Plant Genomics

Biography

Biography: Manoj Kumar Sharma

Abstract

Ayurveda is a natural health care system that originated in India more than 5000 years ago. It emphasizes the treatment of disease in highly individualized manner as it believes that every individual is unique having different constitution. The concept of personalized medicine has been emerged as long as people have been practicing medicine. From Charaka to Hippocrates, all have practiced the personalized approach for treating a disease. According to Modern Science, humans are 99.9% identical. The genetic variation due to single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is the most common between different human beings. The phenotypic differences arise due to SNP and it contributes 0.1% of the differences. Ayurveda is basically pragmatic, systemic and holistic, whereas biomedical sciences are theory-based, structural and reductionist. Biomedical science uses Aristotelian logic and reductionist scientific methodology to guide its propositions. Cellular and molecular biology governs its medical theories, whereas Ayurveda uses the Indian schemes of logic enshrined in the nyaya and vaishiseka schools, tridosha siddhant and dravya guna shastra to guide its medical theory. If personalized medicine is to be realized a systematic classification of human population is necessary but modern medicine classifies human population based on ethnicity. Geographic patterns of genetic variation show that inter-individual variation in drug response is common. This gap could be effectively filled by Ayurveda and its vision as ayurvedic classification is independent of racial, ethnic, or geographical considerations and may provide appropriate means of classifying phenotypes to be considered collectively for genotyping. Ayurvedic system of medicine and other traditional systems of medicine have a personalized approach in treating a patient with centuries of practice, rightly called experiential science. Ayurgenomics is the integration of the principles of Ayurveda with genomics. The primary challenge of Ayurgenomics is to establish the correlation between DNA and ‘Prakriti’. Ayurveda not only offers personalized treatment but personalized nutrition and personalized lifestyle by way of both drug and non drug modalities suited to an individual's prakriti making it a holistic science. These attributes of Ayurveda can play a major role in disease prevention and promotion of health towards longevity with a better quality of life, which forms the basis of personalized medicine.