Are you VATA, PITTA OR KAPHA?

Practised for aeons in the East, Ayurveda has been gaining ground in the West, promoted by the likes of celebrity wellness guru Deepak Chopra. Would it work for you?

ayurveda or ‘the science of life’ is a holistic system with its roots in Buddhist and Hindu spiritual ideologies dating back at least 3 000 years.

But according to many of its growing number of proponents in the West, including its talk-show posterboy author Deepak Chopra, it’s based on the same principles as quantum mechanics. The human body, Chopra maintains, is underpinned by a ‘quantum mechanical body’ composed not of matter, but of energy and information. ‘Human ageing is fluid and changeable; it can speed up, slow down… even reverse itself’ – it’s possible to attain “Perfect Health”, he writes in his book of the same name. This is done, as the charismatic doctor informed me on one of his first visits to South Africa, by achieving a balance of the ‘bodily energies’ or ‘life forces’ – known in Ayurveda as doshas – derived from the five elements.

Ayurveda is widely practiced in India, where, according to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing, as much as 90 percent of the population (now approaching 1 360 billion) is estimated to use some form of Ayurvedic medicine.

Critics of the good doctor and of Ayurveda, including Dr David Gorski, managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, and Dr Stephen Barrett, the retired psychiatrist behind the Quackwatch website, list Chopra among ‘quacks’ and ‘purveyors of woo’. Yet the practice is on the rise in the West. A report in Global Advances in Health and

Medicine suggests that growing ‘cultural diffusion’ and the perceived inadequacies of existing healthcare systems, especially in the US, are driving patients to seek alternative treatments.