My journey

My journey

I have been on a journey towards understanding the functioning of the human body for thirty years now. The first half of that was my formal education in modern life science. The second half came with real life challenges and experiences.

When my first child arrived, I instinctively dropped out of the career rat race. With time, I found myself shying away from pharmaceuticals and looking for natural solutions for supporting my children. That’s how my journey into Ayurveda and other natural healing systems started.

Over the years, I saw people with all kinds of physical and mental ailments going on with their self-defeating behaviours, popping pills and not doing anything to change the behaviour that led to their health issues. I saw misery, helplessness. People complaining about their self-generated illnesses as misfortune. The doctors prescribing more and more drugs. The patients becoming more and more feeble.

I saw that most people were aware of at least some of their health-destroying behaviour, but they didn’t know what to do about it.

Sometimes, they actually didn’t know.

Being a doctor’s daughter and having studied molecular biology, my starting point was complete faith in modern medicine and the belief that understanding the human system at the molecular level, we will be able to solve more and more health issues. However, over the years I realised that making new drugs and designing targeted therapies might be a wonderful intellectual sport, but won’t solve many problems, because we, as a society, are not looking at the real problem.

The real problem is that we have all come very far away from how bodies have evolved to live. And with our life choices and work culture today, we are going even further away from the ideal way we should treat our bodies. Even worse, we are putting our children on the same path, instead of trying to make sure that at least they can live a better life than us.

Researching new drugs and targeted therapies, we are running after a target that is ever evolving and getting further and further away, while totally overlooking the foundations of maintaining a healthy body.

Why this madness?

One answer is that a lot of families in the modern, affluent societies are so busy creating affluence, that they have totally lost regard for the basic care of human life. This is an after-effect of the previous centuries with widespread death and mass movement of people - many families, communities and even entire populations have found themselves in survival mode. I believe almost all the people reading my website come from such families.

The only real solution lies in letting the body heal itself by taking care of it the way it is meant to be cared for. Supplements, medicines, yoga and breathing exercises are there to provide support.

Yes, in advanced disease cases, pharmaceuticals must be used to get the situation under control. The drugs will do their job in stopping the pathways causing the symptoms of the disease. But they shouldn’t be relied on forever to manage disease states.

I hope many doctors, biologists and pharmaceutical industry professionals will read this. I am not criticising them. I have been one of them and totally understand where they are coming from and what they are trying to do. It is indeed amazing that they are able to understand and manipulate life at the molecular level and do life-saving medical procedures. All this is commendable and shows what human beings can accomplish when they put their heart and mind to something.

In fact, it is this way of thinking that has led to the control of infectious diseases, management of acute injuries and other emergency situations and modern diagnostic procedures, all very commendable advancements of the last 100 years.

An example of how modern medicine tackles chronic disease

One client I recently spoke to told me he had peripheral neuropathy, with burning sensation and pain on the soles of the feet, a complication of diabetes. He was prescribed an antidepressant, to block the pain sensation.

What issue is this prescription solving?

Any why is diabetes still just being managed after all these years of research? We are impressed by fancy terminology, molecular signalling pathways, deciphering mechanisms, finding novel targets, insulin injections made easy. How about patient education about nutrition and lifestyle? How about sending them to health coaching programs to help them change their negative health behaviours? How about some therapy that will help them love themselves and respect their bodies more? Why have we not thought about these? Should they not be the first recommendations for diabetes management?

The same goes for all chronic diseases.

We are taking the complicated route of manipulating biochemical pathways in our bodies. The same pathways can be set right by natural means without having to know which molecule did what to another one. Why are we overlooking natural means of altering our biochemistry?

Polypharmacy

The human body is a complex network of interactions. We explored some of them and learnt to manipulate them with drugs. But we have no clue what else these drugs are doing in the body. Have you seen older people becoming feeble? They have their blue trays with a bunch of medicines they need to take every morning, afternoon and evening. The pharmaceutical industry insists all these medications are safe and the doctors prescribe them year after year for decades.

It is not that the pharmaceutical industry wants to do wrong. People choose to become doctors and scientists because of their good intention, wanting to help humanity with disease burden. It is just that they are too busy doing their thing to be able to see the big picture.

Many doctors realise the long-term patient consequences after thirty, forty years of clinical practice. Not many talk about it openly.

I have come full circle, from being totally fascinated by modern medicine to coming to understand that our bodies have the innate ability to heal themselves in most cases – we just have to provide them the right environment.

So that’s how I have evolved into a health educator and coach.

I am pursuing formal qualifications in Ayurveda under the guidance of Dr. Vasant Lad and also in Health and Wellness coaching to learn how to enable lasting transformation.

I believe that creating awareness about health is the biggest seva (service to humanity) at this time. This website is an effort towards that.