Ayurveda in the Modern World: Traditionally Effective, or Effectively Traditional?
BY SERENA LEKAWA
For many, the word “Ayurveda” might bring to mind things like acupuncture, yoga (pants) and the smell of burning incense. Some might imagine hippie-healers sitting cross-legged on the floor, feeling each other’s energies and holding each others’ hands. Others still may imagine someone with a Staten Island accent sneezing through the word “Darth Vader.”
What Ayurveda actually is—a traditional form of healing practice originating in India—may or may not include variations of the previously listed conceptions. Taking the closest translation, Ayurveda literally means “the art of being.”
Often, in the face what we generally think of as “Western” medicine, or perhaps more appropriately, “biomedicine,” concepts of “alternative” healing practice are dismissed as the frivolous experiments of health nuts or free spirits fighting the establishment—something foreign to play with on a personality-branding level, made interesting by its sense of otherness.
Moreover, biomedicine is measurable—quantitatively legible in that it lends itself to affirmation by Randomized Controlled Trial. We live in a society enamored with the power of proving things on paper. Biomedicine is the empiricist’s dream. It follows that doctors, hospitals, diagnoses and prescriptions hold a powerful gravitas in the minds of many Americans, and citizens of the modern world at large.
I don’t believe I personally grasped the magnitude of biomedicine’s symbolic power until this past summer, when I came face-to-face with a prescription for herbal pills and balms in Colombo, Sri Lanka. An aunt of mine who lives there sent me to a practitioner of traditional medicine she used herself upon noticing that heat, humidity, and travel appeared to have thrown off my homeostasis. Upon entering the clinic where the Ayurvedic doctor lived and work, I smiled through a grimace and for the most part ignored the regimen she gave me, traveling on in resolute and determined discomfort. I didn’t feel properly ashamed of myself until I arrived at the air-conditioned LAX terminal three weeks later.
What my unconscious bout of ethnocentrism prevented me from grasping was that these two spheres of thought and healing need not be considered in opposition to one another. It’s true that we cannot gauge the efficacy of Ayurvedic medicine the same way we assess biomedicine. As Ted J. Kaptchuk discusses in his article Acupuncture: Theory, Efficacy and Practice, traditional healing practices often require a more holistic, qualitative framework for assessment that speaks more to human experiences than to chartable results. If we accept that the measurement standards are discrete, it becomes easier to consider biomedicine and Ayurveda as compatible entities. Indeed, potential benefits of this marriage transcend the philosophical.
In the 2006 article In the Presence of Biomedicine: Ayurveda, Medical Integration and Health Seeking in Mysore, South India, author Tapio Nisula uses research on medical integration and health seeking to frame the discussion of Ayurveda’s presence in healthcare practices today. Nisula’s research and analysis found a general preference for biomedical care, and a framing of Ayurveda as either a second choice should “allopathic” treatment fail, or as a supplement. This contributes to the forces influencing healthcare in India, where the government acknowledges Ayurveda as “a significant sector of health care” and formally promotes the “integration of Ayurveda into state health-care system.”
Tradition, historical context, and cultural relativism all factor into the integrative equation, but the economic stakes at hand can’t be ignored either. The powerful mechanisms we associate with biomedicine (CT scans, MRIs, X-rays, among a number of other formidable acronyms) are incredibly costly. The I-AIM Healthcare Centre, an integrated Ayurvedic hospital in India, emphasizes in the mission statement available on their website the goal of providing “efficacious, safe and cost-effective healthcare solutions to contemporary problems,” (emphasis added). In the global political climate of healthcare and healthcare policy, it’s also worth thinking about what integrative policies would mean in terms of economic benefits, and how this informs notions of both cultural relativism and universal standards of care.