THE WIZARD : Of medical diagnosis

I was in a place called Sarai kale khan. It was sort of a village within the city and was behind the Nizammuddin railway station in New Delhi.

I crossed the railway line at the level crossing. The main road here goes straight but there was a turning to the right and this road ended some hundred metres ahead. I took this narrower road.

At the end of this road
there was a two storey pink-colour house on the left hand side. Across
the road and facing the house, there was a large covered hall, open on all
sides. Beyond the road's end there was a private farm of herbs.

The hall was now very crowded. People were waiting there for the
Ayurvedic doctor.

The doctor, clad in a nice and simple pyjama kurta, now crossed the road
and entered this hall.
This was Dr. Brahaspati Dev Triguna (1920-2013), a tall and graceful man
with the built of an international athlete. He settled down to see his
first patient. Each patient had a token number.

He placed the first three fingers of his right hand on the pulse of the patient
before him and observed the beats on all the three fingers. The patient, as
usual, started to tell him his problems but he stopped him.

" l am here to tell the problems." he said as he kept feeling the pulse and noting down the result. He, then, explained to the patient what the problem was.

" Now you can tell me if you want to add anything to what I have told you."

There was nothing to add.

When my own turn came he examined my (nadi) pulse and gave me a precise diagnosis of my health problems without asking me a single question. And then he wrote the prescription and turned to the next patient.

I got up, crossed the road to the double storey building and presented
the prescription to the compounder who was in charge of the pharmacy
there. Herbs were being mixed. Several persons were grinding the mixtures for various prescriptions.
Most of the medicines were being prepared on the spot by hand. It was an awesome task preparing the prescriptions of over two hundred patients. . . .

Now a word about Nadi Vigyan - the ancient
science of medical diagnosis by an analysis of the pulse. Like much of the science of Ayurveda this is also a gift to the modern world from another amazing civilization which vanished, though not totally like the civilization of MAYA of mexico. This was the ancient and very advanced civilization of the prehistoric India - then called "Bharat Varsha".

In the modern medical practice a doctor checks your pulse normally to
see the pulse beat per minute. He does not diagnose the nature of
ailment by feeling the pulse.

Now how do you feel the pulse when you have a fever? You place your fingers on your wrist, under the thumb and check the pulse beat. In nadi diagnosis you do something somewhat similar but in a very
detailed and precise manner. What you do is that you place the first three fingers (leaving out little finger) in such a way that the index finger is closest to the base of the thumb.

Now,when you feel the pulse. The pulse beats will be felt on the fingertips of these three fingers. The
nadi vaidya checks the strength (and weakness) of the beats and the manner in which blood is coursing through the nadi on each of these fingers. It is a profound study and it is not easy to master. The very elementary principle of ayurveda is that VAT (the AIR element)is diagnosed from the index finger, PITTA (the HEAT element) is diagnosed from middle finger and SHLESHMA (loosely speaking you can call this cough element) from the ring finger. This is of course a very rough explanation.

According to the science of ayurveda (the science of life), our health and
illness stems from the permutation and combination of the forces of the three basic elements in the body - vayu ,pitta and shleshma.

Dr. Triguna had taken the science of nadi-diagnosis to an astounding level,
difficult for a vaidya in the present times to reach.
According to the famous Dr. Deepak Chopra of
USA , Dr.Triguna was by far the best nadi vaidya in the world. Like all great
people he seemed to possess a divine
gift (in India we call it SIDDHI) for pulse reading. He was a devout worshipper of God Shiva and there was a shivalaya (small private temple of hindu God Shiva) adjascent to the hall where he saw his patients. On occasions when I reached his clinic much before the opening time (I used to come by train from a nearby town),
I found him seated in the shivalaya, deep in meditation.

Dr. Triguna had been given manywawards in his lifetime including the
Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award by Government of India. He was also the personal physician to
the President of India. He held many assignments in the ayurvedic institutions in India and abroad.

Here is a link to Dr. triguna talking to the media in the USA.

http://www.zoominfo.com/p/
Brihaspati-Triguna/34617228
THE DELUGE. THE FANTASY AND
THE FACTS