Ayurveda: The Gradual Takeover by Modern Medicine
Ayurveda has from a very long time 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. But the why does modern medicine disregard the system of medicine it has been derived from? Why is it that it lost its importance in the eyes of globalized and modern practices? This article tries to understand Ayurveda as a system of healthcare and how it has been taken over by modern medicine. It looks at how theoretical knowledge that provides ‘facts’ has replaced rational and intuitive knowledge that had a more holistic approach by focusing on a single unit rather than piling all the units into one umbrella term.
HOW AYURVEDIC MEDICINE WORKS
Ayurveda has historically divided bodily substances into five classical elements which are earth, water, fire, air and ether. There are said to be 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.
HOW THE TAKE OVER STARTED HAPPENING
I suffer from Migraine and the course of treatment for this is usually a three times a day dose of painkillers along with nerve relaxants till the cycle of headaches end. And everyone knows how the future looks with so many doses of painkillers for a person. It was when I was researching about migraine and the automatic go-to treatment for it was shown as allopathy, that there was a curiosity to know whether traditional medicine had treatment for it or not. And that’s how Ayurvedic treatment came into the picture. Turns out that there are treatments that look towards the long term cure (Figure 1). It was when researched more that it was found that it was precisely 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.
It was found that 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. It can be believed that this has led to the less use of this mode of treatment.
CONCLUSION
One system can be taken over by another by taking in the former one’s weak points; one could say that the same thing could be observed when it came to Ayurveda and Modern Medicine. 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. But is it wrong to look at the individual problem and treat it rather than combining everything together and hoping it will get fixed? Wouldn’t it be better to get a treatment with lesser side effects? Or is it worth having taken a treatment that in the long terms has effects on your organs as well as your nervous system?
References:
1. The Gerson Institute Of Ayurvedic Medicine, Using Systems Biology and Pharmacoayugenomics to Re-Design Ayurvedic Research in the Twenty-First Century, viewed 12 August 2019, < http://ayurveda.md/usefull-links/123-systems-biology-in-ayurvedic-research>.
