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Go To Index Page India offers to teach Ayurveda to US academia New Delhi: The Indian Government has expressed a readiness and a keen desire to promote and teach Ayurveda to interested academics in the United States. According to Dr. Navin Shah, an eminent Indian American urologist of nearly three decades standing, meetings with Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and his predecessor Atal Bihari Vajpayee this month have convinced him that the Government of India is very keen to send a couple of Ayurveda experts to the United States to teach the nuances of this traditional alternative system of medicine. Dr.Shah, who is on a month-long visit to India (a practice that he has maintained since 1980), said that the Indian Government has given him an undertaking to send two Indian Ayurveda professors to the United States within the next three weeks, and they will be tasked with the responsibility of developing a 10-12 hour Ayurveda course with the assistance of AYUSH (Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy), which operates under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. He said that he had been in touch with Mr. Vajpayee since 2003 and had met Dr. Manmohan Singh on the 10th of this month and briefed them about the proposed educational project that would involve interaction with at least 10 medical schools in the United States. "We have had meetings with 12 different medical schools in the United States. There are four in Boston, three in Washington, two in Baltimore and three in Philadelphia, and American education in Ayurveda will be provided under what is called complimentary alternative medicine. The Government of India will spend the money on sending the two professors, who will deliver free lectures on Ayurveda to willing schools and academics," Dr. Shah said. Dr. Shah, who is currently the president of the Doctors Community Hospital in Washington D.C., also said that while it was true that there was an ongoing debate over benefits to be had from Ayurveda treatment as opposed to the benefits from Allopathic treatment, he personally felt that being a urologist had not been an obstruction to his desire to promote the application of Ayurveda in the United States. "The scientific and medical community in the United States, I feel is open to everything. We want to help the patient, to ease his or her suffering from an ailment or a disease or cure him or her. And, if it is Ayurveda or Allopathy that is providing the desired relief, so be it," Dr. Shah said, adding that Ayurveda provided great cures for colitis, Alzheimers, obesity, depression, high blood pressure and diabetes. Commneting on the logistical aspect of the project, Dr. Shah said that in his 15 to 20-minute meeting with Prime Minister Singh, his Principal Secretary T.K. Nair and senior Union Health Ministry official Shiv Basant, he had also brought across the view that this project would help broaden India's role in international medical education. "I do believe that we in the United States can help India to improve its medical education and healthcare practices. This project can be the percursor to a possible Joint Indo-U.S. research in Ayurveda, where both countries can apply the same protocol, and replicate what is being done in India in America," Dr. Shah said. Commenting
statistically, he said that it would surprise most people in India to
know that out of the 68,000 medical students in America, only 12,000
were of Indian-American origin. He further went onto to say that of
the 41,000 Indian-American doctors, 15,000 were undergoing the mandatory
three years training. What would surprise Indians here more was the
fact that the United States spends 40 billion dollars annually on promotion
of herbal products and food supplements. India, on the other hand spends
about a billion dollars. In the American market, the Koreans and the
Chinese have a monoply at present, while the Indian share is very miniscule,
he said, adding "We (Indians) are not very aggressive." He concludes
by saying that the American system has opened up in the last eight to
ten years, and that at present there was an attraction towards the use
of acupuncture. Therefore, he was hopeful that there is room for Ayurveda
to make its impact on the American mindset.
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