Chennai has a great many places offering Ayurveda, from hospitals with a doctor in the building to spas with an Ayurvedic menu. Both can be fine for what they are. The trouble starts when you need treatment for a real complaint and cannot tell which kind of place you have walked into.
This checklist is meant to be used anywhere, including on us. None of it requires medical knowledge — only a few direct questions and attention to how they are answered.
The first question is who decides your treatment. An Ayurvedic doctor in India holds a BAMS degree (Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery), sometimes with a postgraduate MD in Ayurveda, and is registered to practise. Ask the doctor’s name, qualification and registration number, and expect a straight answer.
Then ask when the doctor is there. A name on a board does not help if therapies run all evening with nobody available to check that you should be having them. Someone qualified should be on hand during the hours treatments take place, and should review you during a course.
Ask, too, whether the same doctor sees you through the course. A plan written by one person and reviewed each week by someone different tends to lose the thread of why it was written that way.
A good first visit takes time. Expect questions about your history and medicines, your digestion and sleep, and what you are hoping will change, plus an examination — in Ayurveda this usually includes the pulse and tongue. A place that books you straight into a therapy from a price list, without assessing you, is selling a service rather than treating a complaint.
Expect a plan you can follow: which therapies, roughly how many sessions, when it will be reviewed, and what you will do at home. A course with no review point is hard to judge, for you or for anyone else.
This is also the moment to ask about cost. A clinic should be able to tell you what the plan it has written will cost before you commit, rather than adding items as the course goes on.
If you are given medicines, you should be able to find out what is in them. Classical formulations have known compositions. A jar with no label, or a special preparation whose contents are kept secret, cannot be checked by you or by your physician against what you already take.
Ask whether medicines are prescribed only after a consultation, and whether you can show the label to your other doctor. Both answers should be yes.
An in-house pharmacy is convenient but not essential. A prescription you fill elsewhere is perfectly reasonable, as long as each formulation is named in full and comes from a maker you can identify.
Ask who the therapists are and how they were trained. Therapies such as Pizhichil or Shirodhara need practised hands to keep the oil at an even warmth for an hour, and a therapist taught to notice dizziness or discomfort matters more than the décor.
You are allowed to look around before you book, and a well-run place will not mind. Look for:
Many Ayurvedic therapies involve undressing and oil over most of the body. You should be told beforehand what a therapy involves, what you will wear, and that you can stop at any point. Women should be able to ask for female therapists, and for women’s treatments that should be the standard rather than a favour.
For intimate procedures, the doctor should explain the reason and get your agreement first. If something makes you uncomfortable, say so; a professional place will adjust without argument.
Listen to what is promised. No honest practitioner promises a particular outcome or names a date by which a chronic condition will be gone, and Indian law restricts advertising treatments with promises of that kind. Warning signs to watch for:
The reverse of those warning signs is reassuring. A doctor who tells you a therapy is not right for you yet, or sends you for a scan or a specialist opinion first, is doing the job properly.
Most complaints are treated as a course, so it also matters whether you can reach the place on a weekday evening, whether there is parking, and whether the hours fit your work. A hospital twenty minutes away that you keep going to will do more for you than a better-known one you stop visiting.
At Sri Vinayaga Ayurvibe in Perumbakkam, the doctor is Dr.V.Vaitheeshwari B.A.M.S., Reg. No. 2095. A first consultation runs 40 to 60 minutes; medicines are dispensed from the in-house pharmacy after consultation with every ingredient named; and women’s treatments are carried out by female therapists. We are open every day from 10 AM to 8 PM. Ask us anything on this list — call +91 81229 39197, or walk in and look around.
Sri Vinayaga Ayurvibe — 12/597, Main Road, Nethaji Nagar Main Rd, Nookampalayam, Perumbakkam, Chennai 600131. Phone: +91 81229 39197.