What Makes Ayurveda Unique

Is Ayurveda Different?

Ayurveda characterises itself as a complete medical system and proponents claim that it provides a complete medical set for managing health and illness. This is open to debate. Ayurveda certainly has a distinctive approach to wellness that is increasingly influential as a philosophical approach for other medical systems whether allopathic or homeoepathic.

The unique character of Ayurveda is a function of its modeling of wellness and disease.Where western medicine focuses on disease agents infecting the human body which is otherwise essentially healthy, ayurveda's attention to the concept of balance results in a very different style of practice. Likewise, whilst most medical systems have grown increasingly bio-chemical in their approach to the body, ayurveda still prizes a complete view of the person: physical, mental and spiritual and lifestyle factors are all considered. In this aspect it considers the psycho-somatic relationship in illness: an aspect it considers without a critical stance or disparagement. The concept of psycho-somatism is increasingly viewed by western medical science as a distraction from the pursuit of the infectious agent. Ayurveda's attention to psycho-somatism leads to an approach to treats both mind and body at the same time.

Although some advocates of ayurveda imply that only the use of natural therapies is condoned, this is not strictly true as ayurveda has a long history of pharmacological innovation. Whilst ayuveda's massage-based or external therapies seem to have few side-effects and possibly minimal efficacy, the internal therapies can be potentially toxic as ancient skills are lost and replaced with inexact factory techniques. Ayurvedic pharmaceuticals are insufficiently monitored with small laboratories producing agents which contains unregistered or undisclosed compounds resulting from poor laboratory conditions and technology.

Ayurveda's most significant contribution to medical thinking may be its focus on the complete person and the connection between balance and wellness. This approach offers a different way of modeling healthcare and providing for patient wellbeing across physical, spiritual and mental health.