Ayurveda Treatments

The basic therapeutic approach is, 'that alone is the right treatment which makes for health and he alone is the best doctor who frees one from disease'. This sums up the principal objectives of Ayurveda, i.e. maintenance and promotion of health, prevention of disease and cure of sickness. Treatment of the disease consists in avoiding causative factors responsible for disequilibria of the body matrix or of any of its constituent parts through the use of Panchkarma procedures, medicines, suitable diet, activity and regimen for restoring the balance and strengthening the body mechanisms to prevent or minimize future occurrence of the disease.

Normally treatment measures involve use of medicines, specific diet and prescribed activity routine. Use of these three measures antagonize the disease by counteracting the etiological factors and various manifestations of the disease.

For successful administration of a treatment four things are essential. These are

The Physician

The Medicaments

The Nursing Personnel

The Patient

Ayurvedic Medicine

The physician comes first in order of importance. He must possess technical skill, scientific knowledge, purity and human understanding. The physician should use his knowledge with humility, wisdom and in the service of humanity. Next in importance comes food and drugs. These are supposed to be of high quality, wide application, grown and prepared following approved procedures and should be available adequately. The third component of every successful treatment is the role of nursing personnel who should have good knowledge of nursing, must know the skills of their art and be affectionate, sympathetic, intelligent, neat & clean and resourceful. The fourth component is the patient himself who should be cooperative and obedient to follow instructions of the physician, able to describe ailments and ready to provide all that may be needed for treatment.

Preventive Treatment & The Concepts of Aetio-Pathogenesis

Ayurveda has developed a very vivid analytical description of the stages and events that take place since the causative factors commence to operate till the final manifestation of disease. This gives this system an additional advantage of knowing that possible onset of disease much before the latent symptoms become apparent. This very much enhances the preventive role of this system of medicine by making it possible to take proper and effective steps in advance, to arrest further progress in pathogenesis or to take suitable therapeutic measures to curb the disease in its earliest stage of onset.

Types of Treatments

The treatment of disease can broadly be classified as

Shodhana therapy
(Purification Treatment)

Shamana therapy
(Palliative Treatment)

Pathya Vyavastha
(Prescription of Diet and Activity)

Nidana Parivarjanam
(Avoidance of Disease causing and Aggravating factors)

Satvavajaya
(Psychotherapy)

Rasayana therapy
(Use of Immunomodulators and Rejuvenation Medicines)