Ayurveda integrates with tourism in Sri Lanka

In some western countries, there is a growing enthusiasm on alternative medicinal treatment in addition to western medicine particularly for chronic and long lasting diseases like paralysis.
"Some tourists wish to get Ayurvedic treatment for their chronic diseases and visit Sri Lanka," said Dr.Kamal Serasinghe, Ayurvedic practitioner at the press conference held at Ministry of Tourism yesterday.
In Sri Lanka residential treatment facilities are available for chronic diseases. For such diseases, Ayurvedic medicine has specials drugs and treatment.
"There are millions of such patients in the western world. So we hope to attract them to Sri Lanka and treat residentially’" said Dr.Serasinghe.
Ayurvedic practitioner Dr.Danister Perera said that they were hoping to integrate tourism and Ayurvedic medicine for mutual benefits.
They explained their plan of integration under eight programmes. Firstly, under data collection, they hope to understand the level of integration of Ayurvedic medicine with tourism. Secondly they hope to standardization of Ayurvedic medicine treatment because many are concerned about standards. We hope to prepare a resource base, under which they will prepare an inventory of resources available such as the number of Ayurvedic doctors, number of herbal treatment centres available and so on. We also hope to implement awareness programs in western countries to disseminate knowledge on these facilities. In addition, marketing and promotions, strengthening of legal framework and institutional structure and improving the qualities of services have been included in their program.
K.A.D.George Michael, Additional Secretary of Ministry of Tourism, S.S.P.Maxi Proctor and Ayurvedic practitioner Dr.Ranjith Abeywardena were also present.

Source: The Island