Siddha Medicines to be used in Coimbatore Medical College & Hospital to treat dengue

As a part of treating dengue cases and provide an alternative solution to allopathy in fighting the disease , dengue patients at  Coimbatore Medical College & Hospital will be administered Siddha medicines. On Friday the camps at the siddha units in the hospital were inaugurated by Pollachi V Jayaraman, deputy speaker, Tamil Nadu legislative assembly, in the presence of Coimbatore collector M Karunagaran and P Sukumaran, joint director, Medical and Rural Health Services, Coimbatore. Sukumaran said siddha medicines have been introduced at the government hospital based on the instruction of chief minister J Jayalalithaa. Dengue patients will be given nilavembu kudineer, papali leaf juice and malvembu kashayam. He said the decision was taken as there is no definitive medicine for treating viral fever and dengue and allopathy is just supportive treatment. Since siddha doctors have been claiming the efficacy of such medicine in treating the disease, it will be administered to patients at the government hospital. He said as part of the treatment 30 ml of Nilavembu Kudineer and 10 ml of Papaya leaf juice would be given on a daily basis for five days. The medicines have properties that help reduce fever and increase platelet counts in patients. Talking about the advantages of Siddha medicines, K Mani, reader in botany, PSG college of arts and science, siddha medicines would work well or even better when compared to allopathic drugs. He said allopathic drugs target the viruses. It is very difficult to design a drug that would destroy only the virus but doesn’t affect the human body. That is why there are no good anti-viral drugs in the market. To kill a bacterium is comparatively easier, as viruses are not living creatures. They are funny molecules that multiply just like living beings if a suitable host body is available. The only way to stop this process is to stop the host cell metabolism (metabolism of throat tissues in this case) which has the same goal. The drug should be able to identify the virus oriented metabolism from regular host metabolism. This is a difficult task.  This is where Medical systems like Siddha come in handy.