Author: Dr Sanjeev Rastogi
Kumbh is one of the most celebrated spiritual events recurrently observed in India. Owing to the huge participation of devotees, it has a substantial domestic and global impact. With an expectation of being visited by over 660 million people this time, representing domestic and international communities, it is bound to have major economic, social and cultural bearings upon society. It is presumed that 30 times the total population of the whole city had visited Prayag Raj during the peak of the festival with more flocking in even towards its fag end. A religious congregation held every three years in one…
For many, Ayurveda is a folklore — it is a traditional and empirical health care practice that was in vogue during the time when rational scientific understanding of health, pathogenesis, disease and cure was out of sight. Now, when the health care science has reached its zenith through advances made via experimentally-driven robust evidence, it seems logical to view the traditional health wisdom as a bygone entity with only historical relevance in the contemporary context. It is beyond doubt that the modern health care system — due to its precision, predictability, reproducibility and dependability — has clear advantages over traditional…
Like political slogans destined to have a short life span and memory, ‘Health for All’ from the highly acclaimed Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978 could not achieve much. A slogan given with much fanfare in Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan (then under the erstwhile USSR) by WHO in its conference from September 6-12, 1978, is seemingly losing its meaning and relevance in the world with prevailing inequity referring to health standards and care. Looking back at the debate of Health for All, we see that the initial goal of bringing “an acceptable level of health for all the people of the world by…