Shedding a light on innovation: traditional medicine in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Introduction

Western medicine, with recent advances in biotechnology and advanced standards for proving efficacy of cure and safety of drugs, has become the mainstream pharmaceutical intervention in healthcare relegating traditional cures to a subaltern space. This sharp change in preferred method for medical care is evident in most South Asian countries. Most of these countries have had thriving practices of traditional medicines in the past. For instance, Ayurveda has long been practiced in India and Sri Lanka, Unani in the ancient Arab world, and Siddha medicines in the state Tamil Nadu of India.

A standard problem with traditional medicine is the yardstick of quality and efficacy of cure. Western medicine has employed institutions like clinical trials, standardization, patenting of therapeutic molecules, research establishing biochemical equivalents between patented and generic drugs to address this issue. The design of these institution help bypass or solve the problem of asymmetric information that exists between drug manufacturers on the one hand and medical practitioners and patients on the other. Though many of these institutions create additional problems (patent thickets and enhanced drug prices for patented cures), it is an undeniable fact that the absence of some of these institutions prevent appropriate dissemination of information about quality of herbal drugs and their curative properties. All pharmaceutical research, be it traditional or western, share or have some commonality in their discovery process. Traditional medicine, till recently, has shied away from standards established by western medicines regarding novelty (patents) or efficacy of cure (clinical trials) (Saha & Vasuprada, 2018). The abundance of practitioners who have little scientific knowledge might have been the reason for the decline of the systems of traditional medicine. It is also becoming increasingly hard to distinguish between the quack and the real doctor in the latter discipline of medical cure at present. The decline could also possibly be due to the patient‘s preferences for the kind of treatment they want to go for. Glynn & Heymann (1985) find that western medicine is dominant due to the reasons that it exhibits efficacy of cure, places no dietary restrictions, and also that the government provides free treatment as opposed to Ayurvedic treatment. So, problems like fractures, mental illnesses among various others, lie in the realm of indigenous medical systems, whereas others which demand immediate action attract western medicine. In all, the demand and practice of traditional medicine is under the shadow of great doubt and hence looking at the status of research and innovation in traditional medicine becomes important to shed light on the process by which a dominant system of medicine becomes marginalized.