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BY HERBERT VEGO
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What’s wrong with TAMA?
IF you don’t know what TAMA stands for, you are not alone. Like most Filipinos, you don’t know because of the laxity of the government to enforce it. It stands for the Traditional and Alternative Medicine Act that former President Fidel Ramos signed into law in 1998.
Originally proposed by the late senator Juan Flavier as Senate Bill 1471, it sought to establish the Traditional Medicine Authority (TMA) which would be responsible for the systematic and scientific development of alternative and traditional medicine in the Philippines. It was intended to complement, not displace, conventional medicine practice.
Having promulgated the law, President Ramos predicted that it would end the “sakit sa bulsa” of the indigent patients at the risk of facing the wrath of the medical community that was intolerant of changes, fearful of losing its control and authority.
After 18 long years, alas, the law has hardly taken off – no thanks to the hostility of the Philippine Medical Association (PMA), which had attempted to block its passage on the pretext that it would degenerate, rather than advance, medical science.
The TMA, on the other hand, has surprisingly made itself “invisible.” We don’t know who comprise its personnel. If it surprises us, it’s because of their deafening silence vis-à-vis the foul tactics of multinational drug companies to discredit effective herbs.
The TMA has reneged on its mandate to provide the administrative framework for the protection of the herbal medicine industry from both local and foreign threats.
And so on their own, a few local drug companies have gambled in synthesizing indigenous medicinal plants into tablets, capsules and syrup. Among them are lagundi, for cough and asthma; tsaang gubat, an antispasmodic; akapulco, atifungal; and sambong, a diuretic; yerba buena, antipyretic; and ampalaya, anti-diabetic.
The four others that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has validated as medicinal plants are bawang (local garlic), bayabas (local guava), niyug-niyogan and ulasimang bato.
Had TAMA been fully implemented by TMA in collaboration with the FDA, an estimated 70 other folkloric plants would have already been approved for therapeutic uses. The vegetable malunggay, for instance, when encapsulated, still bears the FDA-required warning “no approved therapeutic claim.” And yet it sells like hotcakes simply because users find it effective against hypertension, arthritis, scabies and constipation, among others. No wonder makers of “junk noodles” and pandesal have decided to enrich them with malunggay.
By trial and error, hard-up individuals have proven for themselves the reasonableness of going back to natural medicines like the ones already cited. I have personally observed a cervical cancer patient survive by drinking boiled rosas sa baybayon.
No doubt the failure of the law to right the wrong image of traditional medicine as quackery stems from the bias of Filipino physicians for conventional Western pharmacology as taught in medical schools. Multinational drug companies, fearful of diminishing patronage, sponsor yearly foreign junkets for popular specialists who prescribe their branded drugs. Moreover, proud physicians argue that they would not have spent a decade in college if they would only end up as “glamorized herbolarios.”
It cannot be denied, however, that bigger countries have extensively explored indigenous and alternative healing traditions. China has already successfully embedded hitherto questionable traditions like acupuncture and acupressure with conventional medicine.
If truth be told, the latest discoveries in cancer prevention and treatment are actually rediscoveries. The “isoflavones” in soybeans and “carotenoids” in certain fruits and vegetables served our ancestors well.
It was no less than the Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates (460-357 BC), who articulated, “Let your food be your medicine.”
It’s a shame that today’s “children of Hippocrates” swear by the Hippocratic Oath with their own material gain above patient’s welfare in mind./PN
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