Caribbean Beat — November/December 2018 (#154)

Long established in India — where up to
eighty per cent of the population use
some form of traditional medicine — and
other countries on the subcontinent,
ayurveda has often been promoted as
“alternative medicine” in other parts of
the world, especially since the 1960s. In
recent years, the World Health Organisation
has begun investigating whether and how
ayurveda and other traditional medical
practices could be integrated into modern
healthcare, recognising its importance to
many communities, especially in maintaining
general health and preventing disease.
According to the WHO’s Traditional
Medicine Strategy, published in 2013,
traditional and complementary medicine
“is an important and often underestimated
part of health care . . . A global strategy to
foster its appropriate integration, regulation
and supervision will be useful to countries
wishing to develop a proactive policy
towards this important — and often vibrant
and expanding — part of health care.”
“I went on a vegetarian diet, but I found that it wasn’t enough for relief,” she
says. “I eventually started taking supplements to help balance my hormones
and clean my blood while I was refining my switch to veganism. Now I’m no
longer on the supplements, and I’m not dependent on them the way I was
dependent on the pill,” she explains. “Ayurveda is a healing system. I wanted
something that would fix me rather than simply make the symptoms go away.”
While she avoids doctors and has no independent verification of her
results, Samaroo describes ayurveda as the means through which she was
able to take back her life, and get back those many missing days during the
month. “My skepticism about Western medicine is that the only solutions for
my PCOS were to take the pill or have surgery. I wanted a natural remedy, and
ayurveda helped me do that. Western medicine isn’t focused on healing the
source of the problem, just cutting it out. It was too invasive.”
“I found ayurveda in 2013 when I went to an ashram to do karma yoga,”
Samaroo explains. “An ayurvedic doctor gave a presentation, and it appealed
to me, because it made sense. It breaks down your personality type and body
type and gives you specific solutions based on them. It seemed practical, and
I like that it was about healing and not just medication to prevent pain.”
For Dominique and her mother Judith, with
whom she owns and operates Namaste Café,
ayurveda is similar in purpose to traditional
Caribbean bush medicine — it simply finds its
roots in Indian and Chinese traditional medicine.
As yoga has become more of a fitness trend,
ayurveda has also slowly entered the mainstream,
with digital spaces cropping up around its practice
— it’s often seen as the next step in a yogic life.
According to Judith Samaroo, “it’s not really
medicine, it’s an alternative lifestyle. This isn’t
over-the-counter stuff, it’s stuff in your yard and
things you’ve planted. It’s only medicine when
you’re in ill health, because you need it to make
you better.”
For ayurvedic practitioners, there is a central
spiritual balance that everyone is trying to achieve,
and their choice of food along with meditation
helps balance the natural body type and bring it
into alignment. While it may seem counterintuitive
to forgo medication in favour of food, for those who
follow ayurvedic principles, the focus on diet and
lifestyle is about managing the two, avoiding side
effects, and finding a holistic approach to healing
themselves. n
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
91