Atropa Belladonna, a poisonous plant, has been proved as an effective
remedy in homoeopathic potencies to treat the dreaded disease, Japanese
Encephalitis (brain fever).
Inspired by the success story of
Andhra Pradesh where homoeopaths distributed Belladona free, followed by
Calcarea Carb and Tuberculinum for preventing brain fever during a
epidemic breakout, trials on rats were conducted in Kolkatta to re-prove
the efficacy of Belladonna in different potencies.
The
herbaceous plant, which is also known by different names as Beautiful
lady, Devil’s Berries, Death Cherries or Deadly nightshade, is a highly
toxic and poisonous. But it has high medicinal value and is used in
other systems of medicine as a cosmetic, and hallucinogen in crude form.
Funded
by the Central Council of Research in Homoeopathy (CCRH), the
scientific experiments were conducted in the School of Tropical
Medicine, Kolkota, with no effective medicine found in other systems of
medicine, particularly Allopathy. The disease spreads faster with the
virus propagated through pigs, resulting in high fever, swelling of the
brain membranes and sudden death, particularly children.
The
virus causing Japanese encephalitis is transmitted by mosquitoes
belonging to the Culex tritaeniorhynchus and Culex vishnui groups, which
breed particularly in flooded rice fields. The virus circulates in
ardeid birds (herons and egrets). It also reproduces in pigs and infects
mosquitoes that take blood meals, but does not cause disease. The virus
tends to spill over into human populations when infected mosquito
populations build up explosively and the human biting rate increases
(these culicines are normally zoophilic, i.e. they prefer to take blood
meals from animals).
Dr Jayesh R Bellare who presented his case
study on how the homoeopathic drug Rhus Tox, (Toxicodendron pubesconis)
has proved to be a model in “immuno modulatory activity” called for
intensive inter-disciplinary studies involving pharmacy to biomedical
groups for revalidation of homoeopathic drugs to face the oft-repeated
criticism of the system.
