Yoga Talk: Making Medicine Work Better | Dr. Vasundhara V.R.

Dr Vasundhara V R (00:00) Then slowly I came to understand that another perspective of yoga where rather than making it spiritual or your daily practice or something where you there's a therapeutic point of view. When I started focusing on that therapeutic point of view, I started exploring myself and I end up in a course under the Dr. Ananda Bhalayogibhavanani. He's an eminent researcher, yoga researcher from Bondi Chilli and my journey ends there and he introduced me into yoga therapy. and that opened a different road. It's a different road. I thought till that time I was thinking okay yoga therapy something like a new chapter like anatomy, physiology or something. Then I came to know that no before itself you all know with the familiar term Padanchali, Mahashi Padanchali, founder of yoga. In his book the Padanchali Yoga Sutra we have all the answers. Yoga therapy is nothing but Patanjali Yoga Sutras You have everything there. Then I just work on it and I'm still learning yoga therapy and still learning healing. So I choose to be a healer than to be a normal yoga teacher which you see normally and who teaches the asanas. I wish to be a healer. So I'm on my journey in this. Brendon Orr (01:25) yeah, I like how you're even acknowledging that this is an ongoing learning and experiential journey. And I really appreciated that. Right, Dr Vasundhara V R (01:30) Yeah. Gina Clingerman (01:34) Yeah, it's so, yeah, I love that because sometimes I think we get this idea of like, there's an end to this practice or this path or this spiritual journey to sometimes yoga can be. And I just have to remind myself all the time that there's no end because there's always more to learn and there's always more to study and there's always how yoga changes for us as individuals over time. It's really beautiful. Brendon Orr (01:59) Yeah, Vasundhara, I was wondering, so you've got this cross-disciplinary training and your work is really cross-disciplined. So I was curious, how do you integrate all these different fields when working with a patient that might be seeing you? What does that look like? And do you think that this integrated approach maybe helps? people navigate challenges that just a single approach might miss. Dr Vasundhara V R (02:31) Actually, with my experience, it's an integrated approach is much more because each person is different. Her body constitution, if you see in the body constitution part or in the other person, they are different actually. And any system has their own plus and minus. And where I also told you, I'm from Kerala. So we have an integration of allopathy. like Ayurveda, Mahatma, Pomeo and Siddha and Yunnan. So these are different kind of and we come into one and one called Mayush. So we work together. So most of the health system works here. 90 % of the health system works like that. So where you patient is coming to you or person is coming to you, they have a choice. If you want example, I will tell you. If you are coming with back pain, generally back pain. So you have Ayurveda, you can go for option for medicines. If you want to take medicines, can either go for homeopathy, Ayurveda or something. And if you want like natural, like a dietary change or something, you can come to naturopathy. Wherever you are, whichever system you are taking, yoga act as a term. It's a switch that can be plugged into any system, integrated with any system. it can be integrated with the English allopathy also. So, what I found is rather than giving only one path, you integrate it with some other system. That person will be in need of medicine, internal medicine is needed for his current problems. it works well. What yoga does is it improves the efficiency of that medicine. he may be taking tablet or medication for diabetes for a long time that will cause a stress to the body. When you introduce yoga, the cortisol that body is able to manage the cortisol because cortisol is something which is giving you the stress. So yoga will help you to reduce that stress level and that medicine works more efficient in that body than before. This is what we have done. Brendon Orr (04:37) Hmm. Dr Vasundhara V R (04:50) and we have made, done so many studies also. Because we have seen people who taking the medicine and who are clubbing both yoga and the medication. So, started with one center and now slowly it has integrated with many other centers. Most of the government centers are working with integration and the private sectors are also looking into it. Brendon Orr (05:12) Mm-hmm.