A clear reading of the Ayurveda surgery move

India needs its Ayurveda graduates, including surgeons, to improve the common man’s access to decent health care

Sanjay Nagral
Nov 27, 2020, The Hindu

In 2014, while speaking at the inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, Prime Minister Narendra Modi extolled the virtues of India’s medical heritage. “How else would Shiva have grafted an elephant head on Ganesha after having beheaded the boy,” he asked to thunderous applause from an audience of senior doctors and very important persons. Shiva as a surgeon is of course mythology. But we know about Sushruta and his surgical dexterity at a time when the world had not yet woken up to the art and the science of surgery. There are detailed descriptions in the Sushruta Samhita , the ancient Sanskrit text on medicine and surgery, of procedures such as rhinoplasty where the nose is reconstructed with tissue from the cheek. It was thousands of years later that modern plastic surgeons described this procedure.

Last week, on November 20, a Gazette of India notification by the Central Council of Indian Medicine — a statutory body under the Indian Medicine Central Council Act, and “which regulates the Indian Medical systems of Ayurveda, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa and Unani Medicine” — identifying surgical procedures that can be performed by post-graduate Ayurvedic doctors in Shalya (surgery) has stirred up a hornet’s nest.

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