Would you do something you didn’t imagine you could do to have a better life or health?
After all, everyone wants a healthy and longer life, they’ll do anything to achieve that.
In India, a family named the Bathini Goud family started administering a strange treatment for patients who have asthma.
More than 5,000 Indians travel to the southern city of Hyderabad to gulp down a yellowish herbal paste with live fish in the hope to miraculously treat their condition. They stick out their tongues, pinching their nose to take the unusual traditional treatment every year in June.
The wriggling five-centimetre murrel fish are slipped into the throats of patients in a bizarre treatment that leaves them gagging.
The Bathini Goud family, which administers the treatment, says the fish clear the throat on their way down and permanently cure asthma along with other respiratory problems.
However, the family refused to reveal the secret formula which they say they got from a Hindu saint in 1845.
The Goud family claims a saint gave its formula to their ancestor Veeranna Goud forbidding them from making the ingredients public.
“The medicine would lose its efficacy if we broke the pledge and it will fall prey to unbridled commercialisation,” Bathini Harinath Goud said.
“We have been offered unlimited money in the past in return for disclosure of the formula by pharmaceutical companies, but we prefer to spend money from our savings and give the medicine free to all the patients,”
“Hundreds of thousands of people have been completely cured of asthma with this medicine,” claims Mr. Goud.
Parents are often forced to pry open the mouths of reluctant children who cry at the site of squirming fish, while others pinch their noses, tip their heads back and close their eyes.
After digesting the treatment, patients are told to go on a strict diet for 45 days and return for the fish-drug for three years.
Medical professionals and right groups critised the process, saying that the fish medicine is ‘unscientific’, a violation of human n rights, and unhygienic. Yet, it is said that the Indian government arranges special trains for the ‘fish medicine’ festival each year assigning extra police to control the crowd at the site.
There is no evidence that it works,” Dr. Ajit Vigg, head of respiratory and critical care medicine at Apollo Hospital, Hyderabad, said. “On the contrary, we have seen 10-15% patients whose condition has worsened.”
Dr. Vigg says they had sent some dozen chronic asthma patients to be treated with fish medicine a few years ago and monitored variables such as their forced vital capacity and forced expiration volume before and after the treatment but found no improvement.
“In my practice of 20-25 years, I have not seen a single patient whose condition has either improved or who has got completely cured with fish medicine,” he said.
Both Mr. Goud and the critics concur that there are no records to verify the claims and counterclaims.
