Ayurveda, the oldest medical system, treats illness as an imbalance of three humors and uses supplements to balance them. Panchakarma, a comprehensive treatment, involves five modalities to purify the body and cure disease. Ayurvedic supplements may contain heavy metals and are not regulated for contaminants.
Ayurveda is widely considered the oldest medical system in the world. It approaches the human being as a combination of three basic humors, or doshas, called vatta, pitta, and kapha. He considers illness to be an imbalance of the doshas. Ayurvedic treatments to balance the doshas involve a variety of approaches, including Ayurvedic supplements. Formulated with herbs and spices and often combined with metals, there are many such supplements available to treat conditions as diverse as hepatitis, insomnia, epilepsy, and the common cold.
One of the most comprehensive Ayurvedic treatments, panchakarma, involves five modalities to purify the body and cure disease. Ayurvedic supplements are formulated to support each modality in a different way. In the former, they are encapsulated in a liquid form to be administered into the rectum, while in the latter they must be in a form that can be inhaled through the nostrils, usually as an herbal oil or liquid. The third stage is a rehabilitation stage. In the fourth, Ayurvedic supplements can be taken orally to induce vomiting, and in the fifth, oral Ayurvedic supplements help prevent disease.
The ancient art of Ayurvedic pharmaceuticals is called rasa shastra, and chemists educated in the art combine herbs and minerals using various methods, including sublimation, controlled heat ashing, grinding, blending, and churning. The resulting Ayurvedic supplements can be in powder or liquid form that can be encapsulated or pressed into tablets. There is a long list of traditional herbs, spices, and minerals that can be included in supplements, including commonly used ingredients like fennel and sesame oil, as well as more exotic ones like neem, bitter melon, and ghee. Ayurvedic supplements may also contain heavy metals such as lead and mercury, which act as catalysts for the active ingredients to work faster.
Ayurvedic supplements are manufactured in India and the United States, among other countries, and are often sold online. Some are formulated according to the principles of rasa shastra and some are not. According to a 2005 study by Robert B. Saper, MD, those formulated according to rasa shastra principles were more than twice as likely to contain detectable amounts of metal and had higher concentrations of lead and mercury. Furthermore, the study warned that Ayurvedic supplements of rasa shastra could lead to ingestion of 100 to 10,000 times the amount of mercury considered safe by medical science. There is no standard for the amount of contaminants allowed in daily doses of Ayurvedic supplements, so consumers cannot distinguish between those that are free of contaminants and those that are not.
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