The Indian Liver Specialist Dragged Into 16 Legal Cases for Calling Homeopathy 'False Medicine'

A hepatologist in Kerala has accumulated 16 legal cases in six years, not for malpractice, but for publishing peer-reviewed research and publicly questioning the scientific basis of homoeopathy and traditional herbal remedies. Dr Cyriac Abby Philips, a liver specialist at Rajagiri Hospital in Kochi, has become one of India's most polarising medical figures. India's Ayush Ministry, the federal body overseeing traditional medicine, has held formal committee meetings solely to discuss him, according to BBC reporting.

Philips has authored more than 170 peer-reviewed publications, accumulating over 2,300 citations in major gastroenterology and hepatology journals. In at least two instances, that published research has since been retracted following legal pressure from manufacturers whose products his studies implicated in liver injury — with no scientific flaws cited as the reason for either withdrawal, according to specialist site Retraction Watch.

The Research Behind the Lawsuits

Philips did not set out to become a public agitator. The shift came at a child's bedside.

A six-year-old arrived at his hospital in Kerala with severe jaundice and acute liver failure after her family gave her a homemade herbal remedy for a fever and cold. 'You have no idea the nightmares I went through in those two weeks trying to save that child,' he said. That case drove him to study what the published literature actually said about traditional remedies — and what his patients' own liver biopsies were showing.

Philips is now one of the most published researchers on Indian systems of medicine-related liver injury, known as AYUSH-liver injury. One study examined 386 alternative medicinal products implicated in liver injury, revealing associations with potentially hepatotoxic botanicals, adulteration and heavy metal contamination.

His research has drawn direct government pushback, including a defamation threat from the Ayush Ministry over his published views on giloy, a widely used Ayurvedic herb, after the Prime Minister's Office forwarded a complaint about his work in 2021.

When Lawsuits Erase Published Science

The most serious consequence of the litigation against Philips is not financial. It is what those lawsuits have removed from the scientific record.

In 2020, one of Philips' papers on harm from dietary supplements was retracted and removed after Herbalife, whose products the paper impugned, put legal pressure on the publisher Elsevier, according to Retraction Watch. The site reported that the retraction notice cited the legal dispute rather than any scientific flaws. A second paper, describing cases of liver damage linked to the Ayurvedic preparation Liv.52 and provisionally accepted by Frontiers in Pharmacology in January 2024, was marked 'temporarily withdrawn' in June 2024, with its abstract removed from the journal's website because of ongoing legal proceedings in India, again without any errors in the manuscript being identified.

In February 2022, the Kerala State Medical Council served Philips notice for professional misconduct after India's Ayush Ministry claimed his description of Ayurvedic medicine as 'pseudoscience' amounted to defamation. The charges were dropped eight months later, but the episode, and the ministry's repeated focus on his work, underline how personal his criticism of traditional medicine has become for some officials.

'They Cannot Invalidate the Information I Give'

Philips has been consistent in defining his argument. 'I am not calling the practitioner a quack,' he said. 'I am saying the principles that drive that practice are not based on scientific thinking or rational logic. Modern medicine corrects itself. That maturity is absent in alternative medicine — it refuses to identify its own failures.'

On X, where more than 300,000 people follow him as the 'Liver Doc', his tone is blunter. He has called homeopathy 'false medicine' and described the persona as deliberate. 'It's an adopted persona. They hate me. But they cannot invalidate the information I give,' he said.

What Is Actually at Stake

One colleague left India after being detained for questioning over a co-authored paper, and some researchers now decline to have their names on work published alongside his. Philips has spent millions of rupees on legal defence, often funding the research itself from his own pocket, saying: 'The whole aspect of somebody being there for the public, letting them know the truth they would never know about — I think this is much more important than looking at your own safety and comfort.'

In 2025, The Skeptic magazine named him the recipient of the Ockham Award for Skeptical Activism 'for continuing to stand up for science and for the best interests of patients, undeterred by a barrage of legal threats and intimidation'.

His 16 legal cases are therefore not only about one doctor's public conduct, but about whether clinical evidence can openly challenge powerful interests without being stripped from the record.