By Sonya Soni

For many people, health care brings to mind white hallways and cold linoleum floors. The ancient Indian practice of Aryuveda suggests a warmer approach.

My eyes first rested on the eighteen neatly aligned beds that were positioned in the center of the room as I leaned against the cool, mud brick wall. The pungent scent of turmeric powder, coriander leaves, and fennel seeds enveloped the bustling room as patients took comfort in their midday meal of soft rotis (flat bread) and daal (lentils) peppered with the Indian spices. Six nurses, with sandalwood prayer beads rather than stethoscopes draped around their necks, placed a paper inscribed with the words of a Hindu prayer onto each patient’s bed. A framed sepia photograph of my great-grandmother Dadi (Indian name for grandmother) humbly hung in the back corner of the room, surrounded by a garland of bougainvillea flowers and votive candles. Its flames danced in celebration of the holy woman, the one who built the ashram (Hindi word meaning “refuge” or “shelter”) for patients who sought a locus both of spiritual nourishment and physical healing. Instead of cutting-edge medical equipment, hundreds of bottles brimming with vibrant powders and natural herbs adorned the back wall, portraying medicine as a precise art. Their eclectic colors and textures provided a rich, vast palette of cures and treatments from which the Indian physicians could choose.

However, the room itself equated to a dark canvas, a disturbing collage of diseases. Dozens of chronically ill and injured patients surrounded me as I slowly walked towards a trembling, elderly Indian woman. She clasped her gnarled, twisted hands into a prayer-like position. The woman chanted the word Ohm, the sound that Hindus believe to have begun life on Earth, and with the single syllable the woman hoped a new, healthy life would be bestowed on her. As a physician’s smooth, sturdy hands wrapped gently around the woman’s deformed ones, he failed to recommend non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for her arthritis (a common treatment for arthritis in Western medicine) as I expected (WebMd.com). Instead, he prescribed a strict regimen of regular physical exercise, daily hand massages with Til oil, and cooked vegetables. From the moment I stepped into the room, I slowly began to understand the significance of the Indian spices, the stock of organic seeds in lieu of syringes, and the sacred prayers placed gently into the hands of the suffering. These were all intermediate steps that served the overall purpose of Ayurveda, a 5,000 year-old Indian medical system that utilizes spiritual principles to treat the physical body and explain biological phenomena (Hontz).