Ayurveda Can Teach Us to Tend to Our Own Health — and the Earth's

It’s winter and a year into a pandemic, and I’m talking from my home in Boston via Skype with a doctor in Secunderabad, India—not for a diagnosis of any one illness, but about the precarious health of both individuals and the world.

- By Rachel Slade

And more important, how pairing modern medicine and ancient Ayurvedic thought can help both to heal.

Shankar Prasad Adluri is a unique medical practitioner—he’s fully trained in modern medicine and an internist at a major facility, Sunshine Hospital in Secunderabad. But he also has the degrees necessary to practice the ancient art of Ayurvedic medicine in the Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

Thin and spry, Adluri looks younger than his 48 years, with a head of thick salt-and-pepper hair and a ready smile. He always appears in a checked button-down shirt. Over a few Skype conversations, he shared details about his life and his journey to becoming an allopathic doctor who is guided by both modern medicine and the wisdom of the Vedas.

Adluri’s parents were academics, teaching language and political science at government schools, and his brother trained in the United Kingdom to become a cardiac surgeon. His grandfather had been a serious yogi who stayed in a cave for 40 years in search of self-realization. (It’s been said that he only left the cave, which is still a temple to Shiva, to fetch water from a well half a mile away, or to confer with renowned yogis when they passed through the remote village nearby.)