Hundreds of thousands of people suffering from asthma flock to the Indian city of Hyderabad once a year in the belief that swallowing a medicine of live fish and some herbs will cure them. The ‘medicine’ is dispensed once a year by the city’s Goud family. Sceptics say this is sheer quackery. Samanth Subramanian reports in Mint:
The oldest habits are the hardest to break. Bathini Harinath Goud is part of the fourth generation of a famous family that has, for 163 years, dispensed an asthma “cure” packaged inside a live murrel fish. Calling it dawai, or medicine, comes naturally to him, but he must keep tripping himself up over the word.
Since 2000, a small but seething opposition has decried the remedy as sheer quackery and protested the government’s tacit, at times overt, support of the magnetic annual event. The family cannily took to calling their offering a “fish prasadam” instead of a medicine, to avoid legal implications. But this leaves Goud engaging in constant self-correction.
Now, a public interest litigation filed in a Hyderabad city civil court challenges five government departments and the Gouds; the case comes up for hearing on 19 June.
[Photos: Left, an asthma patient being given a live fish; and right, the Goud brothers who administer the 'fish medicine'.]
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