Ayurveda

Today we had a doctor who runs an Ayurvedic practice come and talk to us. I am quite interested in the topic but his approach put me off a bit. Instead of telling us just facts about Ayurveda, he tried to persuade the class that Ayurveda can take over biomedicine. I, a westerner who has only known biomedicine, had trouble comprehending that possibility.

The one thing I took away from his lecture is that the Ayurvedic way is a natural way: you don’t do add anything unnatural to the body. No hormones, which means no birth control. No antibiotics. The thought of no antibiotics is very hard to conceive because when I’m sick, I think in terms of “All I need are some antibiotics and I’ll be up and running.

While this seems natural, some of the remedies seem quite unnatural to me. Included in their treatments are blood letting, changing diet (adding garlic or a particular herb), massage, purging. I found purging to be the most interesting because it seems so unnatural to me. I acknowledge that the body gets rid of toxins one way or another, sometimes through purging.

But for a physician to make a patient purge is something I’ve never heard before.
I want to know how strong is Ayurveda in India as a whole. The physician, himself, acknowledged that many people are turning to or have long followed biomedicine. I do see comparisons between Ayurveda and medicine in the USA in some ways. My one primary example is that my father was born in the home of his family. We often forget that the times when Americans believed in folk remedies and had children in their homes was not that long ago. We still believe in remedies today that have no biomedical backing. I have friends who when feeling sick, have grandparents who crack eggs on their heads. (I know it sounds odd, but it’s a remedy that one family, at least, believes in). I guess I found myself acting like the uppity, closed westerner today and was disgusted with myself.