All the mini Ramdevs

Ill-informed influencers do disservice to all systems of healing

IT WAS TIME that the Baba’s bluff was called. Yoga guru Ramdev and the company he has founded, and is a face of, have been irresponsible for far too long. A range of diseases, from asthma to arthritis, obesity to blood pressure, he has claimed, are no match for Patanjali’s potions — and Ramdev’s contortions. During the pandemic when doctors and healthcare workers were struggling against the ravages of an unknown contagion, Ramdev exploited mass anxiety with trademark conceit. He has defied orders of the highest court of the land. The entire country, as the Supreme Court said in February, has been taken for a ride. The Court’s insistence last week for a public apology from Patanjali, in a prominent typeface, was long overdue.

Also necessary is a meaningful debate on the food Indians eat and the lifestyles they lead. Currently, that happens in medical journals, and academic and policy-making circles. Such conversations also take place in a universe where misinformation, half-truths, misdiagnosis co-exist — at times collide — with a desire for good health, political correctness and well-meaning concerns for sustainability and environment. Then there are times when these get entangled or are even deliberately combined to produce narratives that claim to set right what’s wrong with our lifestyles. In ways that don’t always seem apparent, the wellness discourses on Youtube, Instagram and social media channels mimic Ramdev’s pravachans.

It’s no secret that India is staring at an epidemic of non-communicable diseases — diabetes, heart ailments, blood pressure, obesity, even cancer. For a large section of people, their milieu, career choices, economic compulsions and the air they breathe detract from healthy living. The seemingly simple solutions of eating properly and on time, exercising and sleeping well appear elusive.

It’s a situation tailor-made for peddling quick fixes and do-it-yourself regimes. Words like Ayurveda, yoga, heritage and tradition are part of the allure. Combine that with a dose of nostalgia for grandma’s food, mitigating climate change, concern for farmers — even animals — and a world of succour beckons alongside a promise of exoneration from complicity in the planet’s tough problems.

There’s a problem though: Health, nutrition and wellness are not articles of faith. They are about attention to an individual’s physiology and mental state that can only come with expert knowledge and supervision. The influencers on Instagram, Youtube and social media can do many things. But the one thing they can’t do is take the place of the physician or nutritionist — whether that be one who uses the methods of modern medicine or is versed in the skills of therapy systems such as Ayurveda. At least not yet.

Most of them don’t even follow the cardinal gym trainer’s precept — take medical guidance before embarking on an exercise regime. But then, there can be little compunction in rousing couch potatoes when it comes with the message that hop, step and jump exercises were part of the daily jhadu pochha rituals of their dadis and nanis — not the lived experience of the house help, mind you.

Could this be a problem of naïveté? The benefit of doubt isn’t always deserved. The CVS of several of these social media influencers would show that they have undergone expert training, and protocols are quite likely part of their practices in the offline world. But who can resist the temptation to play guru to virtual followers counting up to hundreds of thousands of ks? Especially in a society that has worshipped gurus for centuries. The medical profession too is guilty of exploiting the social propensity to turn the already serious information asymmetry between the doctor and the patient into a relationship of faith.

For a lot of their followers, social media nutritionists or yoga instructors are the only examples of systems of healing that have evolved over centuries. This is deeply unfortunate. There is a growing body of scholarship on Ayurvedic practitioners trying to work out remedies to afflictions that have taken the shape of public health crises in recent times — even in finding remedies to diseases whose history is less than a century old. In her fascinating work on Hakim Ajmal Khan, the historian Barbara Metcalfe writes on the debates between the modern pioneer of Unani medicine and missionary doctors in Delhi in the late 19th early 20th centuries. Khan wouldn’t hesitate to call out missionaries equipped with a chest of pills and a rudimentary training in medicine for doing injustice to the nuances of the allopathic system.

In similar ways, the wellness gurus do a disservice to all systems of healing. They are complicit in a more serious crime. The influencer culture has spawned an ecosphere teeming with mini Ramdevs, who could be compounding a serious public health crisis.