DEVELOPMENT OF QUALITY STANDARDS OF ANCIENT SILVER BASED NANOMEDICINE: RAUPYA (SILVER) BHASMA

Article history Health practitioner afraid to use metal as medicine due to reported severe toxicity. However Ayurvedic system of medicine particularly Rashshastra described about metal based medicine to cure various ailments. From ancient time bhasma is used in various disease and found to be free from toxicity. As per Ayurvedic physician bhasma may be toxic if it is not prepared as per standard method mention in Rashshastra. Raupya bhasma is silver based nanomedicine of ancient Ayurveda which is used to strengthen brain, liver, heart and memory. It is also used as immunomodulator and aphrodisiac. Due to lack of scientific data over Raupya bhasma it is not as popular as other silver nanomedicine. To consider above mention fact an attempt has been taken to prepare Raupya bhasma according to ancient literature and their characterisation by modern analytical techniques. In this work, we present a systematic characterization of this traditional drug using various techniques like inductive coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS), X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT- IR) and zeta sizer. The silver content in bhasma was found to be 63.054%. The nature of bhasma was found to be microcrystalline irregular having particle size 323.8 nm. TGA analysis indicates about loss of weight with temperature. The results obtained were found to satisfactory and confirm the traditional evaluation process by modern method. In addition, some specific findings were also made which could be used as standard data for quality control of Raupya bhasma.