Fake ayurvedic camps set unhealthy trend

COIMBATORE: He’d felt tired for months, so when Guru Kannan, 43, came across an ‘ayurvedic camp’ on Kalapatti Road, he decided to find out what was wrong. The camp was run out of a van. The man in the van felt Kannan’s pulse and told him that his kidneys had failed. He recommended a concoction costing Rs 25,000 for three months.
Kannan coughed up the money but decided to seek a second opinion from an allopathic doctor.The doctor ran some tests, found that his kidneys were fine and asked him to get more sleep. When Kannan decided to confront the man running the camp, he found that the van had disappeared.
Scattered around the city, are many such ‘special ayurveda camps’, which experts say are fake, functioning out of van and tents. The men running the camps say they are traditional healers and admit that they are not registered with any government authority. “We come from families of healers and use only herbs. We learnt these secrets from our ancestors,” said one of the men running a camp.
“Most of them disappear from the spot within a month or two,” said Dr M Thangaraj, district siddha medical officer for Coimbatore and Tirupur. “A traditional healer is supposed to register with my office. The people running these camps are not qualified,” he said.
Dr T N Ravishankar, honorary secretary of Tamil Nadu Government Doctors’ Association, said taking such formulations could be risky. “We don’t know what these concoctions contain and the side-effects. They might offer momentary relief but could worsen the condition,” he said.
The posters on the tents have a list of “diejaisess cured” and a consultation costs only Rs 20. “The cost of the medicine will depend on the rarity of the medicinal plants used, the complexity of the mixture and the duration it is to be taken for,” said Bhagwan Singh, who runs a camp on the banks of Kumaraswamy Lake.
Dr Thangaraj said he got complaints about fake practitioners but had no power to penalise them. “We can cancel registration only if they are qualified and registered . ”
A representative of Indian Medical Association said every time it got a tip-off about such a camp, it filed a police complaint but nothing would be done.