and want to test it. How do you test it if a person who is taking the drug already knows what it is? So you pick up two control groups each group having same illness or symptoms and give one group the real drug you made and other group is given a fake medicine. Neither you nor the two control groups know which one is which. At the end of experiment you should be able to tell which group actually took the medicine based on how they responded. This is so far considered the best test to rule out placebo effect. 

Here comes the crazy fact. All the testimonies of Anandayya medicine belong to only one control group with little or no covid symptoms, who also took other medicines and exactly knew they took the real drug instead of fake. So their claim that this medicine has cured them can only be bought into one of these two categories.

1) placebo. That means they think they feel better once they took the medicine and after few days their disease has gone and they correlated both the events and drawn up the conclusion that Anandayya's medicine worked.

2) Inefficiency of covid. As I said 98% of the people get cured from covid. So even if you take or do not take the medicine there's high chance you'll be spared at the end of the day and get to see the light next day. Plus the vaccination program has been started in the country and many people who came here have already been vaccinated too. If the vaccination is widespread and the disease is not fatal,the magical cure is very easy to claim. We have also seen few people who got cured in 10 minutes of drug ingestion,that too in eyes! This raises few serious concerns on the medicine.

To add fuel to the fire,there exists an government body at Central level,called "aayush ministry" whose primary job from its time of inception has been to promote alternative medicine, eventhough it means that prescribed medicine is unscientific in nature.  Not to mention terrible state of health care in the country where health minister goes to some charlatan like Ramdev Baba to release a similar Ayurvedic medicine known as CORONIL, claiming they have WHO approval for it. Later it has come to our knowledge that WHO has never issued any permission to sell it as covid drug nor certified its efficiency. 

Conclusion

Based on the above factors, it is reasonably correct only to quantify this drug as "unproven alternative medicine" at best. Atleast till ICMR produces a detailed report on it, showing required proofs that drug works. 

Reference material: 

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:3e44adbb-c666-4e17-bc4d-8ceb9ec5c897

https://youtu.be/BtN-goy9VOY