Health Revolution. Maria Borelius

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      When we in the West reach the stage where we begin to treat an illness, Ayurveda considers that it’s already too late. Illness must be met at the gate, early, before it’s had time to develop into a full-blown disease, by actively counteracting the stressors that make disease develop. But there are many differences between the two ways of looking at health.

      ‘The greatest difference is that we see that people are different. You in the West think that all people should have the same type of treatment,’ my Ayurvedic doctor tells me.

      Instead of standard treatments based on the same criteria for everyone, and standard doses, they believe in individual treatment based on the needs that a person manifests through their vata, pitta or kapha type.

      Could Ayurveda possibly be describing the very thing that modern medicine is now beginning to investigate: the idea that low-grade inflammation can lie simmering in the body and contribute to making a variety of diseases surface – and that the specific illness is determined by the type of innate vulnerability the individual has? Today medical researchers are beginning to talk about the need for individually tailored treatments, and all doctors know that people respond differently to different medicines. But Ayurveda has always held that point of view.

      ‘We also believe that food is medicine,’ says the doctor.

      ‘How do you know that?’

      ‘From observation,’ she says. ‘If you look at enough people and see the same things over and over again, you can see a pattern.’

      In Ayurveda, food is even considered to be the most important medication, more important than everything else, simply because we humans eat so often and take in numerous nutrients through our food. These nutritional elements, my doctor says, have the full capacity to either build, protect and heal the body or create stress and disease.

      This way of looking at the connection between food and health in many ways resembles the conclusions that conventional medical science is now beginning to draw. The difference is that most doctors who are educated in academic medicine and practice in Europe and the United States barely talk about this with their patients.

      At the end of my first Ayurvedic medical visit, I receive my personal treatment schedule.

      In addition, we’ll be attending the course for several hours each day, and we’re given a number of different tasks to do during the week of the course, in groups or individually; we also need time to try to illuminate deeper sides of ourselves, or what our course leaders call our ‘shadow sides’, to find out how they affect our ability to work. All of this in one week.

      That’s a lot to do, I think as I move into my simple bungalow, which is situated close to other little bungalows. You might describe them as an Indian kind of little cabin, in the middle of a semi-jungle of vegetation with abundant, large green leaves. For some reason, there are three ominous ravens watching over my patio. There is a plastic table and two aluminium chairs, and along the side, a washing line sways in the wind. The ravens come flapping in with their powerful beaks as soon as I’ve had breakfast the next day. They eat everything, even the paper label of the tea bag. I see a few monkeys climbing around a little farther away.

      Here wild herbs grow everywhere you go, because the health resort grows all the plants that are used in treatment and food preparation. The next day I look at the elegant handwritten signs that have been stuck into the ground, to see if anything looks familiar. Abutilon indicum? Some kind of mallow-like herb? Acacia catechu seems to grow into a mighty tree. There’s a thin shrub with stubby little leaves that I don’t recognise at all. I ask a passing doctor in a white coat about the plant.

      ‘Ah, that’s a guggulu. Very good for haemorrhoids.’