Management of vitiligo: An ayurvedic perspective

Shwitra or Shwet-Kushtha can be co-related with skin disease "vitiligo" in biomedicine. According to Ayurveda, the skin is one of the essential sense organs. Vata and bhrajaka pitta reside in the skin (called twak in Sanskrit). As the skin covers the whole body, bhrajaka pitta should be maintained in a proper state, and it needs continuous care. An imbalance in Vata and bhrajaka pitta may cause skin diseases. The first step (Step 1) in Ayurvedic management of vitiligo is purification therapies (shodhana karma) using herbal decoction of Psoralea corylifolia (bakuchi kwatha) and Euphorbia neriifolia (snuhi) aimed to induce multiple bouts of purgation. In the next step (Step 2), oil massage using oil selected on the basis of patient examination (rogi pariksa) and disease (roga). Step 3 is the exposure of lesions to the sun rays as long as the patient can tolerate (Soorya pada santhapam in Ayurveda). Herbomineral preparations include topical application of herbal Lepa, powders made up of medicinal plants (Curna), herbalized ghee preparations similar to paste (Ghrita, semi-solid preparations taken orally, by licking (Avaleha), herbalized oil preparations (Thaila), fermented solutions (Asava-Arista), and tablets (Vati/Gutika). Various minerals and metallic salts (Rasousadha) are also used. Bakuchi oil is Ayurvedic medicinal oil prepared from the dried fruits of P. corylifolia, and sesame oil is a popular therapy for vitiligo in Ayurveda that contain psoralen to stimulate melanocytes when exposed to ultraviolet light exposure. Details of above-mentioned therapy are discussed. Scientific rationale behind the use of these medications needs to be further explored with modern methods and research

Tests of general relativity with GWTC-3

The ever-increasing number of detections of gravitational waves from compact binaries by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors allows us to perform ever-more sensitive tests of general relativity (GR) in the dynamical and strong-field regime of gravity. We perform a suite of tests of GR using the compact binary signals observed during the second half of the third observing run of those detectors. We restrict our analysis to the 15 confident signals that have false alarm rates \leq 10^{-3}\, {\rm yr}^{-1}. In addition to signals consistent with binary black hole mergers, the new events include GW200115_042309, a signal consistent with a neutron star–black hole merger. We find the residual power, after subtracting the best fit waveform from the data for each event, to be consistent with the detector noise. Additionally, we find all the post-Newtonian deformation coefficients to be consistent with the predictions from GR, with an improvement by a factor of \sim 2 in the -1PN parameter. We also find that the spin-induced quadrupole moments of the binary black hole constituents are consistent with those of Kerr black holes in GR. We find no evidence for dispersion of gravitational waves, non-GR modes of polarization, or post-merger echoes in the events that were analyzed. We update the bound on the mass of the graviton, at 90\% credibility, to m_g \leq 1.27\times 10^{-23} \mathrm{eV}/c^2. The final mass and final spin as inferred from the pre-merger and post-merger parts of the waveform are consistent with each other. The studies of the properties of the remnant black holes, including deviations of the quasi-normal mode frequencies and damping times, show consistency with the predictions of GR. In addition to considering signals individually, we also combine results from the catalog of gravitational waves signals to calculate more precise population constraints. We find no evidence in support of physics beyond general relativity