Ayurveda, the health care system indigenous to India, has an impressive evolutionary history that spans a period of many thousands of years. With the advent of biomedicine, Ayurveda was relegated to the background and there was a time when it looked as though the final word had been said about it. Recently, Ayurveda is getting worldwide attention albeit the nature of the role it can play in contemporary health care scenario is not well defined.
Many still feel that Ayurveda should rest in the annals of history or contend that Ayurveda is a living museum and a promising field for anthropological inquiry. For ethnopharmacologists, Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia is a rich source of information that can facilitate drug development from natural sources. There are people for whom Ayurveda can function in the area of Primary Health Care or as a Medical specialty or even as an independent medical system. For many thinkers, Ayurveda is part of an outdated world view common to cultures of the European and Mid-East Arabian antiquity, but which is still alive in Asian cultures that was exposed to modern science only recently.
There is a viewpoint that progressive research in world health care must include a consideration to early medico-philosophical ideas. Indeed, ancient Ayurvedic thinking might as well provide metaphors that encapsulate templates to organize information on knowledge of life, health and disease from varied sources. However, the fact that Ayurveda still caters to basic health care needs of a significant number of people, especially in areas where modern medicine failed to offer solutions, seems to be the major impetus behind its resurgence in our times. |
