KOCHI: Dr. Rajesh Kotecha, Special Secretary, Union Ministry of AYUSH, on Saturday said that the government is ready to extend its support for attempts at building an integrative medicine. Inaugurating the international conference on integrative Ayurveda and modern medicine at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences here on Sunday, he said that in integrative health, all streams of health sciences come together in a synergistic manner to positively impact health outcomes.
“The Government is serious about promoting a model where experts in different domains contribute to the health science and some migration of knowledge occurs between each stream. Indian healing systems are holistic and intuitive – by definition, they cannot fully fit into all parameters demanded by Western medicine,” he said. Dr Rajesh Kotecha said the government is setting up a nationwide AYUSH grid connecting all hospitals and research labs to record case histories and observations so that a huge amount of evidences can be generated through data analytics about the efficacy of Ayurveda.
“While robust research is being conducted into Ayurveda, the problem arises in implementation of integrative medicine at the level of public health. This is because Ayurveda is still not accepted as a science by the Allopathic community. The Government of India has decided to extend its full support to Amrita University’s initiative on integrative medicine,” he added.
Experts assembled at the conference said that the Central Government needs to formulate a national policy on the integration of Ayurveda with allopathy so that India can take its rightful place as the global leader in integrative medicine. The two-day event called Amrita Samyogam, with 60 experts and 1,000 delegates from around the world participating, is being held in collaboration with Amrita University’s School of Ayurveda.
