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The first question an Ayurvedic doctor asks is not, “What disease does my patient have?” but, “Who is my patient?” By “who” he does not mean your name but how you are constituted. He looks for the telltale traits that disclose your body type, also known as your prakruti. This Sanskrit term means “nature” – it is your basic nature he wants to uncover before he turns to your complaints and symptoms.
The Ayurvedic body type is like a blueprint outlining the innate tendencies that have been built into your system. A glass of whole milk contains 120 calories, no matter who drinks it, but one person uses those calories mainly to store fat, while another converts most of it into energy. A child’s body extracts lots of calcium to build new bone tissue, while an older person passes the same calcium out through his kidneys (and may convert it into a painful kidney stone if his body can no longer deal efficiently with calcium).
By knowing your body type, an Ayurvedic doctor can tell which diet, physical activities, and medical therapies should help you and which might do no good or even cause harm. These are three important reasons why knowing your body type is the first step toward perfect health:
The seeds of disease are sown early. It would be hard to find a heart patient in his forties who had not shown some suspicious signs in his twenties. A pathologist examining the arteries of a deceased 20-year-old can see premature streaks of fat that are liable to create a future heart attack. Even 10-year-olds will already be prone either to allergies or to chronic overweight, high cholesterol, or peptic ulcers. But at this age, when incipient disease is easiest to treat and prevent, symptoms are often difficult to read. By understanding body types and their specific strengths and weaknesses, you can begin to take preventive steps when they do the most good, long before overt illness appears.
Body types make prevention more specific. Nobody is prone to every disease, yet most of us try to prevent as many as we can – cancer, heart attacks, osteoporosis, and so on – moving uncertainly from one medical scare to the next. If you try to prevent every disease without knowing your particular predisposition, you are stabbing in the dark. Heart attacks, cancer, and diabetes happen to specific people, one by one. It only makes sense that prevention must proceed on the same basis.
Body types make treatment more accurate once a disease appears. Generalized treatment – prescribing Valium to everyone who is anxious or antacids to everyone who has an ulcer – is a hit-or-miss affair; it assumes that that a given disease is the same in all people. But as we have seen, this is not true. According to Ayurveda, three people may feel anxious at three different levels of stress. Their ulcers may result from three different diets, job pressures, or difficulties at home. In effect, they are suffering from three different diseases, all of which happen to travel under the same name. This is true for people who chain-smoke, compulsively overeat, or suffer from allergies and asthma. In all these cases, the Ayurvedic body type is remarkably accurate because it can pinpoint what is happening inside each individual.
Finally, knowing your body type is essential to understanding yourself, your creative core. This is your psycho-physiological constitutional type, and includes both mind and body, and is occupied by three operating principles called doshas. The three doshas are called Vata, Pitta, and Kapha.
Every cell in your body contains all three, but by discovering which dosha characteristics are the most prominent in you, your diet, exercise, daily routine, and other measures for preventing disease can come into focus.
Love,
Deepak
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