Ayurveda: Article

Ayurveda: Article: "By Parveen Chopra

The ancient Indian system, particularly its Kerala school; which is back in the reckoning after a brief hiatus, is as much concerned with promoting health and preventing disease as it is with curing ailments. Life Positive takes you to visit some flourishing practitioners and hospitals

It's like a brick kiln of hopes and desires, hot and claustrophobic. On this sticky August evening, there must be over a hundred people milling around in a small hall. Many have been stewing for hours, waiting for just a frenetic three-minute interview and pulse-reading by the good doctor. Hope here has neither class nor color nor gender; its' seekers include rich Gujarati businessmen and dirt poor, illiterate tribal women.

There are babies' squalls erupting out of this thicket and children running around. Somehow, amidst this mess, order finds its place: Queues�one to see the assistant doctors who prescribe diet, another for the dispensary, and so on.

Soon, like a DNA strand, a queue shuffles into existence in front of me, too. Ah, the doctor wants to show off. He is sending me patients who uniformly report remarkable recoveries from problems so varied and complex that few would believe something as gentle as ayurveda can handle: an athletic young man emotionally kayoed by a bout of impotence; a pale, skinny 25-year-old who bares, like a freak show artist, various parts of his anatomy to show me the scars of a lifetime of multiple diseases and complex treatments.

And one of the fattest people I have ever seen, a prosperous-looking safari-suit-clad man, claims he has sloughed off 100 pounds after he flew down for treatment about a month ago from England.

Welcome to Dr Pankaj Naram's clinic�rather one of his four clinics in one city alone: Mumbai,"