Beyond its technical role in Samkhya metaphysics, the word prakriti survives in Ayurvedic medicine with a related but practical meaning: an individual's inborn constitutional type, determined at conception and held fixed throughout life, that Ayurvedic diagnosis is organized around identifying.
Ayurveda classifies individual prakriti according to the relative predominance of three doshas, vata, pitta and kapha, built from combinations of the five gross elements Samkhya catalogues, air and space for vata, fire and water for pitta, water and earth for kapha, so a person's prakriti is described as vata-dominant, pitta-dominant, kapha-dominant or a combination, each associated with characteristic build, temperament, digestive strength and susceptibility to particular illness. A vata constitution is traditionally light, quick and prone to anxiety; pitta intense and prone to inflammatory conditions; kapha heavy and prone to congestive slowness. Physicians assess prakriti through pulse examination and observation, and treatment is calibrated to a patient's specific type rather than applied uniformly.
The connection to the Samkhya sense is genuine rather than a shared word alone: both treat prakriti as the material substrate whose configuration determines a being's characteristics, with the Ayurvedic sense simply applying the principle, that matter organizes into a describable configuration of qualities, to an individual patient's constitution, a continuity classical Ayurvedic texts, which draw explicitly on Samkhya categories, treat as self-evident.