Ramakrishna Yadav, or Baba Ramdev as he expects us to call him, likes to claim that he respects science-based modern medicine. Yet, he has also made repeated statements discrediting it, either out of ignorance or to promote his in-house pharmaceuticals.
Usually, Ramdev’s statements are considered too insignificant to court large-scale controversy. Though, his claims in a public meeting last week about allopathic medicines blew up into a controversy big enough for the Union Health Minister to demand a withdrawal.
In that meeting, Ramdev claimed that allopathic medicines being used to manage covid-19 had failed and that these medicines had caused “lakhs of deaths”. Separately, he has also claimed that ‘Coronil’, developed by his conglomerate, was the only medicine that “treated” covid-19.
Modern medicine is not infallible. It is developed over time through trials, experiments and experience. But sowing doubts about modern medicine can have dangerous consequences. One of these could be an increased interest in alternative medicine based less on science and more on hearsay.
