Sunday Times 2
The great poison
View(s):“Even poison, when used with knowledge, becomes medicine; even medicine, without knowledge, becomes poison.”
- Charaka Samhita, 2nd century BCE
By Dr Ruben Thurairajah
She arrived on a stretcher, 34 years old, 6 weeks after giving birth. The referral note was brief and confident: “Suspected stroke — right-sided weakness, slurred speech.” At first, it made sense. But her blood pressure was collapsing. Her pulse had slowed to a crawl. The doctors knew this was not a stroke. The scans confirmed it: no clot, no bleed, no lesion. The machines hummed and blinked, but the mystery deepened.
The answer came only when she mentioned, in passing, a herbal tonic she had been taking for “postnatal weakness.” The recipe came from a video posted by a local influencer who described herself as a “natural mother.” The ingredients seemed harmless; until someone recognised the name of one root: Vatsanabha, known in Ayurveda as Mahavisha, or “the Great Poison.” Its modern name is Aconitum ferox. This was not a modern illness. It was a very old one.
The ancient poison
Aconite belongs to another world, one that imagined the boundary between medicine and death as a matter of discipline. In the classical Ayurvedic texts, aconite could be used as a drug only after elaborate purification: boiled in milk, soaked in cow’s urine, dried in the sun, and ground only by experts who understood its danger.
The influencer in her ring-lit kitchen knew nothing of this. She simply told her viewers to grind the roots and swallow them. Between wisdom and poison lay centuries of lost apprenticeship.
Aconite acts by hijacking the body’s nerves. It paralyses the heart and muscles, dropping blood pressure and mimicking a stroke. There is no antidote. Only time and luck. The woman survived after two days of intensive care. She became a medical curiosity, another case of aconite poisoning, another statistic. Yet her story speaks to something far deeper: How, in the age of smartphones and open access, superstition still rules the human mind.
A new kind of charlatan
In older societies, the charlatan stood in the marketplace selling oils and promises. The new charlatans live online. They speak the language of science — “toxins,” “immunity,” “balance” — while dismissing its discipline. Their tone is confident, their faces well-lit, their message tailored to the followers.
They tell followers that modern medicine is “chemical,” that hospitals are “profit-driven,” that nature, if treated with purity of heart, cannot harm. They market ancient medicine making as “authentic” knowledge, forgetting that the ancients themselves were scientists — cautious, methodical, and deeply aware of danger.
And the audience listens. Educated, urban, fluent in language and irony, they scroll past data but stop at conviction. They distrust the doctor but believe the stranger on a screen. The algorithms reward emotion, not accuracy.
The paradox of progress
It would be comforting to call this ignorance. But that would be too simple. What drives such belief is not stupidity but anxiety; a quiet fear that the modern world has become too complex, too fast, too impersonal. The idea of “natural healing” offers something that technology cannot: the illusion of control, the comfort of continuity.
Civilization has built miracles: vaccines, genetic therapies, machines that can keep a heart beating indefinitely. Yet each new invention also enlarges the distance between knowledge and understanding. People yearn to return to something older, slower, more human. The problem is that the old world was not safer; only simpler. Aconite’s story captures this paradox perfectly.
Once, it was a weapon: the poison on the arrow tip. Later, it became medicine, used with reverence and fear. Now, in the 21st century, it returns as a social-media trend. The plant that once killed kings and warriors during battles now circulates in wellness circles, rebranded as herbal empowerment.
The illusion of knowledge
When the woman walked out of the hospital, she carried more than her recovery. She carried proof that access to information does not equal wisdom. The internet, that vast library of human thought, has also become a bazaar of half-truths. Between a peer-reviewed study and a viral video, the latter wins every time.
What the case revealed was not just a failure of education but a failure of trust. Science asks for humility, for patience, for the willingness to say “I do not know.” The influencer offers certainty: the one thing science cannot promise.
And so the old poisons live on, not in forests but in ideas. Mahavisha now moves through hashtags and group chats, through the comforting language of “wellness.” It flows wherever knowledge is treated as arrogance and belief as virtue.
The persistence of folly
The irony is complete. The same civilisation that can edit human DNA cannot protect its citizens from their own inventions. The same generation that campaigns against misinformation will swallow a lethal root for “natural balance.” Hospitals now save victims not from microbes, but from the wellness culture of our times.
In a Himalayan valley, the aconite still blooms: tall, violet, indifferent. It has outlived empires, philosophies, and gods. It now thrives in a digital ecosystem of its own, fertilised by mistrust and nostalgia. Civilisation may refine its tools, but not its temptations.
The Great Poison endures; not in the plant, but in the refusal to learn, in the comfort of unexamined faith. It is the poison that no detox can remove — the belief that ignorance, if ancient enough, must be wisdom.