Medicinal plants

शतमूलिका अपामार्ग राजवृक्ष
Photos from FRLHT (http://envis.frlht.org.in/)

The two main recourses in gāruḍa medicine are mantras and herbal remedies. Mantras are widely considered superior, and they are said to work immediately, but the common trope is that if they are recited improperly, the effect may be disastrous. For this reason, medicinal plants are the more widely employed remedy, both among lay people and specialists. It is unfortunate that “herbal medicine” has become stigmatized as backwards and illogical in the modern, so called rational cultures. In fact, many miracles of our modern pharmacopeia are isolations of the active ingredients of plants used by native people for millennia. The people that use the plants know that they work, but somehow they are left out of the story of “discovery” and receive no mention in the headlines. In their otherwise excellent book, Snakes of India (2004), Romulus Whitaker and Ashok Captain make the following statement (p.9):
“Lack of an effective snakebite remedy spawned a host of quack remedies like snake
stones, gold chloride, ‘cut and suction’, chanting and any number of herbal ‘remedies.’
Many of these measures are still used today in rural India and even promoted by
educated people who should know better. They often ‘work’ only because in the
majority of snakebites a serious or fatal dose of venom is not injected by the snake.”
I have no doubt that many popular remedies are in fact bogus, however let’s not throw out the baby with the bath-water, as it were. If one reads the scientific literature (follow link for preliminary list of articles), it becomes quickly apparent that many of the herbs DO work as powerful antivenin agents against otherwise fatal doses of venom. In all of South Asia, snakebite and scorpion sting are a major public health problem. Laws requiring health posts to stock antivenin are meaningless when the most vulnerable population lives hours walk from that post, or the post is not staffed, or the required refrigeration facilities for the antivenin are unavailable due to load-shedding (currently 16 hours a day across the board in Nepal!). I see a traditional system of knowledge that is in danger of dying out because people buy into the belief that they are ignorant and poor and can only be helped by accepting the foreign culture of science which speaks a language they cannot understand and charges fees they could never afford. Perhaps I stray too far afield, I am a Sanskritist and not a doctor or scientist, however my hope is that I can offer some small contribution by documenting the use of medicinal herbs for envenomation in India and Nepal, and also the extremely long history of such use.