Rammanohar Puthiyedath

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham | AMRITA · Amrita Centre for Advanced Research in Ayurveda (ACARA)

Ayurveda is India's prominent traditional medical system. The World Health Organization has stated the need for more evidence and data from conventional medicine methods to inform policymakers, regulatory bodies, healthcare stakeholders, and the public about its safe, effective, and equitable use. This study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis...

Honey is a wonderful gift of nature which is rich in antioxidants, energy sources and healing power. Ayurvedic texts list honey as one of the five elixirs or Panchamrita. Honey has been used as both superfood and medicine for several thousand years. Honey is a rich source of all the important nutrients which are important for growth and development...

Turmeric is known variously as Yellow Gold, Yellow Saffron, and Golden Spice, amongst many other names. It has a long tradition of use in Ayurveda spanning thousands of years. It is used as a spice in food and also as a medicine. In addition, it is also popular as a cosmetic agent. One of the areas where the use of turmeric is being explored today...

Kerala’s first medical oncologist, the erstwhile Dr. CP Mathew, has left a rich legacy in cancer patients' case diaries and medical records. These documents contain valuable information about his attempts to integrate Siddha and Ayurveda treatments to manage cancer. A preliminary examination of these documents compiled over more than four decades g...

Background The nasal carriage of SARS-CoV-2 has been reported as the key factor transmitting COVID-19. Interventions that can reduce viral shedding from the nasopharynx could potentially mitigate the severity of the disease and its contagiousness. Herbal formulation of Citrus medica and Zingiber officinale is recommended in an Ayurvedic text as a n...

Lifelong medications are required for symptomatic relief in Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS). We report the potential of an integrative approach in reducing dependence on steroids and pain medications in chronic AS. A 59-year-old HLA-B27 positive male patient suffering from AS for 40 years sought Ayurvedic treatment for relapse of pain, stiffness, fatig...

The increase in cancer incidence and mortality is challenging current cancer care delivery globally, disproportionally affecting low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs) when it comes to receiving evidence‐based cancer prevention, treatment, and palliative and survivorship care. Patients in LMICs often rely on traditional, complementary, and integr...

Introduction Low oxygen saturation may persist in COVID-19 patients even after hospital discharge, requiring continued supplemental oxygen therapy at home. In this paper, we report the significant benefits of add on Ayurvedic intervention as observed in an oxygen dependent COVID-19 patient in the post hospitalization period. Main symptoms and impo...

Relevance of Ayurveda’s Whole Systems Approach to Health and Disease Management in the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background Unmet needs of cancer patients prompt them to seek care from Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (TCAM) practitioners. Objective To investigate the prevalence of TCAM use in a multi-specialty tertiary cancer center in South India. Methods A cross-sectional survey of cancer patients who used TCAM during the study period....

Identifying best bioactive phytochemicals from different medicinal plants using molecular docking techniques demonstrates a potential pre-clinical compound discovery against SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. The in silico screening of bioactive phytochemicals with the two druggable targets of SARS-CoV-2 by simple precision/extra precision molecular docki...

Repurposing of drugs is one of the ways to combat COVID-19 and Traditional Chinese Medicine set a precedence for such an approach at the outset of the pandemic. In India, the Ministry of AYUSH has recommended a number of formulations in clinical management of COVID-19. Vyaghryadi Kashayam (VK) is a classical formulation indicated in the management...

This paper reports for the first time, the outcomes of Ayurvedic intervention in a COVID-19 patient with severe hypoxia requiring supportive oxygen therapy. Patient developed fever, severe cough, loss of smell, loss of taste, nasal block, anorexia, headache, body ache, chills, and fatigue and was hospitalised when she developed severe breathing dif...

p>The present COVID-19 global crisis invoked different disciplines of the biomedical research community to address the contagious human to human viral transmission and infection severity. Traditional or de novo drug discovery approach is a very time consuming process and will conflict with the urgency to discover new anti-viral drugs for combating...

Metabolic risks are a global challenge. These risks are although modifiable by lifestyle, and physical activity to some extent, they are primarily related to dietary consumption. Considering a clear relationship of diet and metabolic risk factors, we hypothesised that an evidence-based, and widely applicable solution may be found in Ayurvedic diete...

Background Ayurvedic clinical profiling of COVID-19 is a pre-requisite to develop standalone and integrative treatment approaches. At present, Ayurvedic clinicians do not have access to COVID-19 patients in clinical settings. In these circumstances, a preliminary clinical profiling of COVID-19 based on review of modern medical and classical Ayurved...

Aegle marmelos is a folklore medicine which is widely consumed as an anti-hyperglycaemic drug, its properties are known since prehistoric times. Plenty of cell line as well as animal research have reported the anti-hyperglycaemic activity of the drug. Even though quality researches are necessary to fulfil further human studies and marketing, no qua...

Drug sources including plants have been codified using a polynomial system of nomenclature in the classical Ayurvedic texts. For this reason, a single plant is known by many names. Moreover, some of these names are also shared by other plants and this makes it quite challenging to fix the identity of a plant name mentioned in various formulations i...

The present study is a comparison of the data of spectral analysis of heart rate variability with clinical evaluation of pathological state of doshas. The calculated cardiointervalography values are combined into three integral indexes, which according to the authors' opinion reflect the influence on heart rhythm of vata, pitta and kapha, the regul...

Introduction. This article analyzes the development of pulse diagnosis as one of the key methods to assess a person's functional status. The purpose of the article is to isolate and characterize the main stages of formation and development of pulse diagnosis. Materials and Methods. In the course of writing the article the authors used comparative h...

Ethnopharmacological relevance: Chyawanprash (CP), a traditional immune booster recipe, has a long history of ethnic origin, development, household preparation and usage. There are even mythological stories about the origin of this recipe including its nomenclature. In the last six decades, CP, because of entrepreneurial actions of some research Va...

In the early classical texts of Ayurveda, there are descriptions regarding the genetic basis of diseases. The Caraka Sahitā explains that the human body in its entirety is represented in a seed form in the male and female reproductive elements. The complete blue print is called a bīja, which is composed of many components called the bījabhāgas. Th...

Āyurveda is one of the oldest codified traditional systems of medicine on a global scale. Grounded in Indian culture it has developed a sophisticated approach to healthy nutrition and nutritional therapy for the management of diseases within the framework of its whole systems paradigm. Medical interventions have been considered to be ineffective wi...

Kaṣāya or decoction is an Ayurvedic dosage form, prescribed based on the stage of the disease according to the principles of Ayurveda. This dosage form is traditionally prepared fresh and consumed on the same day but for the sake of convenience; the process of preparation has been modified so that it can be stored with longer shelf life, easy avail...

In January this year, Science published a report stating that many cancers are caused by the bad luck of random mutations.[1] This finding hit the headlines around the world, much to the annoyance of bodies like The International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is the cancer wing of the World Health Organisation. The IARC issued statements exp...

Project Report: English Translation with critical notes and indexing of Pathyapathyaviniscaya - A 16

The first accounts of cancer in the history of medicine can be seen in seven papyri from Egypt dating back to 1600 BC. The term 'cancer' was coined by Hippocrates (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC) in his corpus. Descriptions of diseases resembling cancer have also been codified in the classical Ayurvedic texts, which were composed few centuries before the...

The only way in which unfair criticism and skepticism about Ayurveda can be addressed is by nurturing good science to lend greater credibility to it. This seems to be without doubt, the need of the hour. While discerning minds have started converging to pursue this goal, there would be divergent ways of thinking about the modus operandi. It will al...

Narayana, et al.: Posological Considerations of Ocimum sanctum in Ayurveda A study in 2010 reported that administration of 2 g of O. sanctum leaves for 30 days to laboratory male albino rabbits showed adverse effect on sperm count and male hormones. The dose and duration at which this testing was reported was commented upon as being high. It is lea...

Background: Clinical research on Ayurveda has more than often eval- uated single herbs, formulations or component therapies to comply with reductionistic research designs. On the other hand, complex forms of in- dividualised and multimodal Ayurvedic treatments combining pharmaco- logical and non-pharmacological interventions are administered in rea...

Health is a primary indicator as well as determinant of quality of life in Āyurveda. In fact, health is a prerequisite for the pursuit of well-being in life. Āyurveda defines health as an outcome of a continuous and evolving adaptation of the individual organism to changing situations in the external environment. The outcomes of the adaptive respon...

The codified texts of Ayurveda were composed in the few centuries preceding and succeeding the common era. This period marked the emergence of a rational system of medicine in India from the moorings of religious medicine practiced in the Vedic period. Ayurveda made several advancements in theory and practice of medicine that have not yet been reco...

The Siddhamantra is a short treatise on pharmacology in Ayurveda that was composed by Keśava, a renowned phys- ician scholar who lived in the th century CE. This work is historically important for theoretical innovations that have been put forth by the author to explain drug action with greater clarity and precision. The treatise is very short,...

Purpose: Ayurvedic treatment is individualised for each patient depending on a number of factors like constitution, type of disease and stage of disease. An attempt is being made to outline the treatment algorithm for Ayurvedic management of Vatarakta. Method: The algorithm has been developed by a careful study of the classical Ayurvedic texts of...

Purpose: To study the preventive and therapeutic Hypolipidemic effect of different coconut oil extracts of Vyosakatvivaradi formulation. Method: High fat diet was fed for 21 days to induce Hyperlipidemia. 110 weanling wistar rats randomly divided in to Eleven groups, four in treatment, four in preventive group, two control and one standarad group....

A careful study of the classical literature of Ayurveda provides compelling indications to believe that the practice of building clinical evidence was nurtured in the tradition of Ayurveda. Ayurveda exhibits the characteristics of a knowledge system and requires that observations are validated to be accepted as knowledge. The celebrated textbook on...

To compare classic Ayurveda, methotrexate (MTX), and their combination in a double-blind, randomized, double-dummy, pilot trial in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for 36 weeks. Forty-three seropositive RA patients by American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria with disease duration of less than 7 years were assigned to the following treatment groups:...

The objective of this short communication is to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of multiple placebos to individualise treatment when using classical Ayurveda for rheumatoid arthritis in well controlled, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. A total of 46 patients ≥18 years of age, with active rheumatoid arthritis as diagnosed usin...

This article presents an English translation of interview with a doctor of traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda), Ni*** Namputiri (1945~2006) in Kerala, India. The interviewee’s specialized field is traditional psychiatry (bhutavidya) in Ayurveda. The contents of the interview are: 1. Back­ground and History of the Family; 2. The Four limbs of Tre...

This article presents an English translation of interview with a doctor of traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda), Astavaidya, V. C. Na*** Namputiri (1929~) in Kerala, India. The contents of the interview are 1. Background and education, 2. History of the family and Astavaidyas, 3. The legacy of Vahata (Vagbhata), 4. Medical texts and manuscripts,...

Mustard is a condiment that has been used for culinary, religious and cultural purposes by humanity since time immemorial. Mustard has figured prominently in the Indian tradition and its medicinal properties have been systematically evaluated and documented in the classical Ayurvedic texts. The paper attempts to carefully review the ancient and con...

This article presents an English translation of an interview with a doctor of traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda), paediatrician, G*** Vaidyar (1935~) in Kerala, India. The contents of the interview are: 1. Tradition of the family and the manufacturing of medicines; 2. Medical texts and manuscripts; 3. Methods of learning Ayurveda; 4. Modern Ayu...

This paper attempts to highlight the Ayurvedic tradition as a model that can serve as a platform to synthesize science and spirituality in the context of healing. Before venturing to examine this proposition, we need to understand the epistemological foundations of Ayurveda upon which a theoretical structure has been erected that encompasses the me...

This article presents an English translation of interview with a doctor of traditional poison- therapy (visavaidya), V*** S*** Namputiri (1917~ ) in Kerala, India. The contents of the interview are 1. Background and present circumstances, 2. Textual traditions, 3. Traditional medicines, 4. Treatments, 5. Mantra and reading omens and 6. The canon of...

This article presents an English translation of interview with a doctor of traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda), Astavaidya, Na*** Mussu (1936~2007) in Kerala, India. The contents of the interview are 1. Background and History of the Family, 2. Education and Textual Traditions, 3. Royal Physician, 4. Astavaidya and 5. Basic Education.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Ian Ward and James Cahill on political blogs and another by Steven Maras on the work of mass media scholar James Carey.

There is a general belief that the Ayurvedic approach to management of fistula in ano, especially the method of caustic ligature, is similar to that of Greek medicine and has no relevance in the history of world medicine or the advancements made in modern surgery. This article attempts to bring to limelight the uniqueness of the method of caustic l...

It is unfortunate but true that international cooperation in ‘science’, defined in its broadest sense as approaches to a systematic study of nature, does not exist across different world cultures. Whether Chinese, Indian, African, South American or Western, scientists today are all members of the same scientific club. And while scientific instituti...

A major problem, essentially political in nature, that non-Western societies in the colonial and neo-colonial era have had to contend with in any serious evaluation of their indigenous sciences is the common claim of all Western scientists and philosophers that, 'after all, science is one, universal and unique'. Thus, while it may be possible to co...

The concept of immunology in Ayurveda is discussed in this article.