Context:
Ayurveda, India's ancient medicine, has been used for more than 3,000 years, servicing the healthcare requirements of millions of Indians.
Ayurveda has long struggled to solve a few issues that must be addressed.
What is Ayurveda?
- Ayurveda is a combination of the words AYU and VEDA. AYU signifies life, VEDA represents science or knowledge. Thus Ayurveda is the science of life.
- Ayurveda includes all living creatures, including humans and non-humans.
It is separated into three major branches.
- Nara Ayurveda: Relating to human existence.
- Satva Ayurveda: Concerned with animal life and sickness.
- Vriksha Ayurveda: Connected with plant life, its growth, and illness.
Ayurveda is a way of life that promotes whole positive health and spiritual fulfilment.
Ayurvedic practice:
- Ayurveda, Unani, and Siddha are only a few traditional practices recognized by the Indian Medical Council, established in 1971.
- Ayurveda is used for both prevention and treatment.
- The emphasis on prevention emphasizes the necessity of adhering to a rigid code of social and personal cleanliness, the specifics of which rely on individual, climatic, and environmental requirements.
- Ayurveda's therapeutic features include herbal medicines, external preparations, physiotherapy, and food.
- Ayurvedic principles necessitate that preventive and therapeutic actions be tailored to each patient's individual needs.
Importance:
- According to Ayurveda, living man is made up of three humours (Vata, Pitta, and Kapha), seven basic tissues (Rasa, Rakta, Mansa, Meda, Asthi, Majja, and Shukra), and waste products of the body (mala, mutra, and sweda).
- The growth and destruction of this bodily matrix and its contents involve psychological mechanisms of these elements, and their balance is the primary reason for one's health.
- The Ayurvedic therapy method is holistic and individualized, with preventative, curative, mitigating, recuperative, and rehabilitative components.
- Ayurveda's primary goals are health maintenance and promotion, disease prevention, and illness cure.
What are the main challenges that Ayurveda faces today?
Old Concepts:
- Ayurveda indicates that "a sense of ease, improved fitness, easy digestion, ideal body weight, and handsomeness of bodily features are the benefits that would accrue from regular exercise."
- The same cannot be said for the physiological and pathological hypotheses contained in the same literature.
- The Ayurvedic book on urine creation claims that small intestine channels convey pee to the bladder. The kidneys play no role in this basic model of urine production.
- This outmoded notion has no place in modern medical teaching other than as a historical anecdote.
Treatment that is ineffective in emergencies:
- Ayurveda's shortcomings in treating acute infections and other crises, including surgery and a lack of genuine therapeutic research, continue to limit its broad acceptance.
- Ayurvedic therapies are complicated, with far too many dos and don'ts.
- Ayurvedic treatments need time to work and heal. Predicting a reaction or prognosis is difficult, if not impossible.
Insufficiency of homogeneity:
- Ayurvedic medicinal practices are not standardized. This is because the medicinal plants employed in it vary depending on geography, climate, and local agricultural practices.
- In contrast to Ayurveda, ailments in contemporary medicine are defined and treated based on predetermined universal criteria.
Ayurvedic Pharmas' Misleading Propaganda:
- According to the Ayurvedic pharmacopoeia industry, the traditional Ayurvedic texts were consistent with how medicines were made.
- Pharmaceutical corporations publicized various therapeutic claims about their ayurvedic medications without sufficient scientific basis to improve the market attractiveness of ayurvedic medicines.
- This fueled the community's fixation with pharmaceuticals, and ailments that required lifestyle changes were instead treated with polypharmacy.
What initiatives has the government taken to promote Ayurveda development?
- National Ayush Mission.
- New Portals in Ayush Sector.
- ACCR Portal and Ayush Sanjivani App.
- Aahaar Kranti Mission.
The Future Perspectives:
- Pharmacology in reverse: It is described as the science of merging documented clinical experiences and experiential observations into leads for drug development through transdisciplinary exploratory studies.
- NMITLI (New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative): It aims to establish, capture, and maintain India's leadership position by combining the greatest capabilities of publicly financed R&D institutes, academia, and the private sector.
Imitating the Kerala Model: Kerala has been pushing Ayurveda as a means of increasing overall population immunity. It promotes Ayurvedic formulations and practices to all demographics of its population.
