Ayurveda: An Alternative or Compementary Medicine? JoAnn Guest

[Guest guest]

Ayurveda: An Alternative or Compementary Medicine?

JoAnn Guest Sep 07, 2005 17:54 PDT

=====================================================================

 

Robert E. Svoboda

http://www.drsvoboda.com/ayurvedAlt.htm

 

The topic of my presentation this morning is Ayurveda: An Alternative or

Complementary Medicine? I am not sure, however, that this is the right

question to ask. I think we must first ask several other questions

before we can answer this one.

 

Question One: Does modern medicine need alternatives and complements?

The answer, I believe, is yes. Modern medicine responds admirably to

crises which require quick, intensive, invasive intervention, and deals

far less effectively with slowly progressing degenerative diseases The

Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that

nearly half the people in the United States suffer from at least one

chronic illness, and that together these illnesses account for

three-fourths of all medical expenses in our country.[1] In this climate

of change in the West which is now calling into question many of the

assumptions which we once accepted unthinkingly an awareness is growing

that our paradigm is shifting. A system's paradigm is its pattern, the

archetype which structures each of its products.

 

Crisis medicine promotes a crisis-based lifestyle. An imbalance that

begins in one location can surface elsewhere, since all facets of the

organism communicate with each other; physical imbalances can thus be

generated from disturbances of the mind or the life-force, mental

disorders can be due to physical derangements, and so on. Imbalanced

individuals tend to perturb their surroundings, and a polluted habitat

will pollute its inhabitants. Ayurvedists who survey today's world find

the human creature destroying its environment and itself everywhere they

look, and are not surprised to discover the gargantuan imbalances thus

created emerging as rampant disease.

 

The inability of crisis-based medicine to deal with these crises has led

to the present situation in the West in which many alternative paradigms

compete for the acceptance of scientists and public alike. Last week I

spoke at a conference on organ transplantation organized by Howard

University. While I was there I attended a lecture by Dr. James Gordon,

Professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and first

Chair of the Advisory council of the OAM at the NIH. During the course

of his talk Dr. Gordon mentioned that 2 out of every 3 people who

consult with M.D.s in this country are also doing something extra:

herbs, supplements, chiropractic, whatever. 2 out of 3 is a decisive

majority. Is it possible that our health care system is changing faster

than our ability and willingness to perceive and describe it? Do all the

people who are being served by the system still accept the fundamental

premises that make up the system? It would appear that the ajority wants

change.

 

Question Two: Is Ayurveda a worthy alternative? This answer is also, in

my opinion, yes. This " superstition " has already contributed much to

modern medicine, including the drug reserpine, which is extracted from a

plant (Rauwolfia serpentina) that is still used today in India to safely

control hypertension. More recently it has provided the

cholesterol-controlling gugulipid (from Commiphora mukul), which

apparently binds cholesterol in GI tract and has been reported to be as

good as Lopid at lowering blood cholesterol levels.

 

Ayurveda has also given us plastic surgery. During the nineteenth

century the Germans translated from the 2000-year-old treatise of the

Ayurvedic author Sushruta the details of an operation for repair of

damaged noses and ears. This operation, which appears in modern

textbooks of surgery as the pedicle graft, led to the development of

plastic surgery as an independent speciality. Today Sushruta is regarded

by plastic surgeons around the world as the father of their craft.

 

Ideally, all Ayurvedic treatment is carefully tailored to the

individual. Though it concentrates first on making simple changes of

diet and behavior, for simple alterations are sometimes sufficient to

produce big results, Ayurveda does not hesitate to use surgery, shock

therapy, and other intensive treatments when mild interventions fail to

produce results.

 

Ayurveda's materia medica and therapeutic techniques have much more yet

to contribute. I maintain, however, that Ayurveda's most valuable

contributions will be made to the new theory that medicine is trying to

grow. These contributions will be derived from Ayurveda's way of seeing

the world, its darshana, a vision which will facilitate medicine's

ability to teach people not just how to avoid disease but how to

proactively develop and maintain a healthy " state. " Modern medicine

defines health as the absence of disease, Ayurveda focuses on health as

a positive condition that is independent of disease, an active state of

being that can be promoted by appropriate behavior. When you can upgrade

your health you may find diseases disappearing without ever having been

directly addressed. The same Ayurvedic principles that are used to

correct yourself when you are out of balance can be used to preserve

your balance once it is corrected.

 

Question Three: Can modern mechanical medicine adequately perceive,

describe, understand and implement Ayurveda? I rather doubt this. Many

similarities already do exist between the standpoints from which

Ayurveda and modern medicine survey the world. Both believe in

technological progress; on its part Ayurveda has absorbed therapeutic

innovations from many sources within and without India over its history.

Empiricism too is fundamental to both; the Ayurvedic author Sushruta

declares, " A learned physician must never try to examine on grounds of

pure logic the efficacy of a medicine, which is known by direct

observation as having by nature a specific medical action. " Both agree

that an allopathic approach to disease is ordinarily efficient, and both

thus usually treat conditions with their opposites: fever is countered

with temperature-lowering measures, obesity with reduction in caloric

intake, and so on.

 

In spite of this Ayurveda does not yet have a sterling reputation among

physicians of Western medicine; in fact, one recently called it in print

" a superstition of ancient times. " But then this is because the majority

of modern physicians do not know what to look for when they look at

Ayurveda. Western materialist science presupposes that the way to eschew

ambiguity in science is to distance ourselves from the things that we

measure. This posture achieves precision by denying a place in Western

experimental philosophy to any phenomena that are not externally

measurable, and discourages Western medicine from accepting, or even

grasping, that which cannot be explained phenomenologically.

 

The Ayurvedic system maintains that all phenomena however ambiguous are

worthy of investigation if they influence embodied life. It encourages

the free application of both rationality and intuition to scrutinize all

states of being, internal and external. Over thousands of years the

sages who moulded Ayurveda studied how embodied life is affected by what

we do and how we do it in all of life's arenas, including diet,

exercise, vocation, avocation, and personal relationships. Though most

of their experiments were performed internally these were no less

rigorous and systematic than those that scientists perform in external

laboratories. Nor were they less logical; Ayurveda is a different

" language " from modern medicine, and its logic is a fuzzier sort of

logic (in the non-pejorative, cybernetic sense of " fuzzy logic " ).

 

Their inner explorations led these savants to conclude that

consciousness is omnipresent in the universe, and in fact pre-existed

the cosmos. This premise is fundamental to Ayurveda: that consciousness

is omnipresent in the universe, and pre-existed the cosmos. Everything

in the universe that is not pure unconditional consciousness is a form

of matter, and the material universe and all that is within it evolved

from and continues to evolve because of that consciousness.

Consciousness expresses itself in and through everything that exists,

its expression varying with the density of the matter that contains it.

Everything with which an organism comes in contact interacts with its

matter and its consciousness, however minimally; consequently, all

living organisms are innately interdependent.

 

This is the gulf that truly parts Ayurveda from materialist science,

which teaches that consciousness evolved from matter. No conclusions

drawn by reasoning from one of these two competing and mutually

exclusive postulates can be expected to prove or disprove the " validity "

of the other postulate. The " consciousness " model, however, continues to

gain ground as scientific evidence of consciousness's ability to

influence matter, at least in the form of observers affecting their

observations, continues to accumulate.

 

Ayurveda's approach is more alchemical. The alchemical paradigm holds

that that reality is paradoxical. This means that a thing is closely

related to its opposite, as we see today in love-hate relationships and

the like. The approach of Chinese medicine is similar. India and China

have always appreciated life's innate ambiguities. Carl Jung wrote, " The

Chinese have never failed to recognize the paradoxes and the polarity

inherent in what is alive. The opposites always balanced one another-a

sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark

of barbarism. " [2] While Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine try to

mirror this ambiguity in their processes, materialist science abhors

ambiguity.

 

Ambiguity has not always been anathema to science. John Maynard Keynes

discovered in 1936 that Isaac Newton had been obsessed with alchemy and

had mentioned it in early editions of his books. He eventually decided

that he would have to repress this side of himself if he wanted to get

ahead in the world of that time, and so purged all references to alchemy

from later editions of his works.

 

Newton's early form of " political correctness " reflects the sad truth

that even modern medical science, research and practice alike, is

structured in large measure through political means. Modern medicine

itself succeeded in gaining a paramount position in our country with

substantial help from political sources; consider for example the

generally successful attempts at the end of the nineteenth century to

outlaw homeopathy at a time when in many parts of the country homeopathy

was more popular than allopathy. This is merely the most recent

incarnation of a generalized ancient trend to support orthodoxy at the

expense of innovation. Galileo's fate and the witch-burnings were two

other European examples, but no culture (including India's) is spared

this sort of thing entirely.

 

How we structure a thing determines to great extent its reality. " As

Gregory Bateson has rightly remarked, Newton did not discover gravity;

he invented it. " How we structure our reality determines what might be

" alternative or complementary " to it, and the key to structuring what we

believe to be real usually boils down to the amount of repetition and

intensity that is brought to it. If you call something a duck long

enough and loudly enough many people will eventually become convinced

that it is a duck, whether or not it actually quacks. The more that the

medical establishment calls chiropractic or homeopathy or Ayurveda

" alternative or complementary " the more that is what they will become:

secondary to, adjunct to, assistant to modern medicine.

 

All medical systems are models, approximations of reality. The modern

fixed and unchangeable view of medical reality has meant that until very

recently few scientists were prepared to accept that the mind and the

body can and do influence one another in measurable ways. Many of the

problems that we have today stem from the fact that our reality system

officially denies that the mind participates in the creation,

preservation and destruction of our physical reality. Denying the mind

its influence does not prevent that influence; it only prevents us from

perceiving it. Modern medicine assumes that the reality we can perceive

with our senses is the only reality there is, and that we can observe

portions of this reality as non-participating observers. But this act of

mechanically constructing a separate, rationally ordered reality for

ourselves is itself an active participatation in that reality from which

we are trying to separate ourselves.

 

This totalitarian rationality, which by denying participation with our

reality implicitly denies everything that is irrational about us, has

created and is creating enormous difficulties for us humans and for our

world. The most important of our irrational influences exist in the vast

terrain of the unconscious mind, but modern science, by promoting the

idea that rational knowledge is the whole of knowing, has cut itself off

from the 90% of the iceberg of consciousness that is outside the control

of the conscious mind. Now the mass of this iceberg is reacting against

that neglect, counterattacking with epidemics of psychological and

psychosomatic disease.

 

To be worthy of possessing alternatives or complements a system should

accurately reflect and describe the reality that is embodied life to a

substantial degree in a systematic and logical way. Modern medical

science, which is currently in the throes of a revolution that will

dramatically affect both its vision of the nature of medicine and the

way that medicine is practised, may not qualify as such a system.

 

Question Four: How can we understand Ayurveda? The Ayurvedic model takes

the approach advocated by Michael Polyani, who in his classic book

Personal Knowledge showed that (even though most scientists like to

claim otherwise) science is a craft. Whether it involves the growing of

crystals or the reading of X-rays, a scientist becomes proficient at his

science not by strictly following the dictates of some unambiguous rule

book but by immersing himself in the slow trial-and-error process of

discerning patterns and learning to follow those patterns. We have to do

the same thing with our health; we must learn to improve it like we

learn any other craft.

 

This process happens to be very natural to us humans. It is in fact

innate to us, for this is how the brain learns as well. The brain is too

parsimonious to assign one memory to one neuron. Instead, it organizes

its neurons into neural networks. Any sensory stimulus that enters one

of these networks activates each of the neurons to a different degree.

The more highly activated neurons signal strongly and the weakly

activated ones less strongly, the members of the network continuing to

share information until a pattern develops. Many types of patterns arise

and are held in the same net.

 

One of Ayurveda's basic theses is that similar patterns appear at all

levels of a living organism's existence, both in its internal interplay

and in the interplay between it and its environment. Each pattern

affects us whether we are aware of it or not. Taste is one example of

the many patterns in our daily lives than cannot be easily quantified.

You can express your blood pressure in mm of Hg, but how do you measure

taste? Most of us find it natural to believe that that well-cooked food

tastes better than poorly-cooked food, even though there is no way to

externally verify this internal perception. Ayurveda suggests that the

self-evident good or bad taste of food has more than a trivial effect on

the organism that consumes it. Ayurveda asserts that the internal

reality of something as outwardly ephemeral as a taste pattern is in

fact very real to the tasting organism. Evidence that supports this

conjecture has also begun to accumulate in Western science (e.g.in

studies on the ways in which the taste of fat or sugar in the mouth can

influence physiology even before they are metabolized).

 

Taste is only one of the many patterns that characterize our bodies and

minds. Another is prana, the force of life, which the Chinese call chi

and the Japanese ki. We can describe prana as the energy that inspires

life to persist within a particular living being. Students of yoga, Tai

Chi and the martial arts who learn to identify and circulate this force

within themselves discover that prana is as easily measured with their

own internal instruments as it is difficult to measure with external

gadgets. The pattern that these practitioners call prana is as real to

them as the patterns that neural networks of taste produce when they

sample a mango. Whatever their external reality, patterns are very real

to the organism in which they occur.

 

Athletes around the world are now studying the life force as they learn

that cultivating a healthy pranic pattern facilitates the type of

body-mind cohesion that allows one to shine out on the playing field.

Athletic training is basically a matter of breaking down old physical

and mental patterns and building up new ones. Each living body hosts a

wide variety of strongly-held metabolic patterns which influence its

ability to build up new patterns. Ayurveda classifies each these many

metabolic patterns into one of three classes. Each of these classes

forms a metapattern, a pattern which actively reproduces itself whenever

it is given the opportunity to do so. These three metapatterns are the

Three Doshas, the body's so-called " humors. " They are called doshas

( " mistakes, " in Sanskrit) because when they are deranged they induce the

organism to go off balance, in predictable ways. Students of Ayurveda

work with the reality of life from the dosha perspective because of its

practical utility in everyday practice. The dosha approach allows

associations to be detected between seemingly unconnected causative

pathways and manifested symptoms.

 

Ayurveda defines health as balance and ill health as imbalance, in all

aspects of existence but particularly in the context of the Three

Doshas. When they are balanced the Three Doshas ensure that the organism

functions well. Disease-causing imbalance patterns may result whenever

an organism fails to adapt properly to a change in its internal or

external environment. The need to adapt is universal, but the ways in

which people adapt differ from person to person. Though many of these

adaptation patterns are learned behavior others are innate properties of

the organism itself. Everyone has physical, psychological, pranic, and

emotional strengths and weaknesses; taken together these form a set of

" reaction prints " which are as characteristic of their owners as are

fingerprints or footprints. The aggregate of these innate properties

forms the individual's " nature " or " personal constitution " (in Sanskrit,

prakriti), a temperament which profoundly influences predisposition to

health, general and specific sensitivity to illness, and responsiveness

to various forms of therapy.

 

The Ayurvedic approach to healing concentrates first on making simple

changes of diet and behavior, for simple alterations are sometimes

sufficient to produce big results. Ayurveda escalates into surgery and

other intensively invasive therapies only when mild interventions fail

to produce results. Modern researchers continue to rediscover truths

that Ayurvedic researchers learned many centuries ago.

 

For example, since 1935 modern science has known that when mice and rats

are fed a very low calorie diet (30 - 50% of their normal intake) in the

laboratory they live about 30% longer than do well-fed rodents, so long

as they receive sufficient nutrition. Though the mechanism of this

effect remains in doubt (it may be due to decreased production of free

radicals) the effect itself is clear.

 

Americans not only eat too much food, too much of that food is fat. Dr.

Dean Ornish has shown how a judicious program of exercise and dietary

change can not only control but in some cases reverse the course of

obstructive coronary artery disease.

 

Recall that the two most common diagnoses requiring transplantation in

African-Americans are hypertension and diabetes. High blood pressure

afflicts one-third of all Americans in their 50's, half of those in

their 60's, and more than two-thirds of those over 70. But hypertension

is not inevitable; it is a disease of civilization. Preindustrial people

rarely get increases in blood pressure as they age, whether they live in

China, Africa, Alaska, or the Amazon, mainly because they do not eat

processed foods.

 

Dr. Paul Whelton of Tulane University's School of Public Health has

spent the past decade tracking 15,000 indigenous Yi people in southwest

China. As long as they eat a traditional diet-rice, a little meat, and

lots of fresh fruits and vegetables-almost none of them suffer from

hypertension. But when they migrate to nearby towns their blood pressure

starts to rise with age.[3]

 

Our ancestors subsisted mainly on fresh plant foods for about seven

million years, and anyone who lives on such a diet ingests about ten

times more potassium than sodium. " Civilized " people consume far more

sodium; for instance, while a four-ounce tomato contains 9 mg. sodium

four ounces of bottled tomato sauce has nearly 700 mg. Modern humans are

the only mammals that consume more sodium than potassium, and we are the

only ones that suffer from hypertension. Dietary changes can reduce

blood pressure as markedly as drug treatment, and in as little as two

months. In a study known as DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop

Hypertension) researchers at several institutions put volunteers on one

of three diets. Normotensives who ate a low-fat menu including ten daily

servings of fresh fruits and vegetables plus two servings of

calcium-rich dairy products reduced their systolic and diastolic

readings by 5.5 mm and 3.0 mm respectively. Hypertensives had reductions

of twice that magnitude. Potassium supplements can bring a similar but

less dramatic effect, but consuming fresh, unrefined plants provides you

the bonus of phytochemicals which combat cancers and boost immunity.[4]

 

Dietary change is potentiated by exercise, which in judicious amounts

can help everyone, even the frail. Dr. Maria Fiatarone of Tufts

University recently got ten chronically-ill nursing home residents to

lift weights three times a week for two months. At the end of this

period their average walking speed had nearly tripled, and their balance

improved by half. Two went so far as to throw away their canes.[5]

 

A positive attitude is also a big plus in regaining and preserving

health. Most people who live to be a hundred maintain through their

lives a social network of support, keep their minds active, manage

stress well, and never give up. It has been said that " patients suffer

illnesses and physicians diagnose and treat diseases. " The two may have

little in common. For example, in a seven-year study of 3,500 older

people who were asked to evaluate their own health, those who rated

their health as poor were three times as likely to die as were those who

believed their health to be good. However, those who were clinically in

poor health but who rated themselves as being healthy were less likely

to die than those who believed themselves to be unwell.[6]

 

We are what we eat, what we do, and what we think. Observers can affect

their observations; Larry Dossey, M.D. comments: " It appears that

double-blind studies can sometimes be steered in directions that

correspond to the thoughts and attitudes of the experimenters. This

might shed light on why skeptical experimenters appear unable to

replicate the findings of believers, and why " true believers " seem more

able to produce positive results. The validity of decades of

experimental findings in medical research would need to be reevaluated

if it is proved that the mind can " shove the data around. " [7]

 

Ayurveda seeks to find positive ways for each of us to " shove our data

around. "

 

By examining metapatterns in an organism it can help that organism's

owner decide what kind of food, exercise, meditation, and other

healthful habits will be health-promotive to the greatest degree. When

it is too late for prevention early detection becomes the key. In all

cases, removal of the causative factors is the first step: the patient's

diet, lifestyle, and way of thinking all must change. Thereafter, one

must carefully consider all the factors affecting the case, including

the patient's constitution and age, the season of the year, and most

importantly the strength of the patient versus the strength of the

disease. When therapeutic intervention is called for we generally focus

on plant materials, at least initially. In choosing herbs for a patient

we focus primarily on the pattern that the disease has generated rather

than the specific symptom alone.

 

Question Five: " How necessary, desirable or useful is it that Ayurveda

be described in and bound by terms provided by another model? " Our

answer to this question might be, " Scientifically, not much.

Politically, quite a bit. " Two essential steps on the path to good

health are to establish a healthy relationship between yourself and your

environment and to enhance and maintain that relationship with your

every choice and action. Promoting Ayurveda's health in North America in

the current environment requires that it develop some sort of

relationship with its environment, of which a major portion is modern

medicine. The danger is that this will not be a mutually healthy

relationship but will instead be one in which Ayurveda will be

" commodified " and " mainstreamed " into the current disease-care system.

 

Conclusion: Ayurveda could be an alternative to modern medicine now

except for the facts that the medical establishment in this country is

not yet ready for it. Ayurveda is not yet ready either, for there is a

dramatic scarcity of qualified Ayurvedic physicians. Now, therefore, it

will have to act as a complementary medicine before it can become

alternative.

 

It would be better it would be to first reestablish other modes of

thinking and doing science, and create a new model of reality that is a

culture of the alternative and complementary. This new model could do

much worse than to model itself on the ancient model which continues to

serve us so well: Ayurveda.

 

 

Footnotes:

 

1 JAMA Vol. 276, Issue No. 18, Nov 13, 1996, pp. 1473-79

 

2 David Rosen, M.D., The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity, (New York:

Viking Arkana, 1996), p. 92

 

3 Newsweek June 30, 1997, p.62

 

4 Newsweek June 30, 1997, p.64

 

5 Newsweek June 30, 1997, p.61

 

6 Mossey and Shapiro, " Self-Rated Health: A Predictor of Mortality Among

the Elderly, " American Journal of Public Health, 72 (1982):800-807 7

 

7 Dossey, p. 195

 

 

1997

Robert Edwin Svoboda

_________________

 

JoAnn Guest

mrsjo-

www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Diets

 

 

 

 

AIM Barleygreen

" Wisdom of the Past, Food of the Future "

 

http://www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Diets.html