Ayurveda

Ayurveda, Sanskrit for "the knowledge of life", is the traditional system of medicine and healthy living of the Indian subcontinent, with roots in the classical Sanskrit medical compendia (the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita) of the early centuries around the turn of the common era, and connections to the broader worldview of the Vedas. Its central theory holds that health arises from the balance of three vital principles or humors, the doshas, vata (associated with wind and movement), pitta (fire and metabolism), and kapha (water and structure), whose particular proportions define each person's constitution (prakriti) and whose imbalance produces disease. Treatment aims to restore balance through a comprehensive regimen: diet, daily and seasonal routine, herbal preparations, oil massage, yoga and breathing, and cleansing procedures (the panchakarma therapies).

Ayurveda remains a widely practised and, in India, officially recognized and regulated system of medicine, and it has spread globally as a form of complementary and "wellness" practice. From a scientific and public-health standpoint it is understood as a traditional medical system: some of its herbal and dietary elements are the subject of ongoing pharmacological research, while its humoral theory is not framed in the terms of modern biomedicine, and safety concerns have been raised about heavy-metal content in certain traditional preparations. It is best understood as a living traditional medicine with a continuous history of more than two thousand years, distinct in its concepts from Western biomedicine.

Ayurveda rests on a classical literature of real depth. The Charaka Samhita is the great compendium of internal medicine, the Sushruta Samhita covers surgery in detail that includes reconstructive procedures, and the Ashtanga Hridaya organises the material for teaching. These are working medical texts with case reasoning, diagnostic categories and pharmacology, transmitted and commented on for many centuries.

The modern situation is institutional. India supports Ayurveda through a dedicated government ministry, colleges award degrees, and practitioners are registered, so it operates as a licensed system of medicine rather than as folk practice. It is also a large export industry.

Two questions follow and they are separate. The first is efficacy, where the picture is mixed in the way it is for any large pharmacopoeia: some preparations have plausible active constituents and some trials are encouraging, while much of the published research is of low methodological quality, and the classical framework of the three doshas has not been demonstrated as a physiological reality.

The second is safety, and it is more concrete. Analyses of marketed Ayurvedic products, including those bought in Western retail and online, have repeatedly found preparations containing lead, mercury or arsenic at levels above accepted limits. Some of this is contamination; some of it is deliberate, since one branch of the tradition uses processed metals and minerals as ingredients.

Regulators in several countries have issued warnings on that basis.