Hyderabad’s world popular, traditional medicine for asthma, called fish prasadam, will not be distributed this year also owing to the coronavirus lockdown, according to Bathini Harinath Goud, who belongs to the family that has been administering it for decades.
The herbal medicine is administered on Mrigasira Karthi which falls on June 8 and 9 this year. “We request the public across the country not to come to Hyderabad for the fish prasadam this year said the members of the Goud family.
”A 159-year-old traditional remedy of offering “fish medicine” to cure asthma has been challenged in the Indian courts. The Indian Medical Association has questioned the secrecy surrounding the ingredients of the medicine, invoking the provisions of the Drugs and Magical Remedies Act 1954.
Thousands of people with asthma travel to Hyderabad for the annual gathering where the medicine is delivered free to the patient in the mouth of a live fish.
“Any substance other than food used for curing people falls under the category of a drug and its ingredients must be disclosed to the consumers,” says Dr C L Venkata Rao, secretary of the Charminar branch of the Indian Medical Association in Hyderabad, who filed the writ in the Hyderabad High Court.
The herbal medicine is placed in the mouth of a 5-7 cm long fishlings and the patient is made to swallow the live fish, repeating this ritual annually for three years.
The medicine’s ingredients have been guarded zealously by the Bathini Goud family, which claims a saint gave its formula to their ancestor Veeranna Goud in 1845 forbidding them from making the ingredients public.
