Ayurvedic Biology - An Unbiased Approach to Understand Traditional Health-Care System

Abstract

Wisdom transmitted through generations in the form of experience based folk-lore and customs greatly influences the life styles practiced by the given society. Keeping fit and healthy is one of the basic instincts of all living systems and they are now known to employ a variety of proactive strategies to achieve it. Accordingly, human societies also developed customs and practices that were believed to maintain health and combat various illnesses. Thus every civilization across the world has evolved its traditional healthcare system which is handed down the generations through folk-lore and which continues to be enriched by newer experiences (Lakhotia, 2015). The traditional health-care systems in China (Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM) and in India (Ayurveda) are the oldest (>4000 years) and most elaborate, thanks to extensive ancient literature being available about their philosophies and practices. These systems are widely practiced, not only in respective countries, but also across the globe. .... Read more...

Full text

Editorial
Ayurvedic Biology - An Unbiased Approach to Understand Traditional
Health-care System
S C LAKHOTIA*
Editor-in-Chief, and Cytogenetics Laboratory, Department of Zoology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi
221 005, India
*E-mail: lakhotia.eic.insa@gmail.com
Proc Indian Natn Sci Acad 82 No. 1 March 2016 pp. 1-3
 Printed in India.DOI: 10.16943/ptinsa/2016/v81i1/48448
Wisdom transmitted through generations in the form
of experience based folk-lore and customs greatly
influences the life styles practiced by the given society.
Keeping fit and healthy is one of the basic instincts of
all living systems and they are now known to employ
a variety of proactive strategies to achieve it.
Accordingly, human societies also developed customs
and practices that were believed to maintain health
and combat various illnesses. Thus every civilization
across the world has evolved its traditional health-
care system which is handed down the generations
through folk-lore and which continues to be enriched
by newer experiences (Lakhotia, 2015). The traditional
health-care systems in China (Traditional Chinese
Medicine or TCM) and in India (Ayurveda) are the
oldest (>4000 years) and most elaborate, thanks to
extensive ancient literature being available about their
philosophies and practices. These systems are widely
practiced, not only in respective countries, but also
across the globe.
In recent decades the experiment based
“modern medicine” has made unbelievably rapid
advances, largely because of the remarkably deeper
understanding of life processes at cellular and sub-
cellular levels. Equally fascinating developments in
chemistry and other technologies have made it
possible to replace the herbal drugs with precisely
crafted molecules which in combination with equally
novel diagnostic and drug-delivery methods have
transformed the health-care systems during the past
4-5 decades. Notwithstanding the great strides that
have succeeded in eliminating several deadly
infectious diseases and in prolonging the average life
span, there are serious issues due to novel life-style
associated disorders which are not easy to cure by
modern medicines; more worrisome are the side-
effects of many of the modern drugs and the
increasingly high costs that such health-care systems
demand.
Although the roots of modern medicine can be
traced in the diverse traditional health-care systems
(Valiathan, 2016), the modern and the traditional
systems in the current scenario view each other with
suspicion, often bordering on contempt. The feelings
of contempt or suspicion on either side are not due to
“conflict of interest”, but seem to be rooted in the
underlying approaches and philosophies. Modern
medicine is experiment based and much of its
medication is based on the rigours of molecular biology
using a reductionist approach. On the other hand,
traditional systems like the TCM and Ayurveda are
largely based on experience of thousands of years
with a holistic approach where any ailment in body is
believed to be an outcome of some disturbance in the
complex network that maintains homeostasis in the
body. A major emphasis of the modern medicine is to
cure a disease or disorder after its manifestation using
a reductionist approach so that a given medicine/
treatment is specifically targeted to the immediate
cause of disease/disorder. Ayurvedic philosophy on
the other hand believes that its health-care practices
are not directed to cure a disease but are primarily
used to maintain a healthy state and thereby prevent
disease. A healthy state is maintained by following
some basic principles of life style, diet supplemented
with some formulations/medications, and other
exercises/practices that promote homeostasis
between different body systems. Together, these are
Published Online on 15 March 2016

2S C Lakhotia
believed to prevent disease and permit healthy aging.
Ayurvedic approach to health is claimed to be holistic
since, analogous to contemporary “systems biology”,
it believes in the living body being a network of
interacting components. Further, analogous to the
cherished goal of the modern medicine to develop
“personalized medicine”, Ayurvedic as well as TCM
systems claim that their approach is already
personalized because they take into account a number
of combinations of the individual’s features and
properties prior to defining the course of medication
in relation to a given disorder/ailment. However, in
spite of such comprehensive and attractive
philosophies and practices that characterize systems
like Ayurveda, a major limitation is that there is little
experimental evidence about their mechanisms of
actions which can be understood in the language of
contemporary principles of science.
I recently participated in an Ayurvedic Congress
where there was a session on Ayurvedic Biology with
a view to bring the practitioners of Ayurveda and cell
and molecular biologists together to facilitate greater
mutual appreciation. While such concourses help thaw
the ice, they also reveal why the desired results are
not forthcoming easily. A major cause for the mutual
suspicion and lack of appreciation between those
practicing traditional and modern medicine/science,
respectively, appears to lie primarily in the unwillingness
to engage with each other and, thereby, appreciate
and follow the “good” principles and practices of each
while modifying or giving up the ones that do not
qualify a rational experimental explanation. The major
cause for the unwillingness to discuss lies in the
different philosophies and vocabulary. Ayurvedic
practitioners are not trained or exposed to the
contemporary principles of biology, especially the
enormous progresses in fields of genetics and
genomics, cell and molecular biology, physiology etc.
Unfortunately, many of them also appear to think that
they do not need to re-interpret Ayurveda in light of
the contemporary knowledge as they remain
dogmatically faithful to the philosophies and principles
of human body organization enunciated thousands of
years ago by great scholars like Caraca, Sushruta
and others. Practitioners of contemporary science and
medical practices who are primarily trained in the
reductionist approach, on the other hand, find it very
difficult to correlate the principles and philosophies
followed in traditional health-care systems with
experimentally verifiable entities as known now. This
generates justified or unjustified skepticism about
many concepts and practices of the traditional
medicine systems. Obviously, there is a strong need
to correlate these different languages and philosophies
to find the commonalities. Just as the practitioners of
Ayurveda need to come out of their “shell” and begin
to understand human biology as we understand today,
the scientists and modern medicine practitioners need
to read and appreciate the holistic approach of
Ayurvedic health-care system and, thereby, re-
interpret those principles in the current vocabulary.
While an unbiased enquiry into the principles of
Ayurveda as enunciated thousands of years ago is
not to be taken as an insult to the wisdom of those
ancient sages, those principles should also not be
discarded just because they are old. We may never
know the nature of research and experimental
observations that the ancient scholars and sages may
have carried out to define the principles and practices
followed in Ayurveda and TCM but we can certainly
rediscover them in terms of our increasingly deeper
understanding of the molecular events spanning from
sub-cellular to organismic and population levels. Then
only we will be able to separate the distilled essence
of experience-based traditional wisdom from myths
that would have naturally grown around.
“A Science Initiative In Ayurveda” (ASIIA, see
Valiathan in this issue, pp 13-19) has triggered some
dialogue between geneticists, cell and molecular
biologists, physicists, material scientists etc on one
hand and the practitioners of Ayurveda on the other.
As noted by Professor M S Valiathan in this issue,
this initiative has already resulted in some exciting
interactions and mutual appreciations. The ASIIA
initiative has resulted in the formation of an “Ayurvedic
Biology” group under the Science & Engineering
Research Board (Department of Science &
Technology, Govt. of India) to support basic science
research in Ayurveda. An unbiased and deeper
involvement of Ayurvedic practitioners in such
experimental studies is essential to provide the much
needed insights about the holistic health-care system
which the scientists and modern medicine practitioners
can examine and understand in the light of current
experiment based approach. The recent Nobel Prize
for the discovery of Artemisinin, based on the

Ayurvedic Biology - An Unbiased Approach to Understand Traditional Health-care System 3
knowledge base of TCM, is a pointer to the success
of synergistic studies involving different, and
seemingly conflicting, approaches and philosophies.
It is high time that the opportunities provided for such
inter-disciplinary studies are extensively and
intensively utilized to bring about a confluence of
traditional and modern health-care systems (Lakhotia,
2015) so that the increasing menace of life-style and
other chronic disorders can be faced successfully.
References
Lakhotia S C (2015) Exploring traditional medicine - attempt to
validate layman’s experience-based health-care systems
across the world Proc Indian Natn Sci Acad 81 1081-1085
Valiathan M S (2016) Ayurvedic Biology: the first decade Proc
Indian Natn Sci Acad 82 13-19.