Plants are good for you.

Indians have a childlike faith in the safety of alternative medicines. Everyone knows that allopathic medicines have side effects, which they do. Every year hundreds of thousands of people die from side effects of medicines prescribed to make people better. Secondly, western medicine cures only few diseases, such as infections, but the vast majority of diseases, such as diabetes and asthma, are controlled but not cured. The thought of taking medicines everyday for life is very discouraging so people migrate to practitioners of alternate medicines who promise to cure everything without any hazard. Ayurveda, meaning study of life, is an ancient science using plants to cure every ailment. People take ayurveda preparations with total faith . After all most of what we eat come from plants. Rice, wheat, vegetables, spices and fruits form our diet. We grow beautiful flowers in our gardens and use them for worship. Plants and their products are such an integral part of our lives that we think of them as friends and completely harmless. Anyone can practice ayurveda without any control although there are colleges which dish out degrees. Such is their faith that patients never question safety of the concoctions they are asked to take. Yet plants can be deadly. Strychnine comes from nux vomica, aconite from buttercup, mescaline from peyote cactus and atropine from deadly nightshade. Commonly used drugs such as aspirin comes from the willow tree and digitalis from foxglove. Cancer drugs, such as vincristine comes from the Madagascar periwinkle and taxol from the Pacific yew tree. Yellow oleander, a hardy tree needing little water, grows all over streets of Delhi. It is highly toxic and its fruit is used for suicide by women from the south. Now the Defence Food Research Laboratory, in Mysore is planning to make snacks for soldiers using plants. TOI, February 20. " A combination of traditional herbs and medicines will be used to make anti-hunger and anti-sleep bars." An ayurveda practitioner, Dr KT Jayakrishnan says," There are herbs to increase alertness and help a person to stay awake for a longer period without damaging the nervous system." The basic principle of any medicine is that if it has effect it will most definitely have side effects. If it has no side effect it is useless placebo. Just as long as our soldiers are safe.