The Pioneer
ISSAC MATHAI, INDIA
His blueprint of healing is now a model for the world
The moment you step inside Bangalore’s Soukya International Holistic Healing Center, you realise it’s no ordinary clinic. No bland, plastic limbo land, just light, airy space with gurgling fountains, greenery, dotted with Kerala, Nallukettu-style thatched huts. The 30-acre healing centre, which caters to the boldface names such as Madonna and Archbishop Tutu, Prince Charles of England and actor Rajinikanth, symbolises the dramatic changes taking place in medicine today. The man behind it all is Dr Issac Mathai, whose father was a priest and mother the only doctor of a little village, Wayanad, in Kerala. Even as a student of homeopathy in Kottayam Medical College, he took up therapy courses in yoga and transcendental meditation. By the time he set up Soukya in 1989, he had travelled the world, worked as a practitioner in London, treated the rich and the famous—Beatles, Sting and Tina Turner. But his brush with celebrities did not shift his fundamental faith: Holistic health. “I had the vision of a model,” he says, “where the focus would be on the patient and the tools would include anything the patient needed for cure.”
In November 2013, Soukya with the College of Medicine, UK, kickstarted a global network, with hundreds of practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine from across the world assembling at Bangalore for a three-day global conference. Dr Mathai is also rolling out his low-cost rural holistic health centre. It has been set up to serve seven villages through preventive health programmes. “India is sitting on a wealth of healing, food and spiritual traditions. If the government cannot do anything about it, let me at least try in my own little capacity,” he says. Dr Mathai, founder and director of Soukya, isa home opathic and holistic physician