Unravelling the Ayurvedic Mystery
Shanmugamurthy Lakshmanan1, 2
1Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
2 Department of Dermatology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
([email protected])
In Ancient India various scientific techniques and methodologies were well established, parallely, by two indigenous groups of highly civilized cultures. One well-known such established technique is Ayurveda-an Ancient Medical Science and Technology that has been practiced in India for more than 3000 years and still remains part of the mainstream medicine for over 60 per cent of the population in the country. Ayurveda is slowly expanding all over the world as a complementary/alternative approach to modern medicine. Today a number of research articles on Ayurveda are out there published in the main stream medical journals as well as explicit alternative medical journals devoted exclusively to Ayurveda and also other medical technologies of ancient India. However, none of these published works so far uncovers the paradigm dimension of Ayurveda, rather they often viewed Ayurveda under the lens of mainstream medical system; characterization and analysis were carried out without valuing it for its own authenticity. It has to be understood that unlike traditional medicine as it is practiced today Ayurveda has always possessed a personalized medicine approach. Personalized medicine is indeed a growing field of interest in modern medicine system in recent years. From a modern science perspective the fundamentals of Ayurveda cannot be explained on a cellular level using current nanotechnology because of the very nature of its axiomatic construct, though the indirect efficacy of some of the Ayurvedic components can be obtained in labs to a certain extent. However, a classical approach from a physics perspective on the fundamental using atomic and molecular transitions states can be carried out as an analogous study without breaking the authenticity and originality of the Ayurvedic axioms. By carrying out such an study a need for the step to characterize and analyze the effects of treatment using a modern medical approach can be eliminated, albeit the fundamentals reasons that cause the symptoms of certain disease can be understood using modern equivalent terms in physics without breaking the its validity. Here a novel yet ancient approach using mathematical equations and analysis will be presented. The role of energy levels transitions using the fundamentals of physics concept will be incorporated to classically explain the underlying scientific phenomena that lay as the basis for the identified symptomatic disease. This approach is called as the Veda-model. An extensive literature review is carried out on ancient Indian texts to substantiate this model in order to break the unsolved mysteries of Ayurveda that remained dormant for several centuries.