T.R. Reid is a foreign correspondent who has been all over the world covering news stories. When he required invasive shoulder replacement surgery, he decided to find out if other, less drastic options could work as well to reduce his pain and raise his mobility and capacity. This is how Reid ended up in India at the AVP clinic. The video chronicles the treatments and experience Reid has in his three weeks receiving Ayurvedic Medicine treatments.
Personal Reflection
I learned several things from this video, the most important of which I think are the need to initiate the body’s own response in order to trigger healing, the difference between healing and a cure, the importance of the environment to health and the way that attention to the spiritual can change the way that a patient engages with healing processes. I had only a passing familiarity with Ayurvedic Medicine before viewing Reid’s video. I had some awareness of yoga, for example, and the idea of energies flowing or being obstructed in the body, and I once took an online test suggested by social media which advised me that, like T.R. Reid, I had too much pitta or fire which put my other doshas out of balance. I did not really act on this information, nor did I have any real idea what to do with this “diagnosis”. Of course one can’t equate a simple online test with real ayurvedic medicine any more than a person can use the Mayo Clinic symptoms of disease online to practice as a physician. Still, it made me aware of the existence of Ayurvedic Medicine and its underlying principle of balance.
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"Ayurvedic Medicine: A Critique".
A different patient experience
I am very interested in several aspects of Ayurvedic Medicine, and how they might serve Western Medicine. The use of only those substances which can be found naturally is another interesting aspect of Ayurvedic Medicine. I don’t know that it is right or wrong based on modern principles of health and medicine, however it resonates with me. I like that idea, and it is comforting to know that each of the substances that are used have had thousands of years of use, in contrast to randomized controlled trials which are largely overseen by corporate entities with a commercial interest in the outcome.
The overall feeling of being cared for in an Ayurvedic environment is very different from the general feeling of being cared for in Western Medicine. “The mornings are magical”, T.R. Reid said, despite being rather disillusioned with the process of Ayurvedic Medicine near the end of his stay at AVP. How much does that magical feeling contribute to well-being, and conversely how much does the clinical and isolated feeling of being in a hospital, away from friends, family and natural settings, potentially interfere with healing? In trying to deconstruct it, I realize that there are many aspects that I take for granted with regard to the environment for health. Some of these factors I am not quite sure what to make of. For example, T.R. Reid describes not wanting to rush home from the clinic; that he is, in fact, in paradise. That is certainly not a typical response of patients in an acute care hospital! From the video we can see the plants and gardens that are everywhere, and the time that the patients spend outside. This is cultural reality, perhaps, more than anything else. It would be difficult to control an environment with considerable plant life and potential pests, snakes and other things given the tenets of Western Medicine. Simply having the patients roaming free would make it difficult and more time consuming to provide care, if one had to go and find a patient every time a medication or intervention was to be administered.
The cost of healthcare
Another factor of interest was the cost. Reid stated that his treatment cost $300 a week; compare that to the cost of modern pharmaceutical prescription drugs taken for a week, a year or a lifetime, or the cost of healthcare insurance, even. The cost of Ayurvedic Medicine in financial terms if more affordable than Western Medicine by a large factor, although some of this due to differences between currencies, the cost of labor and general prices between India and Western nations.
Advantages and disadvantages of Ayurvedic Medicine
An analogy which struck me while watching the video was that between breastfeeding versus bottle feeding infants. Despite all of the modern scientific knowledge, Western medicine has been unable to improve synthetic baby formula to match the capacity of human breastmilk. It is surely a fundamentally different experience for a child to be breastfed rather than bottle fed. The sensations would be different, and there is nothing that can be put into the formula itself which would recreate or replace that sensation. Further there are new findings with regard to that which science cannot recreate; advantages in well-being that have been hypothesized as being due to antibodies, or some other source, in breastmilk that is not in formula. We can blame science; while science cannot recreate the advantages of breastmilk, observational studies have provided more than enough evidence that breastmilk is better than formula, and that where at all possible the mother should breastfeed her baby for as long as possible to ensure those advantages for her child. Ayurvedic medicine, with its different sensations and unknown functions and operations, seems to be a lot like breastfeeding, and Western Medicine is a lot like bottle feeding which is a lifesaving but poor imitation of the real that provides sustenance and life.
The advantages of Ayurvedic Medicine also pose a danger, particularly for the Western patient who could be easily fooled and taken advantage of. How would the average American patient, for example, know the difference between real Ayurvedic Medicine and a scam? While this could be argued as well in terms of Western Medicine, this is also the reason why Western Medicine and its pharmaceutical drugs are highly regulated and monitored several agencies from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to state medical boards. I also wonder if the traditional knowledge is threatened by increasing Westernization in places like India.
Final reflections
Ultimately it comes to this: modern medicine is not affordable or an option for most of the world’s population. In fact, even in the United States, one of the richest countries in the world, individuals have great difficulty in paying for healthcare, and the state has difficulty paying for the health care system. According to Khazan (2014) in her article in The Atlantic, describes that the US has the most expensive and worst performing healthcare system in the world. How can Western Medicine be the only answer, in a world with 7 billion people, all of whom need care to ensure well-being or alleviate sickness and suffering at some point in their lives, with no capacity to develop, access and benefit from Western Medicine? What do these questions mean for nursing reform for professionals who work within that system of Western Medicine? There are many questions and lessons that relate to nursing reform which strike me after viewing. T.R. Reid’s journey into Ayurvedic Medicine; one is that we are trying to cure a sick healthcare system, rather than slowly healing it. I am interested in going deeper into these questions, as Reid has, by following some of his explorations as they are reported in his book, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care.
- Khazan, O. (2014). U.S. Healthcare: Most Expensive and Worst Performing. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/us-healthcare-most-expensive-and-worst-performing/372828/
- Reid, T.R. (2008). Second Opinion with T. R. Reid: Inside Ayurvedic Medicine. InfoBase. Retrieved from: http://fod.infobase.com/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=40616#
- Reid, T.R. (2009). The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care. Penguin Press.
