draft audio intro to ayurveda

Oskar Buchan is a retired GP who discovered Ayurveda during the Covid pandemic and became a practitioner. Ayurveda is an ancient system of medicine that focuses on diet and lifestyle to promote health and prevent illness. Oskar's journey into Ayurveda changed his perspective on health and led him to understand the root causes of illness. He believes that modern medicine often treats symptoms rather than addressing the underlying problems. Ayurveda emphasizes the importance of digestion and nutrition for a healthy body and mind. Oskar feels grateful to have found Ayurveda and believes it has improved his own health and well-being. He wants to share his knowledge through a radio show called "Ayurveda, the Science of Life" and discuss how Ayurveda can help manage health problems. Oskar's late father had an interest in nature-based treatments and spirituality, which influenced Oskar's interest in Ayurveda. He believes that being in good physical and mental health allows us to fully Hello everybody, my name is Oskar Buchan. I'm a retired GP who is very excited to be presenting this new program which is all about Ayurveda. You may have heard of Ayurveda before or you may not. It's a very, very old system of medicine going back thousands of years. It originated in the Indian subcontinent. It's still in use today in India and in the US particularly and in many countries in Europe. It's growing in popularity as it is a fundamentally nature-based treatment which deals with diet and lifestyle factors to help us promote health and prevent illness. My journey to Ayurveda is very late in many ways. I've been to India several times, like maybe some of us have been, and had some treatments before at health spas over there which were predominantly massage-based treatments. I thought I knew everything about Ayurveda, could never have been more wrong about something. When I found out about Ayurveda in more detail in 2021, during the Covid phase, I was quite surprised and a little ashamed frankly. I've been practising family medicine as a GP for 30 years both in Ireland and in the UK. During the Covid period I discovered an Ayurveda course which was run through the Ayurveda Institute in London, quite by chance, and my wife suggested that I look into it to see if I could develop an interest in Ayurveda, which I duly did as I never disobeyed my wife. What I found in the three years of study was really life-changing for me. I learned and developed so much about myself. I learned about diet, nutrition, how it can affect my moods, my energy levels, my weight levels, my stress levels, it was really quite an incredible journey. I enrolled in the course, completed three years of study, I did a diploma in lifestyle and nutrition and then a diploma in Ayurvedic practitioner. Now I'm working as an Ayurvedic practitioner in Belfast area. It was quite a change of direction for me and it took me quite a while to adjust to not being a doctor, but more a therapist, more a healer, for want of a better word. I found I understood much better why people became ill, what were the factors that led to them being ill and how they could address it in such a way that they would reduce the burden on themselves, sometimes cure themselves and certainly improve their physical health so they can manage and cope with their illnesses and their symptoms a lot better. When I was working as a GP, I felt patient's frustration with gastric medicine and the increasing reliance on medication to manage chronic illnesses and diseases. As a GP myself, we also felt frustration at not being fully able to cure people, not being fully able to manage the conditions and symptoms they were suffering from. We also found quite significant frustration with patients you could not find any obvious reason why they were ill. You might have run umpteen tests and done scans and still found nothing that we could pinpoint as a cause of the symptoms they were genuinely suffering from. And this proved a source of frustration both for the patient and for the doctor, myself and others. Learning about Ayurveda in the last few years helped me understand particularly more about myself in my current state and about my past and what brought me to this state. I'm so grateful to have found Ayurveda even though rather late in life. I really do think it is a case of better late than never. It's given me a greater insight into myself and my relationships and the world around me in general. I must admit during the Covid period, I was asking a lot of questions like many people were about where I was, what was happening in the world, why was it happening and all the changes that are occurring for good and bad in the world and how I fitted into things. And it was really a case of doing a lot of soul searching within myself and about the world in general. I feel Ayurveda, finding Ayurveda and learning about it has helped me understand things a lot better. There are lots of things that frustrate me still, lots of things I don't understand, but it's given me the tools to be able to open my eyes and my thinking about all of these things in a much more positive way. It really has changed my life. I was warned it would change my life at the start of the course and I really did not think that it would in any way. I'm a sceptic by nature, having worked in Western medicine for all of my life and having been trained in the Western medicine model. It changed how I look at my health, both my body and mind. I always wondered how disease and illness affected some patients and not others, how some people seemed to age better than others and wondered why that was the case. I'm beginning to understand that a lot more. Personally and professionally it's given me a new lease of life and a renewed interest in helping people with the health and psychological problems they face. Fundamental to Ayurveda and the principles of Ayurveda is that a good digestion, a good functioning digestion and nutrition are the foundations of a healthy body and mind. This is a very simple and obvious fact to us when you stop to think, but this has been lost to modern medicine, I believe. We treat digestive problems with pills to mainly suppress the symptoms which can cause other problems in the long term and don't really get to the root of the problem. Ayurveda tries to look at the root causes of illness and digestive problems before recommending treatment. That's the crucial difference. It's more a preventative type of system rather than a symptom-treating or treatment type of system. I believe, and a lot of people are believing the same, that our modern diet and our lifestyles are making us ill in many ways. We're only beginning to understand it. There may be environmental toxins and other factors involved as well, but fundamentally our diet and our nutrition is making us ill. Our lifestyles are toxic to the way we live, the way we interact, the way we work, the way we manage our relationships, our time, our habits and our routines are all really not in any way ideal for our health and are affecting us most definitely. I have experienced the same myself and I have turned things around in my life and my health and I'm very grateful, very grateful to have been able to do that, to have been given the opportunity. For me, Ayurveda teaches us the importance of daily habits and routines of self-care as well as diet and nutrition to allow us to remain balanced from day to day and season to season to cope with all the different stresses and strains that we have as part of our life. Discovering Ayurveda has been such a positive experience for me and it's helped improve my health and my peace of mind overall. I now feel a bit more in control of my health whereas beforehand I was struggling with my weight, I was struggling with my fitness, I was struggling with my mental health and my interactions with people were negative and not good. They are much better now and I feel the benefit of it and I feel better for it. I am passionate about Ayurveda and how the principles and practice can be applied to how we live in this modern world of ours. I believe I can share some of the knowledge that I have learned in this radio show which I am titling Ayurveda, the Science of Life. To inform listeners about all aspects of Ayurveda, I will discuss common health problems to be experienced and how Ayurveda can help to manage conditions and health problems in a practically easy to understand format. As to why I came to Ayurveda so late and the turnaround in my life and the difficulty I have adjusted to, even though I know it's for the better, I have to thank my late father, Shyamal, who had an interest in health and nature-based treatments as well as spirituality, including Ayurveda. I wasn't aware of it so much at the time, but having gone through some of his old books in the last few years, I see he was reading extensively about these treatment methods. He also had a special interest in old Celtic traditions of belief, like Amankala, and the interconnectedness of humans with nature going back over time. I believe that we can only be fully ourselves and fully understand the world, the universe, and why we exist, if we are in the best possible physical and mental health. Otherwise, we are just too distracted to be able to focus on these big questions of why we live, why we are here. It's the Ayurvedic philosophy as well that we strive to develop practices, habits, routines, treatments, remedies, eating carefully and mindfully to be able to achieve this balance within ourselves, so that we can then, before we depart this world, think and contemplate about the world, the universe, the reason for existence, and all of these great big questions that we need to think about while we're here on planet Earth. This is the one great benefit of being able to apply Ayurvedic practices in your daily life, that you can reach that state with practice and with discipline and with developing good habits and making small changes in your life, to be able to do this. You may not wish to do it, it may be too much for you to think about, maybe I've often felt that, I still feel that, I'm working towards it, and that's as good enough for me right now. Right, that's about me and how I came into Ayurveda. Really, it's important for me to try and explain to people and explain to my listeners what Ayurveda is and what it involves. Now, Ayurveda is a, translates directly, it's a combined word which means the science of life, directly translated from the Sanskrit language. Ayu is life, veda is science. These date back to the ancient Indian culture, back 5000 years ago, where a lot of the accumulated knowledge was written down in texts on paper, which were described as the Vedas, the Vedic texts. Ayurveda is just one of the many Vedas, but Ayurveda deals with the health of the body and mind and spirit. It forms a set of practices which help you develop your mind, body and spirit in the best way to prevent illness and disease. How this is through your diet, your lifestyle, the use of herbs and spices within your cooking and all sorts of home remedies, and developing a practice of daily routines, as well as prescribed exercises, recommended exercises, including particularly yoga. The treatment plan that is designed is specific to the person and designed exclusively for that person's needs at that moment in time. It can be changed depending on circumstances, and this is just part of the beauty of Ayurveda, it is flexible for different patients at different times. There are quite a number of misconceptions about Ayurveda which really I need to address from the outset. People think Ayurveda is inherently an Indian philosophy, system of medicine that can only be followed if you follow an Indian diet and lifestyle. This is entirely untrue. Ayurveda is universal and can be applied to any society at any moment in time. Another common misconception is that there is only such a thing as Ayurvedic food or Ayurvedic herbs, and they are exclusive to a particular part of the world. This isn't true at all either. There are common herbal medications used in Ayurveda, but all food and all types of herbs and remedies can be incorporated into an Ayurvedic treatment plan. Another very common misconception is that if you know your constitution, you will know what these foods do for you and how to live your life forever. That's not the case at all. We're all fundamentally imbalanced in some small degree or large degree, so knowing your constitution is like trying to close the door after the horse has left. You need to be able to pre-plan and correct your imbalance to get back to your constitution. So you might have an idea about what your actual constitution is, or have a feeling of what sort of person you are, what kind of body you have and how your mind works. But often it's difficult for us to know that ourselves until we're fully back to our balanced natural state. Yeah, I think I've spoken too long.