Ayurveda: An Alternative or Compementary Medicine?

Robert E. Svoboda

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

Copyright © 1997
Robert Edwin Svoboda