Ayurveda 101

PART 1: AYURVEDA AND PREVENTATIVE HEALTH

Our country is saddled with an incredible amount of chronic disease. We spend millions, no wait, billions on treatment of preventable conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.  As we toil away day after day we also seem to be increasingly susceptible to what I refer to as "quality of life" diseases.  These are things like insomnia, stress, hormonal fluctuations and mood swings just to name a few. The question is why if we spend so much money on making ourselves better and billions on vitamins and supplements why we still seem to be faced with the same chronic diseases as we have been for the past 30 years?  I'll tell you why-- if you forget the lessons of the past you'll be doomed to make mistakes in the future.  I would argue that the field of Ayurveda is that lesson from the past.  

Many people do not realize that disease happens slowly over time secondary to a lack of attention to preventative systems in the body that are meant to keep disease away. Now as to why there's a lack of attention to those systems well really the reasons are from the ceiling to the floor based on our current modern lifestyle. Part of it is because overall the majority of healthcare providers do not have a tremendous amount of training for counseling patients in a preventative disease lifestyle. If you combine that with a lack of allotted time during an office visit for preventative education and lack of reimbursement for comprehensive preventative health then its no wonder most of us succumb eventually to one or more disease states.  

So let's try to put all of this together. If the majority of us want to stay healthy and prevent disease but the majority of people who are set forth to provide healthcare do not have basic training in preventive disease prevention and techniques then how exactly is a majority of America supposed to engage and prevent disease? I'll tell you how. You personally have to go back and discover lessons that you may have forgotten or may have never been taught. And that is where you can find the importance of the field of medicine refer to as Ayurvedic medicine.

Think of it as when you typically go to the doctor you are going there with a problem. If you have a problem then that means that the disease has already manifested itself to the point where you have developed symptoms. Therefore you haven't prevented any disease in the first place because there you are sitting in the waiting room of your doctor's office hoping for some type of treatment so that you can feel better. Ayurvedic medicine is geared at keeping you out of the waiting room with a disease in the first place. Now to understand how this field of medicine works on the preventative health spectrum that I think it's best to review it in small chunks so that you can first digest the structure of this field of medicine as it is unfamiliar to most people who are most experienced with traditional Western medicine. By traditional Western medicine I'm referring to the type of medicine where you wait until you are sick and then you go to the doctor and the doctor prescribe something or gives you some type of device in order to make those symptoms go away and then you you don't come back until you have some other type of problem. Ayurvedic medicine is particularly concerned with prevention of disease so this is the type of medicine that at a minimum we can all incorporate to improve and prevent disease.

The purpose of this and the next article in this series of articles will explain in common terms some basic concepts of Ayurveda that you can use in your day to day life, what the origins are of this type of practice and how it relates to Western medicine, and how you can start to experience some of the benefits of this particular type of medicine.  These articles will go over some of the basic principles, how you can determine your dosha and what are some common recommendations to balance your dosha so that you can start to activate some of the preventive and healing mechanisms that are already pre-built in your body on a cellular level. Now if you have already in the diseased state which means that you are already experiencing symptoms Ayurveda can still help to resolve possibly some of those manifestations however you have to always consider the advice of your personal physician who is treating you in regards to what particular steps you should take for your health care conditions. We encourage you to subscribe to our blog so that you will get a notification for the next article in this series -Ayurveda 101.

To take a quiz to start to figure out your own unique composition according to Ayurveda click here.