About Ayurveda

This healing discipline from India goes back thousands of years and has its roots in the Yoga tradition. It parallels that of the Traditional Oriental Medicine discipline as well as Middle Eastern disciplines. All of these disciplines have one thing in common; they all viewed the physical body as not only a matter field but also an energy field. Hence one hears terms such as prana, chi, qi, ru, and ruha which are all terms from various cultures that describe the energy field.

These traditions developed elaborate sophisticated systems for healing around this single concept that the body was an energy field. And that by understanding this, one by making adjustments in lifestyle, food choices and exercise, could evoke healing responses in the mindbody physiology.

These systems of healing were actually the beginning of preventative medicine, because it was a potentially grave situation if one became too sick as to not be able to recover from an illness. Because of the ability of the present day allopathic medical systems to bail people out of their poor lifestyle choices, health prevention has become passé.

There are three basic energy patterns in Ayurveda: Vata the energy pattern of movement, Pitta the energy pattern of transformation and Kapha the energy pattern of stability. These are called doshas in Sanskrit but the important fact is that when people get sick they usually manifest through the predominant energy pattern in their physiology. If you or one of your patients is suffering from interstitial cystitis you can be relatively certain that your predominant pattern is Pitta and that there is significant Vata imbalance.

This imbalance of Vata results in increased movement in the physiology manifested as urinary urgency frequency and pelvic nerve involvement due to the imbalance of Vata. The Pitta imbalance results in inflammation in the physiology and is manifested as burning on urination, pain with bladder filling, and the bladder findings of ulcers in the bladder with an inflamed bladder mucosa which resists bladder distention.

In the West we disease label so that inflammatory conditions are called pneumonia prostatitis and even prostate cancer which research is now showing to begin as an inflammatory lesion. From an Ayurvedic perspective all these conditions have a single common denominator: increased inflammation which is an imbalance in the Pitta energy pattern.