cooling mudpacks: the aesthetic quality of therapy 177
problems her husband experienced from taking allopathic psychiatric
medications:
Kavitha: Are you taking “allopathy” medicine now?Wife: No, no.Kavitha: Now he is not taking any medicine.Murphy: Now it is fi nished.Wife: Now that he is not taking medicine, there is a lot of improvement. When he
was taking medicine, he had memory problems [literally, reduction—kuravu].[.. .]Kavitha: Was it because of memory problems that you stopped, or...?Wife: Yeah, because of memory problems and a lot of “tension,” thinking, and
he was like this. So we changed. Now there is relief after coming here. After he
came here, he sleeps without taking medicine.A quantitative analysis of the aesthetic evaluations of treatment in allopa-
thy and ayurveda among all informants yielded the following overview:
- 95 of the patients my assistants and I interviewed were currently using or
had previously tried allopathy. A total of 14 of these informants off ered,
without our asking, some complaint about the eff ect of psychiatric medi-
cations or ECT during their allopathic treatment. - 42 patients interviewed were currently using or had previously tried
ayurveda. None complained of abrasive eff ects of ayurvedic therapy
though some said ayurvedic treatment could be “diffi cult” to undergo.
Another way to interpret patients’ visceral reactions to treatment is to com-
pare the aesthetics of adversity in ayurveda and allopathy. As mentioned earlier,
not all ayurvedic treatments are “pleasant.” Th ere is the discomfort of drinking
snehapana (ghee for oleation of the body) and undergoing vamana (drinking a
purgative to remove impurities from the body through emesis). One ayurvedic
patient said ayurveda was more diffi cult to undergo than allopathy, and he
explained this “diffi culty” in terms of the lengthiness of treatments one had
to endure in ayurvedic therapy which he contrasted to the quick and simple
administrations of allopathic injections. Another similarly contrasted the dis-
cipline and regimen of ayurvedic therapy (which at the GAMH, where he was