:: June 2006 Volume 5/Number 4

Journey to Ayurveda Special Section:

In Search of Original Ayurveda
Serious inner city care in a modern medical world

By Bob Belinoff


A team of Ayurvedic physicians, interns and nurses meets with each
patient twice daily at AVP hospital in Coimbatore.

The streets of Coimbatore in South Central India are teeming with tuk-tuks, bikes, cars, motorcycles, buses, trucks, cows, goats, and an occasional taxi like the one we are riding in now.
Everything on this road happens at once, there seems to be no repercussions or cause and effect. It is multi-directional, not point-to-point, all fluid, or more apt for my coming experiment in the world of Ayurveda - it is all seemingly immersed in oil. It is frictionless - lubricated from bumper to goat head in an earthbound cosmic soup. We are heading for a 10-day stay at Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam (AVP Hospital), one of the most famous Ayurvedic hospitals in India.

Ayurveda, as I understand it, is based on the idea that the bodymind can really heal itself given two conditions. One, if toxins and all extraneous drains on the human operating system are removed. And two, if the organism gets off the wheel of doing and gets in synch with the rhythms of the natural world.

The entire plant, animal and mineral kingdom are sources of medicine in the Auyrveda system, as are the activities of the planets and the stars. Good health is more a matter of being in sympathy with earth, air, fire water, space, the phases of and the movements of the celestial bodies than it is with lowering your cholesterol or pumping iron. I would like to be clearer, but to be clear would be to miss the point.

A city of about a million and half in the state of Tamil Nadu, Coimbatore is the home of AVP Hospital. My wife, who has been treated here before and knows the physician leadership, has arranged for us to stay 10 days in this world re-known Ayurvedic Hospital. The Prime Minister of India has come here for treatment and other luminaries, I’m told, come and go.

The AVP campus includes an out-patient clinic, pharmacy, library, cafeteria, yoga spaces, school and a 130 bed in-patient hospital. All this frames an enormous and bustling temple grounds tended by a full contingent of bare-chested priests. Surrounding the temple grounds are the patient and treatment rooms which will be continually under the spell of the chanting, incense and prayers welling up from below. Patients come from India and all over the world to be treated for a variety of diseases and disorders, including digestive disorders, musculo-skeletal conditions, diabetes, fibromyalgia and recovery from the side effects of treatments like chemotherapy.

Most patients commit themselves to a 3 - 5 week stay during which they will be tended by therapists, dieticians, priests, herbalists and a team of Ayurvedic physicians who study Ayurveda for as much as 13 years, four of which are intensive medical school-like training, before qualifying as an Ayurvedic physician at one of India’s many Ayurvedic hospitals and clinics.


While there are cottages and deluxe suites on the grounds of AVP, we will not be staying in one of them; we are in the main building lined with small rooms which has a drab army rehab hospital feel, facing out onto a breezeway. The two of us will share a small Spartan room with rudimentary bathroom, two hard cots and a shuttered window which when opened looks out on the busy and dusty backstreet, two stories below; there sits a general store, a bike store and Vijay’s chapati (Indian fry bread) stand.

Spirituality is integrated with healing at a traditional Ayurvedic hospital.
Here is your reporter being visited by a priest bringing prasad

Soon after we are assigned our quarters an intern comes to take our “complaints.” Mine will focus on my weak right knee, the result of a martial arts injury 15 years ago and most noticeable by a lemon-size lump behind my knee that three different orthopedic surgeons have been unable to explain or treat.

After the intern leaves, my medications ordered and my treatments scheduled I turn to the list of clinic rules hanging in a sleeve on the wall that holds my patient chart. These rules include: Do not read, or think too deeply, do not cut hair or nails, no shaving, no sex, no excess talking, do not become angry or sad. Do not exert yourself, do not walk, sit or stand too much or stay up late. I take a tentative walk along the veranda that fronts our room and lie in bed recalling fond visions of the Santa Monica beach and my life, long ago, on the outside.


Here is a system of healthcare that predates the age of science by at least 4,500 years. Back then, before books, type, mathematics and the age of analysis, no one took things apart to try and figure out how they worked. Healing, indeed the whole nature of existence came to humanity whole, in one piece. It was not knowledge based on fact. It was an understanding of the highest order and it was conveyed through metaphors and parables and stories.

Myths were the ancient language of science. In this way complex, otherwise inexplicable interconnected systems of invisible forces were made “real.” The Vedas, a group of India’s ancient texts, were the quantum physics of the day dressed up with characters, drama, winners, losers, war and stories of angst, grace and wisdom.

Ayurveda treatments are known for being slow to take effect. Over the next 10 days I will drink “decoctions,” eat a bland diet of lentils and rice followed by herbal pastes and medicated ghee morning and night. The portions will be modest, the general idea being that the body heals itself best when the digestive fires are low. Every day at the same hour I will be massaged on a neem-wood plank by a therapist in a light airy room presided over by incense and temple chants (and occasionally by radios, street chatter, cow bells or a small speedy motorcycle). Massage may not be the right word for these treatments with oil. Called abhyanga, the massage treatments I receive are the methodical application of specific oils in a carefully prescribed manner (coconut was prescribed for my head, but not for my body). These various oils will be warmed, prayed over and poured over my body, rubbed professionally and soothingly with firm sure strokes for an hour every afternoon.

I will be seen by doctors in the morning and evening, they will look at my eyes and at my tongue. My pulse, actually as many as two dozen different pulses in my wrist, will be taken day and night and my blood pressure will be monitored with a standard blood pressure cuff. Ayurvedic physicians will ask the same questions morning and night, the answers to which will be duly noted in my chart: “How are you feeling? How did you sleep? How is your appetite? Did you have movement?” - this referring to my bowels.

Everyday for the next ten days my entire body will be acknowledged, inquired after, tended to, nourished, rubbed, touched and reminded of its natural connection to natural things.
It is no surprise that Ayurveda, a medicine that uses an invisible world of meridians, cycles, scents, tastes, rest, massage and purification, has become so popular in a techno-medical age. Ayurveda is a call to the senses. Its dramatic re-birth in Eastern and Western Europe, in India itself and increasingly in the United States should come as no surprise. Most patients of western medicine long to be looked at, listened to or touched by their physician. Instead they often feel rushed and all but ignored by someone in a white lab coat who looks like the mechanic who fixes their Volvo.

The ancient science seems to concentrate on the condition of our body’s largest organ, and the one most exposed to the outside world, the world of appearances - the skin. The skin is crucial to diagnosis, a window to the inside, its dryness or oiliness reveals something about a patient’s diet, general constitution and even their emotional state. In Ayurveda the skin is also a gateway through which herbs and oils are introduced to the body proper.

One day Dr. Narayan, the medical director of AVP, comes to visit. He is trailed by a team of Ayurvedic interns and nurses, Indian and western, this also being a “teaching hospital.” He takes my pulses, all of them, and asks his questions. I have not had “movement,” I have no appetite, I don’t feel well, and I don’t look well. And I haven’t slept well. My throat hurts and a nasty looking red pimple has emerged on the tip of my nose. My hair is a mat of chickpea powder and oil. I look like a homeless person. That night I notice my tonics and pastes have been changed. And before bed a young man comes in from the pharmacy and paints my forehead with a thick ginger paste. My body is apparently having a rather shocking awakening to its return to its senses. I am told I will feel better soon. In the morning I do. As he leaves, there is a tap on our little screen door and it opens. A priest comes in, laughs with us a bit and says a prayer and gives us an offering of honey, ghee and rice - remnants of holy food known as prasad, from the dawn ceremony.

The sun is going down on my sixth day of oil, herbs and rest. I have spent no energy for nearly a week and my body is so thankful for the rest it almost cries. In the street below cow bells clang, beeps and honks waft up along with the smell of hot fresh chapati from Vijay’s stand. A young man comes in wafting a sweet gray smoke from a copper bowl full hot glowing herbs, Ayurvedic mosquito repellent. It smells sweet and ancient and fogs the room. The pale green walls and fluorescent tube lights create a dream-like stage effect.

I have always seen this as something of a spiritual journey and the images before me now lend my experience a most befitting Mexico City, Allen Ginsburg hallucinogenic quality. For I have come not so much for recuperation, but for revelation - to see if I could see the world and hence myself in some new way. This is happening, it is a feeling, and I cannot put it into words. Perhaps I do not have the language I will need to make of this a story. But my relationship to the world feels peculiarly different, and in it I feel suddenly and uncharacteristically safe.

“How are you this morning?” the doctor asks as we near the end of our stay. He follows this with the three other major questions concerning sleep, appetite and movement. I am fine. I have slept well. My cold is gone. I have had movement, the lump behind my knee, which has been there for almost 14 years, is down to nothing and the pimple on my nose is gone. Unfortunately my tongue is still coated. “Before you leave here you will be well and you will stay well,” the doctor tells me. More than receiving treatment here, I am learning a way of being treated.

The treatment appears to be this. Empty the mind of all its fixed notions, the need to do, make, attain or produce. Allow the invisible world to become visible and audible through chanting, drumming, smoke and prayer. Empty the body of toxins as well - through the effects of oils and pastes, herbal tonics and potions, all things natural that flush, extract or purge the system - for the human system is self-healing if only given the opportunity.

This Ayurvedic hospital is an environment for that to happen. This hospital is not surrounded by nature, it is not especially relaxing. In fact it can be downright demanding if you are used to the pursuit of pleasure and chasing after endless excess. There is something rigorous about treatment here. You will be deprived of familiar taste, though when you leave your sense of taste will be renewed and perhaps calibrated down a subtle notch or two. You will not be pampered by the sun (which real Ayurveda actually discourages), though your body will understand papering as a form of rest rather than recreation. You will not spend time reading a new book on science and consciousness though you will absorb that understanding as if it was taken in along with the oil through every pore of your skin. You will leave with a new appreciation for the value of touch, simplicity and a self-healing world of possibilities you cannot see, which was why the ancient science of Ayurveda had to be preserved in myth and story. You can experience this story yourself in many places in India including this inner city hospital in Coimbatore.

It’s no wonder that Western medical people today find Ayurveda and so much of natural healing hard to fathom, theirs is not the language in which Ayurveda can be understood. It is only lately, through quantum physics, where whimsy and fuzzy thinking have as much value as precision in the old science did, that we can begin to appreciate the exquisite order of natural healing and a natural world.

For more information about AVP hospital, visit www.avpayurveda.com.

 

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