Rather than a pluralistic approach, an integrated approach may be more viable in theKeralascenario in public Health emergencies, said a paper on ayurvedic response to Covid-19 and its impact on quarantined individuals.
The paper published in Frontiers of Public Health is the first of its kind that talks of strategies adopted by the in battling a public health issue using ayurveda as part of an integrated public health system to combat a disease that had no medical solutions initially.
It talks of how the state set up 1,206 Ayur Raksha Clinics and associated task forces in April 2020 to improve the reach of ayurvedic preventive, therapeutic and convalescent care strategies for Covid-19.
The paper said that 1,206 life clinics covered all the 941 villages with a jurisdiction of over six million households. These clinics have been functioning adequately in tandem with the existing conventional medicine-oriented public health machinery. As of June 28, 2021, over 3.1 million people in Kerala received the benefits of different ayurvedic programmes for the pandemic.