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Ayurvedic Medical Practitioner Dr. Sridhar Desai

While staying at the Dharwad tribe we had the privilege of visiting Dr. Sridhar Desai, an Ayurvedic doctor, and his medicinal garden. Ayurveda is a holistic approach to medicine and has been the system of healthcare in India for the past 5,000 years (Mishra, Singh, Dagenais, 2001). We waited patiently as he was treating a patient that was in need of immediate care. From personal experience with American doctors I have noticed that some tend to not to be attentive or patient oriented. Mr. Desai was treating and conversing with his patient for about an hour as myself and 16 other students and faculty awaited him. This alone showed his dedication to providing the absolute best quality of service to his patient, something American doctor’s in my experiences have lacked.

            Once he finished treating his patient he sat with myself and my fellow classmates and professors and went into great detail about his work. He went into depth about how he became an Ayurvedic doctor, and the family tradition he followed. His father, grandfather, and great grandfather were also Ayurvedic doctors but he made it very clear that he was not forced to follow this career path. Mr. Desai has a strong passion for curing diseases by prescribing patients medicine that can be acquired through his large 10 acre medicinal garden.

            Meeting Mr. Desai and walking through his immense medical garden taught me to think twice about taking Tylenol or Advil for a slight headache and listen to my body. For every slight pain or discomfort there is a plant catered to heal. There are no Ayurvedic medical classes to my knowledge being offered at FIU making this experience greatly valuable. I was unaware that there are medicinal plants for things as small as a headache and as intense as a seizure. I am sure this information can be found on the internet but being in the presence of these plants was surreal. It makes me wonder what would happen if the United States followed Ayurvedic practices.

            During this visit I learned a lot about the background of Ayurveda including the Doshas and names of many medicinal plants. A question arose about a central database for these Ayurvedic medicinal plants, Dr. Desai said that he did not know of such a database and that all of his own medicinal knowledge comes from a large book that has been passed down from his family. I did a quick search on Google Scholar and found out there are large amounts of handbooks for Ayurvedic medicinal plants. This raises the question, how many other rural Ayurvedic doctors do not have access to these online databases and would their medicinal practice improve if they did? Visiting Dr. Desai and seeing the way of life he lives I do not think it would be practical if they had high speed internet but on the same token there would be an immense amount of knowledge gained if he could share his knowledge to other Ayurvedic doctors in other parts of the world. A handbook was published by Kapoor L.D. (2000) on Ayurvedic medicinal plants that has over 300 pages. Each plant in the handbook has a description on parts used, habitat, characteristics, medicinal properties, and chemical constituents. This vast amount of knowledge can be helpful to many rural villages around the world.

            Being a psychology student I am very interested in how Ayurveda and mental health issues tie together. A paper by Mamtani, and Cimino (2002) views how the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) can be used with psychiatric disorders. There is limited research on this somewhat new topic but Mimtani, and Cimino came to the conclusion that CAM is not curative but can provide valuable symptomatic assistance to people with psychiatric disorders. This excursion really enlightened me to think about the healthcare system in the United States. Seeing Dr. Desai so involved and invested in his patient’s health as a whole stemming from generations of selflessness. This is what Westernized countries need in the midst of a healthcare epidemic.  

 

References

Kapoor, L. D. (2000). Handbook of Ayurvedic medicinal plants: Herbal reference library (Vol. 2). CRC press.

Khandelwal, S. K., Jhingan, H. P., Ramesh, S., Gupta, R. K., & Srivastava, V. K. (2004). India mental health country profile. International Review of Psychiatry, 16(1-2), 126-141.

Mamtani, R., & Cimino, A. (2002). A primer of complementary and alternative medicine and its relevance in the treatment of mental health problems. Psychiatric Quarterly, 73(4), 367-381.

Mishra, L. C., Singh, B. B., & Dagenais, S. (2001). Ayurveda: A historical perspective and principles of the traditional healthcare system in India. Alternative therapies in health and medicine, 7(2), 36.