Of all the traditional healing practices bone-setting plays a vital role in meeting the needs of orthopeadic problems, especially in the rural area where the facilities for formal primary and secondary health care are still not adequate. Now, as a field research programme, we are looking into the extent of service provided by the traditional bonesetters. This essentially involves sociological and medical aspects of fracture healing.

In this modern mechanized world an average of thousand deaths occurs everyday on the road and about seven million are injured in road accidents, 90% of the morbidity is due to fractures and dislocations. Therefore, it is important to document and revitalize our bone-setting tradition. The preliminary studies conducted by FRLHT and other NGOs of similar interests have shown that approximately 60,000 bonesetters are serving the rural population of developing India. In certain cases in cities, approximately 30- 40 patients are attended to every day by a single bonesetter.

Totally, about 350 traditional bone setters were documented in 16 districts in Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and four districts in Kerala. Software for documenting the data on traditional bone-setting is also being developed.

The programme includes a pilot study to document the efficacy of traditional management methods for fractures and dislocations with the help of modern diagnostic tools such as X-ray.

As there is no direct reference to the term malaria in the Ayurvedic or other Indian traditional medical literature, it is essential to have a rigorous disease correlation of malaria with traditional medical nosological entities.

Ethno-nomenclature or local name is a visible aspect of the local knowledge of plants and of local health traditions. It tells us how communities think/ use/ distinguish plants which is apparent from the meanings of the names. Meaning of the plant name also gives an idea regarding the basis on which the plants or set of plants are being grouped and identified.

The ethno-botanical nomenclature programme took its inception in August 2003. This programme is a inter-cultural study to explore the nature of folk, nomenclature and taxonomy. The analysis of plant names will be done at three levels viz etymological, epistemological and taxonomical.

Initial field studies are being carried out in Karnataka, which will gradually be expanded to an all-India level using ethno-botanical and anthropological methodology.

In order to study the relevance of traditional quality standards of raw drugs in respect of collection, processing, storage and their application, the first and foremost step is to document them in a systematic manner. The database includes information derived from both folk and codified traditions.

Local communities have high priority for the health problems of their livestock. Identification of health problems in livestock and subsequent documentation of remedial measures is documented from the paramparika vaidyas based on their prior informed consent. The assessment is done through "Rapid Assessment of Local Health Traditions (RALHT)" method. This is a participatory way of documenting and assessing the data. Besides this, a desk research is done to collect published data on the efficacy and safety of the selected drugs.

This approach is called a rapid assessment as it is done with a back-up of strong literary supportive evidences from Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM) and Western bio-medical science. Promotion of assessed data on remedial measures is done by means of kitchen herbal gardens through training village resource persons. FRLHT also collaborates with the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) through six district milk unions of Karnataka.