Ayurveda: The gradual takeover by Modern Medicine
My presentation focuses on Ayurveda and how from a very long time it has been seen as an integrated system of healthcare as it uses a sundry of interactive therapies and interventions that are personalized and designed to help each person. Being a system of medicine with its historical roots in the Indian Subcontinent, it is said that modern medicine is derived from Ayurveda. It has historically divided bodily substances into five classical elements which are earth, water, fire, air and ether. There are also twenty gunas (qualities or characteristics) which are considered to be inherent in all matter. Ama is used to refer to the concept of anything that exists in a state of incomplete transformation, although it has no equivalent in standard medicine. Ayurveda also names three elemental bodily humors, the doshas (called Vata, Pitta and Kapha), and states that a balance of the doshas results in health, while imbalance results in disease. Hence, one can say that Ayurveda works on the whole ideas of equilibrium. If you are ill it means that your doshas are not balanced one or the other might be in an increased or decreased amount.
Further when I was researching about the ailment that I chose; Migraine, I involuntarily started looking up Allopathic medicine, since that is what I have been using when I had one. This automatic response to look for allopathic medicine made me what to look into the area why Modern Medicine doesn’t regard Ayurvedic treatment that much today. Researching more, I could understand that it was precise because Ayurvedic therapies are not standardized and depend on multi-component interactions and synergies, the randomized clinical trial (RCT) which is the gold standard of modern medicine makes it an inappropriate tool to evaluate Ayurvedic treatments. Modern medicine depends on all scientific aspects and therapeutic substances at a molecular level. One can even say that Ayurvedic medicines are seen in a reductionist way and in order to understand and evaluate it one must redesign this present approach.
In addition to this, modern medicine believes in the process of “lumping and splitting”. They try to identify similarities among various conditions and then proceed to “lump” them all together under a common name, i.e. hypertension, diabetes, ulcerative colitis, etc. The other approach involves the “splitting” of a condition into different types. For example, under schizophrenia, we find the diagnostic subcategories of paranoid, delusional etc.
The art of medicine is reflected in the way that Ayurvedic physicians arrive at a diagnosis. Drawing simultaneously upon both rational and intuitive knowledge, vaidyas identify multiple signs and symptoms across the whole spectrum of body and mind and then consider them as a constellation or pattern that is unique to each person. Prescription, therapy and dosage are tailored to each patient and initial treatments are often modified as the course of treatment progresses. Such complexity and variability have been difficult, if not impossible, to assess through the current standard method of randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) as modern medicine is more conceptual in nature.
CONCLUSION:
Just like it was told that one system can be overtaken by another by taking in the former one’s weak points, I could observe the same thing when it came to Ayurveda and Modern Medicine, the latter took over the former due to a few of its shortcoming in this rational and science-driven world. I even noticed that Ayurveda looks into the psychosocial care of its patients whereas Modern Medicine tends to combine everything under an umbrella term and split it into different types. One can see a system in both these treatment methods.
