Maharishi Vedic Medicine

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Main article: Transcendental Meditation

Maharishi Vedic Medicine (MVM, also known as Maharishi's Consciousness-Based Health Care or Maharishi Ayurveda) was founded in the mid 1980s by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, creator of the Transcendental Meditation system. Although Ayurveda has been in existence for centuries, Maharishi claims to have restored the purity of some aspects of this ancient system. [1]

Practitioners of MVM believe that this system of health care helps to restore balance in the physiology, eliminate toxins and impurities and awaken the body's natural healing mechanisms. Practitioners also believe that diagnosis of the pulse can help to detect diseases before they manifest. Simple treatments (often consisting of herbal remedies, dietary adjustments, routine changes, etc.) are recommended to eliminate potential health problems.[2] Maharishi Vedic Medicine is a so-called alternative medicine and aims at being a complementary system to exist alongside modern, western medicine. Some treatments are unconventional, such as oil massage and "Vedic Vibration" in which "The expert whispers within himself or herself some specific sounds traditionally chosen for the indicated health concerns and then administers them by blowing on and/or touching the affected area of the body."[3]

1 Research on MVM
2 Controversies
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Research on MVM

The National Institutes of Health have funded research on the Transcendental Meditation program, which is considered an application of Maharishi Ayurveda. [4] Other research on MVM is on-going. [5]

[edit] Controversies

In 1991 the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an article on the benefits of Maharishi Ayur-Veda titled Letter from New Delhi: Maharishi Ayur-Veda: Modern Insights into Ancient Medicine, authored by Hari Sharma, M.D., of the Ohio State University College of Medicine, Brhaspati Dev Triguna, of the All India Ayur-Veda Congress, and Deepak Chopra, M.D., of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine.^[1]

When JAMA's editor, Dr. George D. Lundberg learned that the journal was misled about the authors' financial involvement with the TM movement, he assigned associate news editor Andrew A. Skolnick [6] to investigate and write an article on the movement's efforts to promote its trademarked line of traditional Indian remedies. A subsequent article in JAMA, entitled Maharishi Ayur-Veda: Guru's Marketing Scheme Promises World Eternal "Perfect Health", alleged that the authors of the first article had not disclosed their affiliation with organizations that sell the products and services about which they wrote. The article reported on an investigation into the marketing practices surrounding Ayur-Veda products and services.^[2] "An investigation of the movement's marketing practices reveals what appears to be a widespread pattern of misinformation, deception, and manipulation of lay and scientific news media," Skolnick wrote. "This campaign appears to be aimed at earning at least the look of scientific respectability for the TM movement, as well as at making profits from sales of the many products and services that carry the Maharishi's name.".^[3] It also countered the article's claim that Maharishi Ayur-Veda was more cost effective than standard medical care.

The article reported that in the late 1980s, herbal researcher Tony Nader, at the time a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came under criticism from his MIT advisor and his superiors at Harvard, where he was a research fellow, for using his positions at the institutions to promote Maharishi herbal products. They censured him in writing and warned him not to claim to be doing MIT and Harvard-sanctioned research on Maharishi's herbs. Nader also drew the ire of the organizers of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Botany, which was held at the University of Illinois at Chicago in June 1987. According to the organizers, Nader submitted a research abstract for a presentation that turned out to be nothing but "a bait and switch ploy and a publicity stunt" to promote Maharishi's herbal remedies.[7]

The second article quotes a former TM teacher and chair of the TM center in Washington DC, as saying that "I was taught to lie and to get around the pretty rules of the 'unenlightened' in order to get favorable reports into the media. We were taught how to exploit the reporters' gullibility and fascination with the exotic, especially what comes from the East. We thought we weren't doing anything wrong, because we were told it was often necessary to deceive the unenlightened to advance our guru's plan to save the world."^[4]

In 1992, in response to the second article, including the actions surrounding its writing and also subsequent actions, the Lancaster Foundation and the American Association for Ayur-Vedic Medicine filed a $194 million dollar libel suit against the author of the article and the editor of JAMA, alleging in part that statements in the article were false and defamatory. Pursuant to a settlement agreement, in 1993 the suit was dimissed by the judge at the request of the plaintiffs, with the option of reinstating pending completion of the settlement.^[5].