Research shows that the tulsi, or Indian basil, mitigates the ill-effects of radiation, whether background or nuclear, and could protect cells in patients undergoing radiation therapy for cancer.
Scientists at the DRDO’s Institute of Nuclear Medicines and Allied Sciences, and the Department of Radiobiology, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, have successfully tested tulsi extracts on mice for its anti-radiation and anti-cancer properties. The DRDO is now preparing a herbal concoction from tulsi that will serve to both prevent and cure the ill-effects of radiation.
In the mouse model, there was no impact on bone marrow after the mice exposed to radiation ingested the tulsi preparation. It is the bone marrow that is affected in case of radiation exposure, and this brings down the immunity level.
The DRDO now proposes to take up human trials, says Dr W. Selvamurthy, chief controller (research and development), DRDO, who presented a research paper on the anti-radiation impact of tulsi extract at the 99th Indian Science Congress, which concluded in Bhubaneswar on Saturday.
17 comments:
Rubbish "research"!
Next read about "darbha" grass....
@witan: your monotheism about allopathy is pretty myopic: how about the 'research' on rezulin, eh? http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6484, or avandia? http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/05/19/diabetes-drug-removed-shelves/
(actually, i can't tell if these are the same drug, killing different people at different times)
so the FDA colludes with big pharma to bring quack drugs to market, kills bunches of people, and then withdraws them?
oh, yeah, 'science' and 'research'. also known as the 'car mechanic model of medicine': try feeding the patient something, if that doesn't work, try something else.
yes, i do believe allopathy is the last word. 'modern medicine', my left foot!
Let Dr. Selvamurthy publish his team's results in a reputable peer-reviewing scientific journal, and let other independent researchers corroborate them. If this is not done, his team's findings would remain "rubbish". It is extremely dangerous to dish out their snake-oil to our jawans: and this applies not only to his tulsi preparations, but also to "Aloe Vera based anti-frostbite cream"; "a special herbal drink ... [to] help the soldiers in acclimatising fast to tough weather conditions"; and "several other herbal medicines".
which wonderful 'peer-reviewed' 'scientific' 'journal' was the avandia study published in?
oh, the same ones subsidized by the big pharma companies that "dished out to the indian public" such gems as chloromycetin (see note below), or avandia, or rezulin?
from the wikipedia on chloromycetin:
"The most serious adverse effect associated with chloramphenicol treatment is bone marrow toxicity, which may occur in two distinct forms: bone marrow suppression, which is a direct toxic effect of the drug and is usually reversible, and aplastic anemia, which is idiosyncratic (rare, unpredictable, and unrelated to dose) and in general fatal.[2]"
oops, fatal? let's try something else now. oh, patient is um... dead?
allopathy has more than its fair share of dr. mengele's who *experiment* on other people.
witan,
your faith in the west is touching. 'peer reviewed journals' publish papers in gender studies, women's studies, political science and a whole load of rubbish.
then there is global warming. do you believe that too? those claims were published in 'peer reviewed' journals.
My comments often seem to have the effect of fluttering a few dovecotes, especially if they relate to pathetically misguided belief in the efficacy of “alternative medicine”. Please, let me assure the flustered persons that I certainly take no pleasure in rubbing them the wrong way, and that it has never been my intention to offend them. It is not necessary for them to resort to bluster and invective.
However, I am terrified by implausible claims on “medicines” and treatments, and their aggressive promotion particularly for the use of our defence personnel. It will result in denial of proper treatment in critical and emergency situations. I am tempted to draw a parallel to the absurd claims made a few years ago by Madhya Pradesh “Cow Protection and Conservation Board” that cow dung smeared on house walls and roofs protects against nuclear radiation, ensures normal delivery instead of C-section, it actually protected some people from MIC in the Bhopal disaster, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam. This kind of charlatanry will kill our soldiers, kill our country, kill us all.
no bleeding 'dovecotes' here, and i am certainly not flustered by you, @witan. i am just annoyed at your holier-than-thou pronouncements and your evident bias.
for instance, you pontificated about how a singular incident of success of some medicine should not be generalized to belief in that system. well, that would have been quite unexceptionable, except that you had *just* used a single incident of failure of some medicine to dismiss that entire system! that is, hypocrisy is fine for yourself, but not for others.
also, you said you were a pharma industry employee, so i am willing to make some concessions for bias/faith based on a lifetime of working for those vested interests, but that doesn't give you a license to vituperate against non-allopathic systems. you have to keep an open mind and go by the evidence. blind faith is not acceptable in you or anyone else.
appallingly, allopathic 'research' is basically just statistics. i know allopathic doctors who do FDA drug approval research, and it's *just* statistics they do. that's all the 'science' -- merely symptom based. they wouldn't recognize 'holistic' even if it jumped up and bit them on the nose.
@nizhal yoddha
When did I say I was/am a pharmacy industry employee? Also, when and where did I “pontificate[ ] about how a singular incident of success of some medicine should not be generalized to belief in that system ... etc. ”" Is this all part of the load of misinformation you are carrying? I suggest you should verify facts, especially about persons, before putting them down in your blogs.
Your earlier references to chloromycetin (chloramphenicol), avandia, and rezulin are irrelevant to the topic under discussion, and so is @arvind's statement about "gender studies, women's studies, political science and a whole load of rubbish".
If your comments, particularly the latest, are not "bluster", what are they?
ok @witan, here's the direct quote from you, committing the fallacy of hasty generalization. no, you cannot generalize from a single example. that's just totally bad logic:
witanDec 23, 2011 03:00 PM
What harm can Ayurveda do? Here below is an example. In the government office where I was working, there was a "Class IV" employee who contracted lepromatous leprosy. Central Government Health Scheme was available to him, so he went to a CGHS dispensary. He opted for ayurvedic treatment, which was available in the dispensary. HE WAS NEVER CURED. If he had opted for "allopathy" (using the term described as pejorative by Non Carborundum), he would have received the Multi-drug therapy available in modern medicine that would have probably cured him completely, or, at the least, would certainly have rendered him non-infective to others.
That is the same problem with all "alternative medicine" — they lure patients away from valid and effective therapies, at much cost to the patients and to society as a whole.
@witan, you have been posting on this blog for a long time, and you have said somewhere: a) that you were very experienced, implying that you deserve the respect that age gets (which is fine: i remember right your comment about the time when you were in school implied that you were in your 60s or older), b) that you were from the pharma industry and therefore we should listen to you when you said something about it. i said nothing at the time but noted it for future use. i don't have your verbatim comment, but if i searched for it in the blog archives i'd find it.
as for 'relevance', i'll be the judge of that.
plus, you whingeing about non-allopathy naturally will be responded to by attacking allopathy.
as for 'bluster', i don't think there was anything blustery in what i said. i told you directly, and i reiterate, that your pontification and blind-faith monotheism for allopathy are annoying me. there was nothing 'empty threat-ish' about it.
witan, you claimed that my statement about gender studies, women's studies, political science and a whole load of rubbish is irrelevant to the discussion.
not so fast! you swore by peer reviewed journals of the west and you should answer for them. and you have evaded the question of "climate science." it is the most pseudo-scientific claim ever made and guess where it came from? western universities.
if publishing in peer reviewed journals from the west is the most authoritative statement one can make, please explain the fraudulent global warming and why you think that carbon trading will prevent a flood. this is all western science! in fact it is "settled science."
@witan,
once again, as i posted in another thread, vaccination and germ theory came from india and the details were published in a medical journal in london in 1767.
edward jenner and louis pasteur (b. 1822) lifted the idea for vaccination and germ theory from this journal. and no, the minor detail of using a related but different kind of culture was not the breakthrough. the breakthrough was the principle that one could immunize the system by using the virus.
your flaw is that you believe that there was nothing of note that was discovered before the 20th century and that every scientist began from scratch without using prior data. this is the result of indoctrination about how "great" scientists were and how their curiosity led to great changes. in reality, most changes were incremental in nature and built upon existing ideas.
also, look up how garcia da orta laid the foundation for western medicine by writing a book on indian medicine.
@arvind
Don’t mix up threads. “Climate science” [sic] is not “Tulsi for protection against radiation”. It is not even “alternative medicine”. Also note that the field of specialization of Dr. William Selvaraj (of the “Tulsi mitigates radiation effects” fame] is not in any of the “alternative medicine” “systems” — his post-graduate degree, from Christian Medical College, Vellore, is apparently in Human Physiology. The “research” and other work done by him and his team are also not in “alternative medicine”.
Also, I reiterate the fact that “vaccination” is different from “variolation”.
@arvind, @nizhal yoddha et al
Discussion on this thread (viz “Tulsi to be Used as an Anti-Radiation Medicine”) has lost direction, has become diffuse and nebulous, and has degenerated into false attributions and ad hominem attacks. Therefore, I will not post any more on this “thread”.
CORRECTION:
In my last post the name of the scientist should be
Dr. William Selvamurthy and NOT Selvaraj.
@witan, You have clearly not read the Holwell paper which contains a description of vaccination and not variolation. It also contains a description of germ theory.
What was done in India is vaccination, not variolation. Variolation was done by giving blankets containing small pox virus. Vaccination was the process of immunizing the system by injecting it into the bloodstream.
Also, on whether I am mixing up threads, this is what you posted in THIS THREAD when you swore by peer reviewed journals.
Let Dr. Selvamurthy publish his team's results in a reputable peer-reviewing scientific journal, and let other independent researchers corroborate them. If this is not done, his team's findings would remain "rubbish".
So yes, you have a lot to answer for pseudoscientifc stuff of the West including the alleged Global Warming that was published in "reputed" peer-reviewed "scientific" journals.
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