As an eastern holistic approach to health Ayurveda is slowly gaining in popularity in west.  People are becoming disillusioned with the drug and disease-oriented approach of modern western medicine, which is currently no better than a system of legalised drug dealing, and are starting to realise that not only does this approach not work because most of the current synthetic drugs only suppress the root cause of the original disease, but that they can actually cause the development of a separate new disease because of side-effects or reactions to the chemicals in the drug.  The idea that the whole environment should be taken into account is also becoming recognised as a vital and neglected part of healthy living.  People are already beginning to realise that treating body parts as separate like parts of a car, doesn’t work. In western medicine all people are treated as the same and often all that treating outward symptoms with drugs does is suppress the main disease causing the body to manifest the disease in a different way by developing new symptoms somewhere else.

In Ayurvedathe use of drugs and medication has only a subsidiary place only natural herbal products are used as medicines, which are both bio-friendly and eco-friendly (no big drug companies with a patent and a primary motivation towards huge profits involved!)

Ayurveda appreciates the uniqueness of each individual and focuses in the first instance on helping the mind and body heal itself, but even at the treatment level Ayurveda is more concerned with the elimination of the cause of the disease and finding a way to restore complete health to the individual so that disease does not reappear.

However it is also vitally important to recognise that pure Indian Ayurveda needs to be adapted to take into account differences in the western environment, particularly in relation to food and climate.  For example using foreign herbs is not always appropriate when in the UK there are native herbs that deal with various diseases traditionally more endemic to this country.  Unfortunately with the overemphasis and reliance on modern drugs, and the attraction to more exotic remedies, a lot of this local knowledge is being lost.   It is more Ayurvedically sound to use home grown remedies.  A good example of this is the current obsession with tea tree oil as an antiseptic.  First of all the tea tree is not a European species, so obtaining and using this remedy means having it expensively, and with the concomitant damage to the environment, flown in from the other side of the world, but also and more importantly the strength of the tea tree antiseptic is naturally indicated for dealing with the stronger pathogens more prevalent in that particular south east Asian environment.  Lavender or rosemary would be the equivalent, gentler, European disinfectant herbs to use.

What now also complicates attempts to live in harmony with your own nature and environment, is that people are also moving around the world and choosing or having to live in alien environments, which makes maintaining a balance so much more difficult.  In the end maintaining a balance and staying as healthy as possible really just means keeping well informed, about yourself and your larger environment, and making sensible life decisions based on what is as close to natural as possible– that is the true science of life.