Every year, in June, a strange ritual takes place in Hyderabad, a small town in southern India: several thousand Indians gather and queue to gobble up live fish.
No religious rite below, but rather a technique of traditional Indian medicine. Indeed, all the Indians present (who sometimes come from the other end of the country) suffer from respiratory problems and in particular fromasthma : however, swallowing a live fish – and wriggling – would make it possible to breathe better…
Holy recipe
The treatment is administered by members of the same family. After cramming a channas (a small carnivorous fish of 5 cm anyway) with a yellowish preparation based on medicinal herbs, they administer it to “patients” who must swallow it without delay. Impossible to know the exact recipe of the mixture: the Bathini Goud family protects it jealously, and even claims to have received it from a Hindu saint in 1845 …
According to the patients themselves, the wriggles of the (poor) fish help to clean the throat and the bronchi of mucus. Doctors, for their part, are skeptical and do not hesitate to qualify the method as “dangerous” because it is anti-hygienic and, above all, ineffective …
Despite everything, this treatment, to say the least exotic, remains very popular in India: thousands of Indians will follow one another for at least two days to swallow channas and the Indian government has even planned to allocate buses to allow its citizens to participate in the event …
What do you think of this anti-asthma treatment? Would you be ready to test? We discuss it on the forum!
