The Government Ayurvedic College in Gwalior is setting up a laboratory to provide accurate and precise results about the quality of herbal and ayurvedic medicines. The laboratory will also monitor the quality, safety and effectiveness of Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and Homeopathic medicines in the State.
According to medical experts while ayurveda medicine has helped millions of people since time immemorial it has also negations and the potential for adverse effects.
Many believe that in India, owing to lack of proper testing and monitoring many manufacturers of ayurvedic medicines have been using metal contents and steroids in the medicines to make them fast effective.
In the past ayurveda medicines were generally administered after individual study and treatment and medicines depended on individual symptoms and also medicines were manufactured not on a mass basis.
But these days that is not the case. Factories manufacture these medicines in a mass scale without any proper study or diagnosis.
There are also opinions that the testing of ayurvedic medicines in a systematic and scientific way will not be possible as individuals are treated with a different formulation or schedule for the same diseases.
This branch of medicine believes that no two persons are alike; hence all treatments must be customized.
They further argue that experiments to test the outcome or effect of a single treatment or medicine on large numbers of people are almost impossible within this branch of medicine.
The laboratory to be set up at the Ayurvedic College is expected to establish the identity, purity and strength of the Ayurvedic medicines in the state, ensuring that only good quality materials are used while making the medicines and that the quality medicines are available to the general public.
The Commissioner of the Health Department of the Government of Madhya Pradesh Sanjiv Kumar Jha is in the city to finalize the setting up of the lab.