Category Archives: Traditional medicine

So on to my personal experience with a KIRTADS healer. I went inside one of the shacks (there were many, specialised in various segments perhaps) and met a dark, well built healer with a smooth-shaven face. (Not the features you expect for a traditional healer.) I told him that one of my friends has a thick skin condition like psoriasis. He immediately recognised psoriasis (may be it is a common complaint) and advised me that psoriasis requires exfoliation of thick skin from outside and purification of blood from inside and recommended concoctions for both. I realised that at a conceptual level, their approach is not very different from ours. Purification of blood is a very popular concept among traditional healers. It is a very appealing concept and has very high placebo value. Even if you go to a modern pharmacy in India and ask for “blood purification mix”, I am sure you will get something or the other OTC!!

Next I asked him whether he has any medicine for being fair. I sensed a qualm before he offered me “slim oil” for the same. May be he equated fair to beauty and by a complicated reasoning process – beauty to being slim. He did not offer me any further explanation. I feel “fairness creams” is a modern fad and never existed before. That brings me to certain ludicrous claims of Indian “fairness creams”. More on this in the next post.

Related articles

• Kirtads (gulfdoctor.blogspot.com)
• What is Healing? And Who Should Care? (drchana.com)
• Scientists examine toxicity of medicinal plants in Peru (scienceblog.com)