Desi fish medicine gets thumbs up

This is that time of year when Hyderabad is the destination for thousands of people suffering from asthma from across India and abroad. This is the time when ‘fish medicine’ is administered by the Bathini family which has been faithfully doing it for the last four generations, for about 165 years! The family has been  dispensing the medicine free because it is believed that it would lose its efficacy if it is made into a commercial deal.
The family elder Bathini Harinath Goud recounts the lore that is well known: a sage from
Himalayas was very impressed by the generosity of their great grandfather Bathini Veeranna Goud, a toddy tapper, who would donate 25 per cent of his earnings to the poor. He shared the fish medicine formula with him with the warning that if it is commercialised it would lose its efficacy. Since then, every year on Mrigasira Karte, that is when monsoon sets in according to the Hindu calendar, a medicine, prepared from various herbs is inserted in a live murrel fish which is then forced into the mouth of the patient who gulps it down.

On June 8, the fish medicine will be dispensed and Harinath Goud is a much relaxed man as the campaign against the medicine ran by rationalists and scientists for the past decade has been capped with the courts dismissing as many as six cases against the  medicine. The herbal preparation was tested in various labs and no traces of steroids or metals or mercury, as claimed by the rationalists, were found in it.

The courts found no validity in the arguments that the Goud family was propagating superstition or blind faith and that it was violating law by claiming the herbal concoction to be ‘medicine.’ (The Bathini family now calls it fish 'prasadam' to avoid legal issues.)
Sudhakar Goud (no relative of the Bathini family), a consultant to the UN, says a basic flaw in the rationalists' view is that they dismiss as fake what they don't understand.
"Herbal medicines have proved effective since ages in our country. Another factor to be taken into consideration while passing judgment on herbal medicines is whether there have been any ill-effects.

    Although fish medicine is being given for several decades, there has been no single instance of side effects or a patient dying… Unfortunately in our country, there is no support from the government or any university or research lab for indigenous medical knowledge and traditions," he said. There is no awareness about our heritage of indigenous knowledge and medical culture. Nor is it appreciated, he said.

In fact, Harinath Goud recounted the instance when his father Bathini Shankar Goud sold his house to raise money for preparing the medicine. He didn't want to raise a loan as he believed that the medicine might not be efficacious. Today the large Bathini family raises the funds required entirely within the family. Refusing to disclose the amount the family spends on the medicine, he said even if one rupee is spent for each person, one can calculate the amount that goes into treating a few lakh patients every year. "This is our
culture..it is a service we do for the people,” he said.

The Bathini family zealously guards the formula of the medicine, making sure it remains within the family. But there has been no dearth of temptations. In 1997, a pharma company offered a blank cheque to him in return for the formula but Harinath Goud refused to take the bait.  The secret is known only to members of the family, that is, the men and their wives. Daughters are not privy as they marry and go to another family and they could be pressurised into revealing it, said Harinath Goud. The elders decided to share the secret with the younger males and train them in preparing the medicine after two of the five Bathini brothers died in one year, in 1997. Today 22 members of the family know the formula.

Apart from having to deal with the nay-sayers, the Bathini family has had to deal with disappearing forests and hence a more strenuous and arduous task of finding the herbs needed for the formulation. "Earlier, we would go to the Srisailam forests.. they disappeared and so we went to MP for some years..those also disappeared so now we go as far as Haridwar and Rishikesh," said Harinath Goud. The stakes of losing our forests to the greed of the modern civilisation are huge indeed: both the indigenous people and the vast wealth of indigenous medical knowledge could be lost forever.