Ayurveda is a longstanding medicinal tradition, its roots extending back thousands of years. Once relegated to India and scoffed at by conventional medicine practitioners, Ayurveda is gaining traction and experiencing growth as a healing modality as much as its sister, yoga, is gaining popularity. But is it useful in treating diabetes?

Ayurveda: A Brief History

The word “Ayurveda” means “Science of Life” and seeks to treat health as a holistic system, wherein different maladies affecting the body are both healed and created by balance and imbalance. Ayurveda categorizes its patients into three distinct categories (called “doshas”) based on their body’s natural predilections and tendencies. These doshas are then used to determine any dietary or movement changes necessary to create balance in the body.

Ayurveda, unlike most conventional medicine, sees health as something that requires harmony in all areas of a person’s life, including mental and spiritual health. This means that a lack of spiritual life will have an affect on your mental and physical health, physical ailments will affect your mental and spiritual health, and so forth. Thus, Ayurvedic treatment does not rely upon a single system of medicine but seeks to incorporate mental, physical, and spiritual healing techniques to treat illness.

Ayurveda and Diabetes

Ayurveda’s primary source of healing is food. The tenets of this medicinal practice hold that food and herbs are the greatest source of healing and seek to create balance and harmony in the body by shifting dietary habits according to dosha. Foods are separated into flavors and types and include heating and cooling foods.

Ayurveda comes into play in diabetes treatment because the food you eat is such a significant part of effectively managing and treating diabetes. The difference comes, however, in the notion of different bodies needing distinctly various combinations and restrictions regarding food and drinks, and emphasizes sorting out other areas of life, as well.

Currently, there are few scientific evaluations of Ayurveda’s efficacy, making it an unsafe treatment to entirely take the place of conventional western medicine. Paired with your doctor’s recommendations, however, Ayurvedic principles may be able to help your metabolic system and could help your body move toward additional healing.

The Future of Ayurveda

Further studies are required to determine whether or not Ayurveda can safely be used as a treatment method for both Type 1 and Type 2. Fortunately, the increasing incidence of Ayurveda in western countries could make larger studies possible. Just as yoga has undergone countless studies and is now seen as a strong wellness practice, Ayurveda may come to be a legitimate, powerful form of medicine in the fight against diabetes. Until that time, however, the method is best used as a complementary treatment rather than a primary source of healing.