Meet traditional Doctor Tony from Batala reliving back pain patients free of cost

Jammu: At a time when healthcare sector in India is booming in terms of revenue generation and employment creation, the sick and anxious queue up every day at the clinic of a popular Dr Tony in Punjab’s Batala village, hoping to find a solution to their ailments, and many undertake an arduous journey to reach this remote place with a strong motivation that their back pain will be properly treated here. The steady stream of patients has been increasing over the years for this practitioner, whose knowledge has been handed down the generations. Dr Tony doesn’t charge anything from back pain patients and even has made provision for free food at his premises for patients. Top dignitaries have already visited him and got much needed relief from back pain.

It deserves mentioning here that traditional healing practices have existed in many or most cultures since their beginnings as a culture.  Today, traditional healing practices such as Ayurveda, Spiritism and many others are re-emerging in Indian cities, and are being practiced alongside contemporary forms of counselling and healthcare. These forms of traditional healing generally include a system of classifying and explaining illness and distress, as well as ideas about the best treatment for particular problems.

Traditional healers in are visited by people both from their own cultural/ethnic communities and from other cultural groups in Dr Tony’s clinic.  Traditional healers are qualified and legitimate within their communities and are the first resource to poor people turn for their healthcare and psychological/emotional needs.India as a nation is becoming increasingly multicultural, it is therefore important for healthcare practitioners to become familiar with, and to respect, indigenous healing practices. Such an understanding will equip practitioners to consult and collaborate with traditional healers, and to help their clients connect with these healers when appropriate, added Dr Tony.

Dr Tony maintained that many people are doubtful about these treatments, and many chronic pain patients in particular know all too well how little they have been helped by this category of care. He said lack of well-tested treatment methods, physical therapists, chiropractors, and massage therapists routinely sell treatments that would be considered experimental in most other fields of medicine. But patients generally have no idea when they have entered this grey zone of therapeutic guess work. Chronic pain patients often feel desperate, and it’s not wrong to cautiously try an experimental treatment method. But very few methods are anywhere near as promising as their marketing makes them seem, observes Dr Tony.