Page "History of alternative medicine" Paragraph 7

Ayurveda or ayurvedic medicine has more than 4, 000 years of history.

It is a rational system of medicine based on a humoral interpretation of disease and health.

Its prehistory goes back to Vedic and Buddhist cultures.

Although the hymns of the Atharvaveda and the Ṛgveda mention some herbal medicines, protective amulets, and healing prayers that recur in later ayurvedic treatises, the earliest historical mention of the main structural and theoretical categories of ayurvedic medicine occurs in the Buddhist Pāli Tripiṭaka, or Canon.

Ayurveda originally started as the name suggests, a science of life.

Ayu means life, and veda means science.

It was founded on the principles of yama ( time ) and niyama ( regulated ).

Regularity is not the rule.

We have to regulate our habits to abide by calls of our body not of our mind or intelligence.

That means we should eat only when we are hungry and not when we assign a regular time for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Ayurveda teaches that when we are tired, it is not wise to eat food or drink, but to rest.

Regulated principles shows us that work is the justification for rest and in order to get good sleep, we should subject our body to rigorous exercise.

Periodic fasting, or abstaining from all food and drink for short durations of one or two days helps regulate our elimination process and prevents illness.

It is only in later years that practitioners of this system saw that people were not paying for their services, and in order to get their clients to pay, they introduced herbal remedies to begin with and later even started using metals and inorganic chemical compositions in the form of pills or potions to deal with symptoms.

Then it became similar to any other medical system.