Doctors!

The whole of Chennai seems to be down with some kind of fever of the other (well, fine`whole' is probably an exaggeration). The names doing the rounds include the famous chikungunya, usual viral fever, malaria, typhoid,dengue,para-malaria, para-typhoid,multiple-viral fever, etc.etc. I know because I was among the stricken and everyone I spoke to had either just gone through some fever or knew of someone who did.

The first conclusion I drew from the varied moanings of the sick or the friends of the sick is that the more medicines you create, the viruses or the bacteria seem to effortlessly just change their forms and come back to haunt you. So while one can talk about polio eradication or leprosy eradication, fever eradication doesn't seem to be that possible. But if one were to believe the newspapers/media, some of the fevers seem to be fatal and because they are so widepsread and quickly propogated the number of fatalities is quite significant.

On the other hand, medical science still works on the trial and error methodology of the Louis Pasteur days. Symptoms don't seem to be uniform and hence doctors also experiment with you like a guinea pig. Well, I do guess life is tough for the doctors with the varieties and sub-varieties of the bugs (bacteria/virus) increasing everyday. But is not very comfortable for the patient when the doctor says Oh, you have a viral fever and promptly prescribes a long list of antibiotics. The fever goes away for the week when the antibiotics are working in the body and the next week it is back and this time you get a new list.... By laws of probability and the action of antibiotics, it is likely that within three attempts a lasting cure is effected, but this is more by accident than by design. And of course, you feel exhausted with all that medicine in your body.

I think this is going the same way as plants and pesticides - the pesticides intially protected plants from pests, but the pests just changed or became immune and hence the pesticides got stronger and stronger and the plants got weaker and weaker and the final output was that yield was anyways affected. And now there is the return to organic farming, which is essentially the same kind of farming that our forefathers practised, except that now it is stylised and jargonised.

So is it with people and drugs I guess. The best cure is anyways rest and limited food and I guess we will soon be deriving catchy terms for decoctions and concoctions from grandma's home remedies. So if you soon see Fortified Basil juice, make sure you recognise it for what it is - thulasi kashayam with preservatives for shelf-life!