Why Swallowing a Live Fish Doesn't Cure Asthma

On Monday and Tuesday, more than a lakh people stood in queues at the Nampally Exhibition Grounds of Hyderabad to get a small live murrel fish stuffed with a paste forced down their throats. The reason for subjecting themselves to this discomfort is that the fish and the paste together are supposed to be a cure for asthma. Called fish prasadam, it happens every year around this time followed by the inevitable sound bites of its effectiveness. Even the state becomes a party to this exercise by organising amenities, deploying police for crowd control, and managing traffic and transport. Asthmatics come from faraway places and return with a sense of health. Feeling well and being cured are however two different things.

No scientific or peer-reviewed study has been published on this treatment. There, in fact, cannot be a study because the family that conducts this event claims the ingredients of the paste are a secret. Their story is that 180 years ago a wandering ascetic from the Himalayas came to their house and gave them this method including the recipe for the paste. Since then they have been doing this as a public service without charging anything.

Something being free is not necessarily beneficial. That needs to be confirmed through controlled studies. Say, you give the fish with the paste to 500 asthmatics and don't give anything to 500 other patients. And then monitor their progress over a reasonably long time. If the 500 who got the fish are substantially better off at the end of the study, you can vouch for it. Nothing like that happens here. The story of the ascetic sounds like one of the many mythological spin-offs found all over India. Why would someone meditating in the Himalayas for self-realisation have any interest in fish and asthma? We will never know because there is no documentation of it either.

Why do people feel better then, which leads to others coming? There is the placebo effect. The human body is mysterious in its operations and belief in something can itself lead to results. In addition is the nature of the ailment. Asthma is not one disease. It is a condition of inflammation in the airways as a result of different allergies and triggers. You can get asthma from eating eggs to breathing polluted air. It can lie dormant for long periods before flaring. Such an ailment is especially susceptible to showing false positives because what one considers a cure is merely a temporary reprieve brought about by one's own faith and asthma’s on-and-off characteristic.

The only thing going for taking the 'prasadam' is that, even if it does not do permanent good, no great harm can come from it. It is free and a little fish is still some protein.