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Philosophy of Healing
Dr. Vijaya Raghava
Dr. Vijaya Raghava has an MBBS from Gulbarga Medical College (1978), with Senior Housemanship completed in Madras Medical College (1981). He has worked at NIMHANS, Bangalore, from 1982-83. Following this, he has had a 19-year career as a personal physician with a private practice, with clinics in Bangalore urban area. From 2001-present, he has focused on chronic lifestyle diseases, building up an extensive knowledge of natural supplementation and early diagnostic methods. He has recently practiced at Pavamana Health Center and P M Santosha Multi-specialty Hospital in Kengeri, in addition to private health consultations.
Dr. Veena Raghava
Dr. Veena Raghava has an MBBS from Madras Medical College (1982), and DA (Anaesthesiology – 1996) from Bangalore Medical College. She has worked at several hospitals such as Gunsheela Nursing Home, Shastri Memorial Hospital, and ESI Rajajinagar. In addition to a long term government service with postings in Hospete and Bangalore (ESI), she has worked as an anaesthesiologist at ESI Hospital Rajajinagar for a continuous period of 8 years. During her post-graduation in anaesthesia, her studies were at Bangalore Medical College, Victoria Hospital, Vanivilas Hospital, Minto Hospital, Bowring Hospital, NIMHANS and Kidwai Operation Theaters. She has served in Emergency Medicine and Clinical Nutrition at P M Santosha Multi-specialty Hospital, Kengeri. Along with Dr. Vijaya, she has developed an expertise in nutritional medicine and lifestyle diseases, and has traveled extensively throughout the state of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu for the same purpose.
The purpose of medicine is to heal – a word which comes from the same root as the word for whole. Yet, how much of modern medicine is able to live up to this ideal of healing in a wholesome way? With the extreme differentiation of medical specialties, it is getting harder to obtain simple straightforward help as was common in the era of family doctors and house visits. The large commercial machinery of the modern hospital, and its insistence on pharmaceutical drugs and technology-and-money-intensive testing, has increased the prices and decreased the connection that existed between a doctor and the patient.
More importantly, when it comes to the question of chronic lifestyle diseases, be it diabetes, high blood pressure, varicose veins, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, colitis or other auto-immune diseases, modern allopathic medicine has no real solution – only a disease management strategy. Why is this so? It is because modern medicine treats the body as a physical or chemical apparatus, which is good within limits, but cannot be applied to the whole body and all its functions. This leads to a flawed vision of the human body, and therefore most treatments of lifestyle diseases are only symptomatic – they only reduce the symptoms, but do not address the root cause of the disease.
For example, if a road develops potholes, what is the cause of the problem? It is possible to argue that it is the rain, or the sunlight that heats up the road surface, that is the culprit, and set up a pothole management strategy by putting a roof over every road to block rain and shine. It is also possible to argue that the traffic is to blame, and so set up a traffic management strategy in order to reduce the number of vehicles in order to protect the road. It is also possible, as a far more effective strategy, to set up a division of people equipped to fill up potholes as they appear, or to put warnings around them to help people avoid them.
Yet, do all these strategies address the true cause of what causes a road to develop potholes? The true cause is that the road has not been built with the right materials at the right quality to sustain normal traffic, rain and shine. The issue is in the road structure itself, and not the surrounding factors. This is precisely the difference between the traditional symptomatic treatment and our approach towards the body with lifestyle medicine. Instead of pain killers, blood thinners, beta blockers and so on, we seek to strengthen the organism from the inside out, by providing it the right substances that it needs for its rejuvenation.
There are many alternative approaches to do this, of course, such as maintaining good health through exercise, good food, home remedies and so on. There are also ancient approaches such as Ayurveda or Acupuncture. However, is there a way, based on the medical knowledge gained in allopathy, to extend this knowledge in a systematic way? And is this extension fruitful?
This is where we utilize the ideas of cellular nutritional optimization via nutritional medicine and also anthroposophic medicine. While regular nutritional knowledge is usually restricted to some essential dietary principles, it is possible to go beyond this, and look at the cellular health of the organ and the nutrition it requires to perform at its best. Based on this, it is possible to tailor the right kind of nutritional supplements and treatments that help the different organs strengthen themselves as a whole from within.
This approach has yielded enormously fruitful results over the past 16 years, which is what we would like to share with you at Healion.