Toward Evidence-Based Practice of Ayurveda: Extrapolating the Challenges in the Current Decade

Abstract

Repeated observations of failing in combating intractable illnesses, escalating cost of health care by virtue of its increasing dependence upon technological breakthroughs, and adherent adversities—these essential evils of conventional medicine have created a niche for a better medicine which can deal more effectively with disease and can also propose the methods to maintain health with minimum of interventions. Ayurveda, on the basis of its strong inheritance and unabated practice through millennia, is a need felt in this scenario.

It however is felt direly that to bring Ayurveda into the mainstream medicine in order to ensure the dissemination of its advantages into a global reach, a lot is still required to be done. This chapter makes an overview of currently prevailing Ayurveda practices with a focus upon their limitations and pragmatic proposals to counter them effectively. The ultimate objective is to unearth a more humane medicine whose path essentially goes through an evidence-based practice of Ayurveda.