The Making of an Ayurvedic Physician: A Journey to the Realm of Vedic Medicine
The Making of an Ayurvedic Physician
Kampala, Uganda in the heart of Africa, 1971. Here is where it started.
I arrived tired and hungry, not having eaten a decent meal for a fortnight. Three weeks previously, I had dispatched my research samples of tuberculosis bacteria from rural Zulus to my medical school in Colorado and had embarked on a trek by motorcycle, thumb, truck, and boat northward through the Rift Valley. In thirty days I had to be back on the hospital wards and I was eager to see Africa in its pristine state. Surviving on the local fare of mashed tapioca root and grasscutter stew had left my taste buds begging for something savory.
I inquired of the first European where I could find the best meal in town. She responded that the tyranny of Idi Amin had left Kampala plundered. The good restaurants had closed. I could buy the inventory of a whole hardware store for a few hundred dollars cash because everyone was trying to flee the country. The only meal worth eating was at the Hindu temple. I found my temple and the best meal I had eaten in my 24 years, or all the years since. As the waiters brought dish after spicy dish of South Indian cuisine, I knew that the following year I would pursue my research in India.
Nine months later, I was staring at the dried herbs on the bedside table of a man in a white dhoti suffering from tuberculosis at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. I wondered how this patient could have been prescribed something so unquantifiable at such a prestigious research center. "If you will not tell my doctors that I am seeing an Ayurvedic doctor, I will tell you how to find the vaidya who prescribed them," he bargained, sensing my interest. This patient opened my eyes to the science of life.
For the next five months, as my research permitted, I apprenticed myself out to the best vaidyas who would accept a foreigner under their tutelage, journeying from the Himalayas to the southern tip of the subcontinent. In Varanasi, I assisted in Ayurvedic surgery with Dr. PJ Deshpande; in Thanjavur I coddled in my hands an ancient crumbling Ayurvedic text that scholars were translating. I visited the forests where the herbs grew and the pharmacies where the plants were crushed and fermented. Under trees in the villages and in clinics in the cities, physicians tried to explain to me Ayurvedic theory, coaxed me to recite the Sanskrit verses which comprise the medical texts, and placed my fingers in the proper position on the pulse.
Since Ayurveda was unknown in the West in 1972, I chronicled my discoveries and upon my return to Denver was asked to present the paper before a society of medical school faculty and students. The Waring Society received my paper with interest, appreciating it mostly as an elegant historical analysis of a quaint relic of medical science. I protested that they had missed the point and that contemporary medicine had much to learn from Ayurveda.
In 1973, the medical profession regarded these arguments as nonsensical and even the lay public was not interested in approaches such as Ayurveda. I quietly continued reading the ancient texts and putting up with the admonitions of my fellow residents who pointed out that I was wasting my time feeling the pulse when I could plainly see the ECG monitor. I found a copy of Caraka Samhita printed in 1888 among the rare books left to McGill University by Sir William Osler, one of the giants of medicine. It was inscribed to Sir William as a gift from the translator, and in its pages, I found an letter from the translator answering Osler's questions on the humane approach to the patient. Since Osler authored the textbook of medicine used by generations of doctors, I found some satisfaction in realizing that, like a child who refuses medicine, Ayurveda was being surreptitiously slipped into the pudding.
Four years later having been board certified in Internal Medicine and working as an attending physician in a teaching hospital, supervising students and residents in the emergency department, I realized I still needed to learn real medicine. My plan had always been to open a practice in the mountains of my native Colorado. Something else kept me from my plan. Having learned the Transcendental Meditation technique in medical school, I went straight to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the program.
Ten years passed in the role of a brahmacharin, a single apprentice. I had no idea this "real medicine" would be more demanding than medical school and hospitals: the routines, the lessons learned, the changing winds Maharishi generated to break my boundaries and structure flexibility. Sometimes I found myself washing pots (open ego surgery for a doctor used to giving orders), sometimes doing research or teaching.
In his study in the Swiss Alps in 1979, I asked Maharishi when we would be taking up Ayurveda, which was still not known in the west and about which Maharishi had rarely spoken. He replied that Ayurveda was a beautiful flower that was soon ready for picking. Three months later, he returned to Switzerland from India with Dr. VN Dwivedi, a learned Ayurvedic physician and specialist on Ayurvedic rejuvenative tonics called rasayanas. Other renowned vaidyas from the various regions of India began to come and go, each with their expertise in a specific area of Ayurveda.
The western doctors would sit on one side of Maharishi, the Vedic physicians on another, and for hours we would explore the essence of the ancient Ayurvedic texts. Nothing was beyond the scope of our scrutiny as each expert described a unique part of the flower that we were now picking. Some described the roots of Ayurveda in the Vedas themselves, others the stem in the three great encyclopedic medical texts, while others were expert in the petals and leaves, the subsidiary sciences with therapeutic value such as Vedic architecture, music therapy and yoga. There were even experts in the disciplines that assure the perpetual descendence of Vedic knowledge in its purity to other generations. With every point the experts made, Maharishi would connect the knowledge of Ayurveda to its source in pure consciousness, the simplest state of human awareness.
From a discussion of agni, the digestive fire and basis of metabolism, we would find ourselves considering agni, the first word of Rg Veda, and then a poetic description of the experience of an ancient rishi or seer and then back to the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome. The days dissolved into late nights and then into weeks and years as we buzzed around the flowers of Ayurveda and retreated to the hive, the wisdom of the Vedas we found in Maharishi.
On occasion, a Sanskrit verse describing a benefit of meditation, a property of an herbal preparation or an Ayurvedic purification technique would set us wondering if the phenomenon was valid for modern practice. My colleagues and I would head to the laboratory to design experiments testing the ancient record, looking at the properties and effects of herbs, or studying hormones during meditation. Maharishi encouraged us, while the Ayurvedic physicians approvingly laughed, implying that for them, being tested through the millennia was proof enough.
Maharishi surprised me once while we were in India working on herbs for treating chronic diseases. Suddenly pushing his papers across the table, he proclaimed, "This is all fourth class Ayurveda!" I was startled and speechless, wondering how Maharishi could say that about knowledge he held precious. "If a medicine is really good," he finally continued, "it should work on the most subtle level, pure consciousness. These herbs, diets, massages and rasayanas function on a grosser level of the body. How good can this kind of medicine be? I was aware of the possibilities of Ayurveda in 1955 when I came out of the Himalayas, but if I had talked about herbs and diets, everyone would have missed the point. Truly effective remedies always have their basis in consciousness."
By 1986, we realized that we had made a good start in reconstructing Ayurveda in its ancient purity, dignity and integrity. It was a different Ayurveda than the one practiced in India today, where physicians with many years of training and memorization of sacred ancient medical texts function largely as herbal pill pushers. The Indian vaidyas were elated to find that Ayurveda had not only been restored, it had been saved, and their profession had been elevated.
Meanwhile my medical colleagues and family wondered why a board certified internist who, having paid his dues dealing with severely sick people early in his career, had taken such a long sabbatical and not profited from his profession. They were delighted when at last I announced my intentions to test this new clinical tool in practice together with neurologist Tony Nader, MD, PhD and endocrinologist Deepak Chopra, MD at a newly founded center in Massachusetts.
I assessed the effects of Vedic medicine in every patient, referring to the ancient texts when in doubt, and working in the company of Ayurvedic physicians from India. Sometimes I simply had to summon my clinical judgment to design a program based on Vedic principles when neither the ancient or modern approaches kindled a cure. At times all I could think of was to simply sing a poetic Sanskrit verse from the medical texts predicting hopefulness to a disconsolate heart.
It did not take long to realize my clinical trial was a success: Vedic medicine works. The twenty or so therapeutic approaches we utilized were valuable, especially for chronic disorders that stubbornly resist conventional medicine.
One thing was still missing: a concise presentation of the essence of Vedic science. Several authors had compiled books outlining the details of Ayurveda such as the three body types and the idea of individualized diets. Most patients, however, have problems that cannot be resolved by simple prescriptions: marital problems, depression, anxiety, job dissatisfaction, destructive habits and lifestyles, all of which may contribute to or even cause their physical illnesses.
Vedic medicine is a way of thinking about life and health. It is not a set of prescriptions followed cookbook style for a given disorder. Our nurses watch in exasperation as I try to impart to patients during a one-hour consultation the essence of Vedic knowledge that bears on their problem. The knowledge presented here is designed to inspire people to take a deeper approach to health issues and other problems in their lives, because it presents Ayurveda based on consciousness.
This web site is for those patients I could not spend the whole afternoon with, those who may someday consult with me, and those who somehow could never call or come.
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