Abhishek retweetledi
Standing up for accurate medical information should never invite intimidation. Absolutely. I applaud Dr. Sivaranjini for her fight against misleading ORS branding, and every doctor who rallied behind her. This is what the medical community should look like.
But let me be honest. Painfully honest.
The medical community in India develops courage selectively - when the stakes are low and the enemy is convenient.
Fighting fake ORS is important. But it is also safe. No ancient tradition protects it. No ministry backs it. No political ideology wraps itself around electrolyte branding.
Now try standing up against Ayurveda and Homeopathy causing liver failure, kidney injury, lead poisoning, and death. Try publishing that data. Try saying it out loud on a public platform.
I have been doing this for years. What has it earned me? Fifteen-plus legal notices. Criminal cases. FIRs. Defamation suits filed across multiple states. Harassment, bullying, and coordinated attacks from an industry that enjoys state protection and cultural immunity.
And where has the medical community been?
Largely silent. Comfortably silent.
By-and-large, the medical community especially the medical student community, the specialists clinical societies or national and regional level doctors group never come out and fought for the rights of the patients and their safety against Ayush in India in the open - not even endorsing evidence after evidence of harms published.
The gastroenterology and hepatology societies in India - my own specialty - do not hold sessions on alternative medicine at their national meetings. They do not publish guidance for patients. They reject manuscripts documenting AYUSH adverse events. Their consensus statements pretend the problem does not exist. They have decided that this particular cancer growing inside Indian public health is someone else's problem.
For years, the medical establishment believed that if they ignored AYUSH harms, if they simply didn't talk about it, the problem would disappear. It didn't. It metastasized. And now have infiltrated Institutions of repute. And while it grew, the people who stood by me, who amplified the evidence, who fought alongside me — were not doctors. They were not specialist societies. They were not medical colleges.
They were the public. Ordinary citizens who understood that patient safety is not a niche academic concern - it is their lives, their families, their right. And I want them to know, that I appreciate you. You are my sanctuary here.
I love what I do. I have no complaints. I will keep doing it as long as I can. But imagine, just imagine, what we could have achieved if the entire medical community had treated AYUSH harms with the same urgency they now show for fake ORS. If every clinical society had said: our patients are being poisoned by unregulated products sold as medicine, and we will not stay quiet.
We would have had better regulation. Better research. Better outcomes. Fewer destroyed organs. Fewer dead patients. Fewer transplants.
"Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic."
That is what AYUSH toxicity is to the Indian medical establishment - a distant rumble they can ignore while they enjoy their conferences. Until the storm arrives at their own table.
It shouldn't take one doctor being dragged to court for the community to notice. It shouldn't take a patient dying for a society to issue a statement. Stand up for all of patient safety. Not just the parts that don't cost you anything.
Dismantle the narrative Ayush is building. This is, the only beast, medical community in India must handle effectively to improve healthcare outcomes and public and patient safety.
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