I am fortunate in that most patients understand that Ayurveda is practiced differently than allopathic medicine and they use it in the way it was intended: as a holistic health care system which both prevents and treats disease by taking into account all aspects of the person’s life by incorporating lifestyle changes, nutritional counseling and the introduction of proper cleansing and detoxification techniques, all geared to that patient’s unique physiology.
But I do come across the occasional patient who has learned some bad habits from the standard medical model and tries to apply that model to Ayurveda. And when I see that happen I try to deepen their understanding of their health problems by teaching them how to step back and take a broader perspective of things.
First of all, we have all been trained to react to disease. This usually means that if a doctor finds you are trending towards a disease, such as multiple sclerosis or diabetes for example, they usually take a watch and wait attitude. They perform tests periodically to see if and when you have finally reached the actual disease state where it can be definitively diagnosed as that disease, then they jump in and start treatment.
So if you have tingling and numbness going down your arms and legs and an MRI is performed which shows no lesions in the myelin sheath, the covering to the nerve tissue, then no diagnosis is given which means therefore that no treatment is given either.
Or maybe your blood sugar is beginning to creep up over the last year or two, but it’s not quite high enough to be diagnosed yet as diabetes. The approach taken here then is to get periodic blood work and then when the diabetes is finally diagnosed because the blood sugar has become elevated over a long enough period of time then medications are immediately prescribed to lower the blood sugar.
One of the first things I tell my patients is that when you see your body begin to spiral out of balance you should jump in immediately and identify all the reasons for these imbalances, so you can stop doing those things, change your diet, daily routine, take some herbs, cleanse and do whatever it takes to reverse that trend so you don’t get the disease. This is one case where Ayurveda differs from allopathy in that it recognizes the early states of the disease process, identifies the imbalances causing them and then works diligently in reversing them so the disease never develops. So when patients tell me they are watching and waiting for a disease to develop, I make sure they understand that they need to begin treatment now so they don’t get the disease.
The next thing I recommend to the patients is that they should not contact me only when symptoms develop, ask me for some herbs to treat those symptoms, and then not contact me until the next symptom comes up in a year or two. This is another habit taken from the medical model. Since allopathy is mainly geared towards treating symptoms, you go to your doctor when you have a symptom, they give a treatment, and then when the symptom goes away you don’t see your doctor until the next symptom comes up.
Again, this is definitely not the approach we want to take with our health. We are not interested in just taking symptoms away, but want to identify all the underlying causes for the symptoms, which are different in each patient, teach the patient to stop doing those things and then show the patients all the things they need to do to reverse their symptoms — which again usually involves lifestyle changes, the use of various herbs and cleansing techniques. As they slowly get better, sometimes changes need to be made in their herbal program, or maybe in the diet, and in most cases, they need to be monitored periodically as they are going through the healing process. It’s not good either for the patient or the doctor if you are seen only occasionally when symptoms come up.
The other question I get asked a lot, which also doesn’t translate to Ayurveda, is “What do I have for this or that symptom?”
People will ask me for example, what herb do we have for prostate enlargement or for the thyroid, or for any number of health issues and symptoms.
This is definitely not how Ayurveda is practiced! We don’t have a set formula for anything we do! While yes, we do have herbs to shrink the prostate or herbs to strengthen the thyroid, we won’t get very far if that’s all we do for treatment. In fact, I always work it opposite in my patients. The actual herb which takes the symptom away is usually the last thing we do.
Instead, whenever you have any health problem, you should identify all the reasons for that symptom or disease, stop doing the things that are causing it and then fix all the imbalances. So here is an example of what I mean:
If a person comes to me and says they have Hashimoto’s Disease, and they are on thyroid hormone, but would like to get off it, they immediately ask me what I have for the thyroid.
I first tell them that Hashimoto’s is actually a problem with the immune system attacking the thyroid. The thyroid is more the victim, so we instead need to shift our thinking away from the idea that this is a problem with the thyroid, but instead take a deeper look at the immune system to see why it has lost its intelligence and is now launching its attacks on the thyroid. We then need to see what has thrown the immune system out of balance. It’s important that the patient understands exactly what it is we are fixing, that the immune system is basically the friendly bacteria in the gut, the liver and the bone marrow.
Once we identify what has affected these three areas we tell the patient to stop doing those things and then work on regrowing the friendly bacteria in the gut, cooling and cleaning the liver and cleaning the bone marrow, all of which were affected over the course of their lifetime, resulting in misguided attacks on the thyroid gland, weakening its capability of making thyroid hormones. Once all this is figured out, the final thing we do is to give the remedies to strengthen the thyroid gland.
But you can see that if we just gave the thyroid remedies at the onset, without any regard for the underlying cause of the Hashimoto’s then we wouldn’t get very far.
So when a patient asks me what herb I have for this or that condition, I teach them how to think outside the box, how to take a deeper perspective on what is going on and show them how to systematically address all the levels of their imbalances, so that true healing can occur.
And finally I teach them not to be fooled by the name of their disease. Many times a patient will tell me for example that they have a specific disease and get confused and think all their symptoms come from this disease. To take Hashimoto’s again as another example, many people tell me that their Hashimoto’s is causing their bowel movements to be irregular, maybe causing constipation, gas, bloating, or diarrhea. I make sure they understand that Hashimoto’s is only the name of a disease, that the underlying problems with digestion are causing the Hashimoto’s and not the other way around.
This is true for a lot of diseases. We must remember that the name of the disease is only just that — it’s a name given to a lot of imbalances located all around the body. The important thing is the actual imbalances themselves, and not so much the name of the disease. For instance, with Rheumatoid Arthritis the patients describe to me the pain they have in their joints which is caused by the Rheumatoid Arthritis. But I teach them that the underlying causes of the inflammation and autoimmune responses are what is actually causing the pain — so we need to look at all the sources of inflammation, coming from faulty digestion, the heat in the liver creating inflammation everywhere as the heat spills out of the liver into the whole body since the liver makes the blood.
And speaking of inflammation, almost every patient tells me they have inflammation in their body, and leave it at that. This is what they have learned to do. They then hope I will put them on an anti-inflammatory herb because their doctor has used anti-inflammatories, such as prednisone and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. So they wonder if we have herbs which can take away inflammation, which, of course we do. But the first step we need to take is to identify all the reasons for the inflammation, which are different in each patient, and address all those reasons for the inflammation, and THEN use the anti-inflammatory herbs. If we just resort immediately to the use of the anti-inflammatory herbs then we won’t get very far. That is why the symptoms come back once the prednisone is stopped.
So you can see how important it is to change the way we look at disease. You must learn to shift gears and instead take a deeper look at your health problems, otherwise you will spend a lifetime just chasing symptoms around the body, never really fixing the root causes and in the process watch your health deteriorate as the years go by.
I hope this information helps you as you learn to take control of your health and break some of the habits that have been deeply ingrained in the way you look at the disease process.
Thank you,