R. A. Podar Ayurved Medical College in South Mumbai

Lord Dhanvantari welcomes students to the RA Podar Ayurvedic College in Mumbai — Lord Dhanvantari welcomes students outside the hospital entrance

Amid a lush garden of banyan trees, the stately yet somewhat decrepit R. A. Podar Ayurved Hospital just south of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link offers no-frills treatments for locals and foreigners alike at some of the lowest costs I have encountered for Ayurvedic care. I have visited the institution twice, with the first time being almost a year ago for virechana treatment, and the second time being a week ago for some vata pacifying herbs to help with my jet lag. Overall, I’d recommend this place as an option for treatment in Mumbai, but there are some caveats.

Virechana Treatment November 2016

Before my first visit, I began by filling out the online consultation form available on the college website, and I highly recommend taking this step first if you decide to go. I was able to correspond with an upper level professor at the college who arranged for me to see a doctor before I arrived.

The morning of my consultation, the doctor recommended virechana, and I was given a set of instructions for purvakarma, which is the preparation for treatment. For those of you who have not had virechana before, this is the treatment where you drink ghee every day in order to loosen the ama, or built-up toxins, in the body. My orders were to drink increasing amounts of ghee mixed with special salt for the week leading up to treatment. I had to ingest the ghee and salt mixture first thing every morning at home, and by the end I think I had worked up to drinking close to 100 ml or more at once, but I don’t recall the exact amount as I have buried this memory, along with the ones of bearing my child, deep in my subconscious.

The doctor at the clinic had warned me about the difficulties inherent in ghee drinking, but I thought it wouldn’t be too bad because I love ghee so much when it’s warmed and spread on chapatis or drizzled into dahl. Clearly I was in denial, because—I am not gonna lie—there’s nothing nice about drinking salted ghee first thing in the morning. By the time I had worked my way up to drinking the full amount, it was all I could do not to throw it all up as soon as I had choked it down. (Pro-tip: hold your nose closed and drink it as fast as you can.)

There is also a special diet to be followed, but after you drink a big swig of ghee first thing in the morning, nothing after that will look like a hardship. The diet is basically kitchari, steamed veggies, and light vegetable soups. If you are not staying in a place where you can do your own cooking, it will be hard to find what you need in a typical Indian restaurant as the amount of spice in practically everything will only provoke the pitta dosha, which is the imbalance virechena seeks to address.

I did pretty well at following the diet, aside from falling off the purvakarma wagon once for an amazing thali on the day we celebrate Thanksgiving in the United States. I also may have taken too much to heart the advice that I could snack between meals on chikki, a jaggery and nut or seed-sweetened snack available in markets (“chikki” may be the Hindi word for “crack”), but otherwise there were no major offenses.

After a week of cleansing, I showed up at the hospital for my treatment, which I was told would take the entire day. During my first visit the week prior, I had been massaged by two women PK specialists (there is no opposite-sex massage in true Ayurved) and treated to a session of svedana in their special steaming apparatus that looked like a cross between a beautiful wooden coffin and a tanning bed. This visit, I was again treated to a massage with medicated oil and steam before I started the treatment. If you’re a California gal like me, you might be tempted to strip down to nothing before you are massaged with oils, but I recommend you wear an old pair of panties because they really do want you to keep them on, as I found out the hard way.

hospital treatment room at R A Podar Ayurved Medical College in Mumbai — Private hospital room used during treatment

Massaged, steamed, and dressed again, an attendant took me to a hospital room to start the therapy. I had to drink some nasty concoction and then sit and wait for the pooping to begin. Be sure to bring a book, because there’s a lot of waiting. After a couple of hours and a couple more drinks, my bowels were still hanging on stubbornly, but after a third drink served with the attendant’s assurance that “this one will work,” I began to get some results. Finally, around 6 pm, I was pronounced fit enough to take a cab home.

For the following week, the doctor suggested continuing in the same detox diet while slowly introducing foods that are harder to digest. Again, I think I did pretty well, but it’s Bombay, and I’m a foodie, so there was a lot more cheating than during the purvakarma phase.

Did it work? Yes, I think it did. The symptoms of my primary complaint abated significantly, although they returned a couple of months later to a lesser degree. However, that may be due to the diet I followed while traveling in South America in the subsequent months, which mostly consisted of bread, cheese, coffee, and chocolate.

Podar Hospital Pros & Cons

First the good:

Cost: my entire treatment from consult to hospital stay was under rs 20,000, which was about $30 USD at the time.

Ease of use at facility: the hospital is well staffed with English speaking doctors and student practitioners, and they are welcoming to foreigners despite serving primarily to treat locals who are unable to afford more expensive treatment.

Authenticity: if you are from the US or another foreign country, it’s really cool to be able to see a real government-run Ayuvedic hospital from the inside.

Quality of care: as someone who is just starting to study Ayurved, the treatment seemed legitimate to me, although there was no examination during purvakarma to determine the level of oleation resulting from the ghee drinking. I was also impressed with the staff and doctors at the hospital in how I was treated and in the communication I received.

And the maybe-not-so-good:

Ease of use at facility: this is not a spa, and you will have to stand in a queue with other folks to await your treatment. At times there is also a lack of privacy in discussing your medical issues as some consults will take place in rooms with other patients.

I had a private bathroom in my hospital room, but I think it was well known as a place to go pee for the workers there. Twice while I was in the room, employees entered the room without knocking and then went into my bathroom to use it. Being a whiny, uptight American, I complained, but let’s just say I’m glad that I didn’t need that bathroom during those interruptions.

Self-care during preparation: no one is going to hold your hand during all that ghee drinking, and no one will provide your meals. Patients must be prepared to follow the instructions for preparation and post-care or the treatment will not work as well.

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Ayurveda is a Sanskrit term meaning the “science of life,” and it is considered the sister science to yoga. At the most basic level of understanding, Ayurveda is the area of knowledge that allows us to keep our bodies healthy so that we can achieve union with the divine through the practice of yoga.

If you think of someone contorted into a difficult pose when the word “yoga” comes to mind, you may want to let go of that preconception, especially if it’s discouraging you from practicing. While the practice of asana (literally, “seat,” or what the yogic postures are known as) is a part of the eight-fold path of yoga, it is not the highest goal. The highest aim of yoga is to attain moksha, or full realization of the soul’s union with the divine. Asana is merely a tool that helps us find comfort in our bodies so that we may practice meditation with more ease.

In this way, Ayurveda is also a tool to maintain health in the body so that we are not hampered by pain and disease in our quest to understand our relationship with the divine in the universe. Anyone can practice yoga‒even someone who is confined to a wheelchair‒as anyone can benefit from Ayurvedic healing. Ayurveda addresses the physical body as well as the subtle bodies, and therefore can benefit where there is disease in the body or imbalance in the mind.

When trying to explain Ayurveda to someone with no familiarity with it, I often describe it as the Indian counterpart to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Many people have heard of acupuncture, which is a healing modality employed by TCM, but not many people understand that it was Ayurvedic physicians who first discovered the energetic points (called marma points in Ayurveda) that are used by acupuncturists.

When patients are treated by Ayurvedic practitioners, it depends on the state of disease as to what recommendations the physician or health advisor will make. While it is possible to treat and cure diseases that have been active in the body for many years, it is not an overnight process. Ayurveda strives to treat the disease at its root cause rather than the symptomology the disease presents, so it may takes months or even years of treating a disease through herbs and diet before a reversal is seen. This eventual elimination of the disease is complete, though, and will not include a host of obnoxious or even deadly side effects as are common in the pop-a-pill quick fixes proposed by pharmaceutical companies.

The strength of Ayurveda lies in preventative measures and a holistic approach to healthcare, which makes it a complementary practice to allopathic medicine. While allopathic medicine is well designed to treat sudden traumatic injuries and diseases in their most advanced stages, Ayurveda is best used as a preventative strategy. It can be efficacious in later stages of disease, but it is often to the patient’s advantage to work with allopathic health care givers in later, more intractable stages of disease or during acute situations, like a heart attack.

For treatment both of strongly rooted chronic disease and for yearly preventative maintenance, panchakarma is recommended. Panchakarma comes from the Sanskrit “panc” (meaing five) and “karma” (meaning action). This practice is composed of deeply detoxifying and healing treatments designed to treat the vikruti, or current condition of imbalance, of the patient.

As the name implies, there are five detoxification treatments designed for particular doshic imbalances: vamana (therapeutic vomiting), virechana (purgation), basti (enema), nasya (nasal purgation), and rakta mokshana (bloodletting). Each of these treatments is related to a specific imbalance, with rakta mokshana used in cases where profound and speedy relief is required.

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Ayurveda