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Dr.
Vasantha, Dr. Natesh, Colleagues & Friends,
On
behalf of Kasturba Health Society, Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical
Sciences and on my own behalf I am happy to join Dr. Gupta in welcoming
you all to this International symposium on Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy
& CME on Alternative Systems of Medicine. My congratulations to Dr.
Harinath and his team for organising this symposium.
My
special welcome is to Dr. Vasantha who has at a short notice agreed to
inaugurate this conference, as Mrs. Shailaja Chandra could not make it.
She had already reached Bombay, but had to return to Delhi this morning
for an important assignment.
Sevagram is a small village and many of you may be visiting and
experiencing your stay in a village for the first time in your life. You
may not get here all the comforts which you are accustomed to in your
respective places. We will try to make up that by the warmth of our
hospitality.
Our rural medical college, MGIMS has always shown openness to Naturopathy
and Ayurveda due to the positive influence of Gandhiji. Hence we have a
department of Ayurveda and have already built up 24 cottages for and are
in the process of organising ‘Nature Cure’ and Ayurved treatment
facilities at our Institute. As most of you know that I do not belong to
the profession of medicine, but apart from my close association with this
Institute, my association with Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan's SPARC has
sensitized me further to the emerging evidence-based Ayurveda. Lokmanya
Tilak preferred to call Ayurveda as Ayurvidya, an open-ended art-science
of healing. The faculty of Bhavan's SPARC is relentlessly working on
synthesis of Ayurveda and modern medicine under the leadership of my
friend Dr. Ashok Vaidya. SPARC and MGIMS have together provided me an
opportunity to closely interact with leaders, scientists and
administrators of health care.
When we talk of alternative systems of medicine we presume that there are
two distinct systems of medicine—the modern western system of medicine,
allopathy and the traditional systems of medicine which are also called
‘alternative systems’ like Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, Homeopathy,
Acupuncture, Acupressure and the more recent systems like Pranic Healing,
Rekhi, Magneto therapy etc. While we need not accept modern medical system
as the only remedy available, we have to recognize its dominance over
other alternative systems. Let us grant that in the current situation it
is for good reason that the system of allopathy enjoys the advantages of
being effective in treating acute disease conditions and crisis management
as in heart attack, acute appendicitis, accident care etc. It is the
modern way of life and modern diseases due to which allopathy has come to
be accepted as the mainstream system of medicine. Allopathy does not
provide answer to many diseases which are chronic in nature, where the
mechanism of the disease is not clearly known or worked out. It is
comfortable with treating diseases only when it can show a direct, linear
cause and effect relationship. This explains the growing disenchantment
with Allopathy and the growing popularity of other systems of medicine
which have a more holistic approach to treating illnesses. These systems,
particularly, Ayurveda take into account of basic elements of health
namely, physical state of an individual, mental attitudes, nutrition etc.
Ayurveda’s premise that mind, body and spirit are intimately connected
is revolutionizing the way Westerners understand their body and their
health. Ayurveda teaches that separating mind and spirit from the body
creates physical imbalance, which is the first step in the disease
process. It naturally follows that reintegration is the first step toward
healing. Based on the principle that disease is the natural end result of
living out of harmony with our environment, Ayurveda views symptoms of
disease as the body’s normal way of communicating disharmony. With this
understanding of disease, Ayurveda’s approach to healing becomes obvious
to re-establish harmony between self and environment and create an optimal
environment for health.
I
would urge upon all of you present here that a large majority of the
people like me, are those whose communication with medicine is only as a
patient. I would like to point out to the conference from the point of
view of a patient and it is he who finally should matter. In the intensity
of our medical education and hustle-bustle of our clinical services, we
sometimes tend to forget the very raison-de-etre of our profession and
institution. Patient must be central to all our concerns.
When a patient approaches you, he does not want a fancy diagnostic label,
a litany of investigations or an equally complicated regimen of multiple
drug-schedules. He or she is seeking health.
And, Ayurveda seeks to establish health, whereas allopathy is more
disease-centred. Ayurveda is based on the principle that the person is a
three-dimensional being with body, mind and soul. Whereas allopathy based
its perception of human body as a conglomeration of cells and now of
molecules—DNA and its products. One is a holistic view and other is a
reductionist view of the nature of man. I am sure that our Indian system
of medicine that is Ayurveda will offer an integrative view where the
reductionist and holistic would meet and aim at harmony of the body, mind
and soul, because health is harmony and disease is discord.
Currently, all over the world alternative systems of medicine are
increasingly recognized and among the alternative systems of medicine,
Ayurveda has the largest acceptance. Yet, Ayurveda remains a secondary
system of health care. World over a trend of complementary care is
emerging by which medical practitioners and ayurveda physicians can work
side by side. They can talk to each other rather than talking at each
other.
Author William Collinge, M.P.H., Ph.D., is one of the first Westerners who
has interpreted this Hindu science of balance and harmony and made it
understandable to Westerners. Ayurveda offers practical guidelines about
how to create greater harmony among your doshas by changing your behaviour
patterns. Chronotherapy is the process of bringing your daily activity
patterns into alignment with the natural metabolic rhythms and cycles your
body goes through in each 24 hour period. I am told that laboratory and
clinical studies on Ayurvedic herbal preparations and other therapies have
shown them to have a range of potentially beneficial effects for
preventing and treating certain cancers, treating infectious disease,
promoting health, and treating aging. Mechanisms underlying these effects
may include free-radical scavenging effects, immune system modulation,
brain neurotransmitter modulation, and hormonal effects. When it comes to
clinical services I as a patient see no reason why Ayurvedic and
allopathic experts cannot sit together and give their best to their
patients. At Bhavan’s SPARC we have such joint clinics in rheumatology,
women and child care, cancer care with substantial success. I recommend
that such joint clinics, initially for ambulant care of chronic diseases,
be initiated at several Ayurvedic and medical colleges. Meticulous records
must be kept of diagnosis, investigations, interventions, response and
side-effects. I recommend that a small task-force be formed to initiate
joint clinical services at some leading Ayurvedic and allopathic teaching
hospitals. This will help accelerating the process of Ayurveda becoming a
mainstream.
I do not know whether by now I have been able to enlighten in any manner.
Maybe, I have succeeded in creating more confusion. But, I am sure of one
thing that at the end of this conference, I will get enlightened better
enough and improve my vision of the subject matter by looking things in a
proper perspective.
I wish the conference all success.
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