Ayurveda - prevention rather than treatment.
I love Ayurveda - ancient Indian medicine. Even though it's old, it's still very much in use.
Modern medicine can sometimes be helpful, but it often changes its mind. Think about doctors promoting smoking, cocaine, heroin. How many drugs were mistakenly approved and led to tragic endings? Or remember the recent fight against dietary fat? I'm going to stop here, for now; you've got the point.
I am happy to see more and more people looking for doctors who are not waiting for the moment when the problem will become so significant to prescribe certain drugs to treat it. People often can feel the issue in their bodies pretty early, looking for prevention or early solutions. Holistic medicine can give this solution.
Ayurveda has been around for at least five thousand years and never changed because the human body didn't change either.
Ayurveda sees the physical body only as one layer of a human, and it is also the least powerful. There are five layers of our existence according to this knowledge. Other layers are:
energy channels (meridians) and centers (chakras);
the thinking mind, emotions, and feelings;
inner knowing and wisdom;
super-conscious state of a person or the soul.
Ayurveda believes that if you see a problem on the physical level, it's almost too late to treat it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's much easier to prevent the problem than fix it.
The pathological process starts with negative thoughts. Those thoughts generate negative emotions. They, in turn, cause blockages in the body's energy flow and misbalance of the elements in the body. If we are still not paying attention to the disbalance, it goes to the next layer, and we may see first clinical symptoms, and very often, they are being ignored because they are not that bad. The next stage is when a doctor can diagnose and prescribe a symptomatic treatment protocol.
A long time ago, people would see an Ayurvedic healer in the early stages of the development of the disease - when negative thoughts and emotions arise and when methods of spiritual practice could quickly stop the disease: repentance, prayer, meditation, etc.
A healthy lifestyle, proper nutrition, daily regimen, conscious information consumption, herbs, and aromatherapy can help in the early stages of a pathological process.
This approach allows identifying and eliminating the causes of the disease, not just its consequences in the form of external symptoms.