Treatment
The fundamental therapeutic approach in Ayurveda is "that alone is the right treatment which makes for health, and he alone is the best doctor who frees one from disease." This summarizes the primary objectives of Ayurveda: the maintenance and promotion of health, prevention of disease, and the cure of sickness.
Treatment of the disease involves avoiding causative factors responsible for the disequilibrium of the body matrix or its constituent parts, utilizing Panchkarma procedures, medicines, appropriate diets, activities, and regimens to restore balance and strengthen the body's mechanisms to prevent or minimize the future occurrence of the disease.
Normally, treatment measures involve the use of medicines, specific diets, and prescribed activity routines. These three measures are employed in two ways. In one approach, the three measures counteract the disease by neutralizing the etiological factors and various manifestations of the disease. In the second approach, the same three measures of
medicine, diet, and activity target effects similar to the etiological factors and manifestations of the disease process. These two types of therapeutic approaches are known as Vipreeta and Vipreetarthkari treatments, respectively.
For the successful administration of treatment, four elements are essential:
- The physician
- The medicaments
- The nursing personnel
- The patient
The physician holds the foremost importance. They must possess technical skill, scientific knowledge, purity, and human understanding. The physician should use their knowledge with humility, wisdom, and in the service of humanity. Next in importance are food and drugs. These should be of high quality, have wide applications, and be grown and prepared following approved procedures and should be readily available. The third component of every successful treatment is the role of nursing personnel who should have good knowledge of nursing, must be skilled, affectionate, sympathetic, intelligent, neat & clean, and resourceful. The fourth component is the patient, who should be cooperative, obedient in following the physician's instructions, able to describe ailments, and ready to provide all that may be needed for treatment.
Preventive Treatment & the Concepts of Etiopathogenesis
Ayurveda provides a detailed analytical description of the stages and events that occur from the onset of causative factors until the final manifestation of disease. This gives the system an advantage of recognizing the possible onset of the disease well before latent symptoms become apparent. This greatly enhances the preventive role of this system of
medicine by making it possible to take proper and effective steps in advance, arresting further progress in pathogenesis, or taking suitable therapeutic measures to curb the disease in its earliest stages of onset.