Ayurveda Remedy Database!

This is great news, not only should it keep those dastardly drug companies at may with their patents, but it means that all these ancient remedies will be collected together in one accessible place, enabling further study.
Seems rude to regard ayurvedic medicine as a therapy, but there wasn't a separate Forum for it so here it is:-

India Digitizes Age-Old Wisdom
Effort Seeks to Keep Westerners From Poaching Folk Remedies
NEW DELHI -- In a drafty government institute, Nighat Anjum reads from a dog-eared textbook on traditional Indian medicine and acquaints herself with the miracle fruit known as aamla, which is said to be useful in treating heart palpitations, immune disorders, bed-wetting and memory lapses.
Tapping on a computer keyboard, the 27-year-old physician enters its properties in a database that eventually will contain more than 100,000 such traditional remedies -- the collective wisdom of the ancient healing arts known as ayurveda , unani and siddha , the latter based on the teachings of the Hindu god Shiva.
Employing about 150 doctors and technicians, the four-year, $2 million effort is aimed at protecting India's traditional remedies from theft by multinational drug companies in a practice known here as bio-piracy. The database will also include hundreds of yoga poses so that foreigners cannot copyright them as their own.
Though Indian officials can point to just a handful of such intellectual-property cases involving traditional medicine, they say the threat is bound to grow as foreign drug companies seek to cut soaring research-and-development costs by finding new products among natural remedies that have been used in India, China and other developing countries for millennia.
More broadly, the compilation of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library reflects a nationalistic pride in India's ancient scientific heritage as well as its citizens' continuing faith in herbal and other natural treatments that often are viewed with skepticism in the West.
Indian officials say the data-collection effort will promote the commercialization of traditional Indian remedies, help validate their scientific underpinnings and encourage collaboration between Indian and foreign pharmaceutical companies.
In doing so, they say, the project will spur the development of a uniquely Indian health-care industry that blends 21st-century technology with spirituality and the wisdom of ages in the same way that Brahmin traditions of Sanskrit and mathematics helped set the stage for India's information-technology boom.
By John Lancaster

Full article - [link= http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/07/AR2006010701042.html ]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/07/AR2006010701042.html[/link]

Andrew.