Published this week in the Business Standard
Here I was in the middle of a working day lying on my back on a worn mattress in a tiny room separated from the next patient by an old sari draped over an aluminum rod, waiting for my turn with the doctor.
The path to this place in one sense was hard to find. I had to push past a shop selling ready-made dosa mix and another one piled high with stainless steel utensils in a part of Bombay that had still to outgrow its 19th century origins as a housing tract for textile mill workers.
In another sense, my path to this tiny room could have been foretold. It was the middle of 2001 and the last few months had been tough at work. A hard won listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange was now threatened to be undone, the internet economy had plunged into a bottom less pit, and eager advertisers who had vied to be on our home page would now not return calls. I was downing whiskies indiscriminately adding many kilos to my normally athletic frame, there were dark rings under my eyes. And then I was felled by an excruciating pain in the lower back. My usual ports of call for health issues, Bombay's glitzy hi-tech five star hospitals had no answer other than dark hints about surgery when a friend seeing my plight suggested ayurveda.
Ayurveda! I am as supportive as the next guy of traditional Indian culture and things. I faithfully wear a dhoti and sit cross legged on the floor and eat out of plantain leaves at family weddings. When my religiously inclined mother was still alive and needed to visit a temple I'd drive her there and wait patiently in the car outside. I dutifully sit through Bharat Natyam performances and make donations without complaints when the Ganesh pooja folks come around every year. But how could unscientific, unproven, unlabelled potions be of help when modern medicine had proposed surgical treatment?
The first day's 'treatment' did not do much to reduce my skepticism. After a massage of the back and legs I was escorted into a corner for a 'steam treatment' of the affected lower back area: a home pressure cooker outfitted with a rubber tube did the job. The doctor gave me an unlabelled bottle of multicolored pills.
'What's in these pills', I asked
'Don't worry, they are safe'
'Why don't you list the ingredients on the label?'
'If I do that, others will copy them', he said
In the next few weeks, my skepticism slowly gave way to amazement. The combination of massage, the pressure-cooker based steaming, unlabelled secret-potion pills and yoga gradually eliminated my lower back pain. And all for a few hundred rupees a week.
Why did this system, if it so obviously 'works' get so marginalized in the modern world?
When I checked the Indian Government Health ministry's website, in the grand tradition of the Indian policy establishment of blaming everyone but ourselves, it held 'the advent of foreign invasions' and 'the Britishers who did not encourage these systems' responsible.
Dr Deshpande and Dr Ranade of the Pune Ayurveda College go even further in the blame game: 'The golden age [of Ayurveda] ended', they write 'when waves of Muslim invaders inundated northern India between the 10th and 12 centuries. The Muslims slaughtered sages and monks as infidels, destroyed the universities and burned the libraries'.the British [who arrived shortly afterward] denied state patronage to Ayurveda'closed down existing schools''
Yet, the answer may lie elsewhere.
Just as the industrial revolution undermined home 'base Indian hand spinning and weaving first by centralizing manufacture in factories and then applying machinery to speed up production, healthcare too went through an 'industrialization' in the late 19th century. Instead of caring for the sick at home, hospitals sprung up in Europe. Instead of making patients cook up their own medicines from herbs, companies sprung up who identified the active ingredient in herbs and produced these ingredients from cheaper synthetic sources. Instead of depending on undisclosed ingredients and secrecy a patent regime allowed innovators to appropriate for themselves the profits from their innovation.
The Germ Theory of Disease, that great paradigm change, dealt the next blow to Ayurveda. Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany demonstrated that infectious diseases are caused by germs and that specific diseases are caused by specific germs. Based on these insights, drugs were soon discovered for infectious diseases. Epidemics that had hitherto laid waste to millions of humans were gradually eliminated. The discovery of antibiotics in the 1940's dealt Ayurveda its final blow.
Ayurveda's refusal to use the tools of organic chemistry early enough to make it medicines affordable for the masses, it s rejection of the Germ Theory of Disease, and the consequent inability to deal with the common man's illnesses of cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, and small pox is what marginalized it. Not foreign invasions and colonialism..
Medicine is now in the middle of another paradigm change. The insights of organic chemistry that drove the last one are giving way to the microbiology driven biotech era. Will Indian policymakers gracefully incorporate these new insights and allow ayurveda to evolve into a living science or will they continue blaming invaders and colonialism. END
Comments from Readers
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Dear. Mr. Balakrishnan,
Read your column in Business Standard today with great interest. Having been associated in past with development of modern herbal drugs and launching a couple of them, I must say that entrepreneurs today are taking some steps forward in taking the science forward.
Apart from the points that you elegantly brought forward in the article, I believe decline or stagnation of ayurveda can be looked from a larger context — decline of science and questioning. Not only ayurveda, but astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, etc., all remained stagnated after Gupta Dynasty. Eventually, our sciences became gospels, beyond questioning. And, before we recovered, the western science was light-years ahead of us.
Even today, acceptance of improved ayurvedic formulations is very limited and use of modern technology in making ayurvedic medicines is not encouraged. Yet, time was never as ripe as it is today for ayurveda. We now clearly understand that diseases happen because of internal causes or because of external agents. Ayurveda doesn’t offer potent antibiotics for acute treatment, but can do a lot in improving the immune system and offer mild chronic treatments.
In context of overall healthcare system, we need a paradigm shift wherein we would have integrated healthcare. Patients would be examined by a panel of experts and appropriate line of therapy recommended. Focus must shift to patients and their well-being, today it is on modes of therapies which don’t talk to each other.
Best Regards,
Mohan
Mohan Pandey
Director, Integrated R&D Management,
Discovery Research, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories
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Dear Shri Balakrishnan,
I was happy, though not surprised, at your experience with the healing powers of Ayurveda in the Business Standard of date.
I have been working for a long time through various agencies to get an acceptance to use Ayurveda, both as a supplement as well as a separate department in various public hospitals for a long time but without success, if you have the time to see me in my office in Mumbai at Indian Mercantile Chambers, 3rd Floor, 14, R. Kamani Marg, Ballard Estate, Mumbai-1 (if you are a Mumbai resident), I would be happy to show you evidence of several hundred cases of cures of cancer through ancient Ayurveda.
I presume you are a Journalist and would therefore be the right source for spreading the message forcefully.
N.K. Somani, M.P.(4th Lok Sabha)
Email: vindhyapaper@yahoo.co.in
Dear Mr Balakrishnan,
I have been reading your column in BS with great interest. Perhaps I should have shared my thoughts with you when you wrote about Hindi in the English script. May be later on. At the moment , I was a little surprised to see no reference to the novel ,Arogya Niketan, by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. To my mind , this novel convincingly delineates the great battle lost by Ayurved to Allopathy, way beyond the easy blame game that you rightly refer to.Yet another book , by Claude Alvares (Homo Faber,I think) referred to the invention of Small Pox innoculation by Indians and its immediate suppression, by Law!, by the Britishers.
It is of course a mute point whether we in India could ever claim that we had our own Technological and scientific future apart from borrowing the “Techne ” from the west, as describerd or analyzed by Raimundo Panikker a long time ago.
But one of the things that the socalled PostModern theorization seemed to offer was the demolition of the Universalistic modes of perception –scientific or otherwise. Hence the courage in our ,some of, professors to reclaim some space in the Academia for Indian Philosophy or political theory, which were never recognized as such until very recently..
In particular it was only now that one could talk of alternative modes of perception, investigation and validation. One began to hear of a Hundred different Pathies, capable of offering cure etc, with due Legitimacy.
No doubt modern science has so many wonders to offer based on its own analytical modes.But it may yet have to catch up with the other modes of therapeutic sciences in India , China and elsewhere, which got their legitimacy as Science in some other ways.What were those ways!
Of course I am all for adopting the wonderful analytical tools offered by the modern science, which in fact questioned their own ancient philosophical and scientific theories. They, the west, in fact have updated themselves every now and then, including the postmodern models referred to above. The irony for the rest of the world is much too obvious to be belaboured– it is again the west offering the Other an occasion to claim a sense of self confidence!
Yet . I wonder if there can be modes of perception other than the dominant ones!
With regards, Girdhar Rathi
