जरा & व्याधि – Two types of bodily degeneration as per Ayurveda.
In previous article, when I told openly that annual body checkups are unscientific and waste of time and money, one friend advised me to do mental check up. 🙂
Here is the rationale behind my open rejection of quackery.
जरा or ageing is built into one’s development programme, being innate, inevitable, and a mere function of the temporal flow. Only life style routine measures can accelerate or slowdown process of जरा or aging. There is no medicine to stop जरा. Yet, modern medicine will foolishly try everything to stop जरा. 🙂 For example, as per Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment , a noted publication notes in 2008 edition:
1) “The single most important risk factor for developing cancer is age i.e. जरा”
2) About 76% of cancers are diagnosed in persons aged 75 years or older
3) An additional cause of cancer is chemotherapy or radiotherapy for prior malignancy
This means, cancer due to जरा will never get healed by any medicine or therapy.
व्याधि is temporary and generally healed by body itself.
If cancer is due to व्याधि i.e. due to carcinogens or cancer-causing events, it can be mitigated. But even, to mitigate them, if we use processes like radiotherapy which will accelerate aging, there are high chances that due to accelerated जरा , cancer will relapse.
Solution?
Instead of attacking cancerous nature of our body cells, learn to reduce their stress and provide them positive environment. It works well in case of व्याधि type of cancer. For जरा type of cancer due to aging, let it be no treatment except slowing aging by different Ayurveda medicines.
Cancer is not alone to classify in जरा & व्याधि. All diseases come under this classification. The doctor is not capable of affecting the working of जरा ; but may be able to mitigate व्याधि. The failure of medicine to understand the cause, course, or ‘cure’ of age-related processes provides scientific vindication of the scriptual insights.
And so, annual bodily checkup for young adults is nothing but waste of money and time :). If at all you want to observe body every morning (urine,stool, breathing), do it daily. Have control over your food, water and sleep. Do exercise in open air daily. That is enough to slowdown जरा and avoid व्याधि. (Y)
PS: Most of us, due to sedentary life style, are accelerating aging process. Please be sincere about it. Take care (Y). Our kids would not like rapidly aging parents in their teen age. 🙁
