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Our bodies are natural, and our medicine, to be truly effective and safe, must be natural as well.
—The Ageless Woman

Guy Spiro: Nancy, please tell our readers how you came to be who you are. Just a simple easy question to start.

(laughter)

Nancy Lonsdorf: It probably started about 300 million lifetimes ago as far as I know (laughter), but who am I? What role I play is the medical director of the Raj Ayurveda Health Spa. As a teenager, I was really interested in the mind and when I was sixteen, I learned transcendental meditation. This was 1975 and there was a huge wave of interest in TM across the country, partly fueled by Maharishi appearing on the Merv Griffin show. I learned TM when I was away at high school and I found it really fascinating. Here was something where I could close my eyes and within a few minutes experience my mind becoming quieter and settling down, and really experiencing a very different state of consciousness from just being awake and doing my usual stuff.

GS: That’s a very good thing for people to do.

NL: Exactly. It was really a fascinating thing to me. I had wanted to be a doctor since I was in eighth grade and I immediately felt, wow, this is something that has got to be good for health and something I wanted to incorporate into a practice that I would have someday. As I proceeded through my teens and going to medical school, I always kept that in my mind. On my application to Johns Hopkins where I went for medical school, I said I was interested in mind/body medicine and I wanted to study the effects of meditation on health.

GS: They let you in anyway?

(laughter)

NL: They let me in anyway. I wanted to go somewhere where I could be myself and pursue the things I was really interested in. I was always impressed with Hopkins, even though they are sort of an ivory tower of medicine. I think because they are so established and the people they have there are so bright, there is also an openness to new things. That was back in ’78, and now they have a Department of Complementary Medicine and are looking at all these kinds of alternatives.

Ultimately, I was going to do mind/body medicine or use meditation in my practice. Later, in the eighties, I had an opportunity to learn about the traditional natural medical system, ayurveda. It comes from India from the same tradition, the vedic tradition of knowledge, that transcendental meditation and yoga has as its source. I found that there is this whole body of health knowledge that I was again fascinated by and wanted to utilize for my patients. It all came together in 1987 when I was offered a position as the medical director at the Maharishi Ayurveda Medical Center in Washington, D.C. I went there and started practicing and seeing patients. I did that for thirteen years before I came to the Raj.

GS: Is your practice a combination of western and ayurvedic?

NL: I would have to say on an intellectual level, yes, but on a practical level, I really focus on providing the ayurvedic approaches for people. There are tens of thousands of physicians that can give them all the western stuff. Being trained in western medicine, I can review somebody’s health history, discuss their treatment with them, and help sort out what is a good approach for them. I might suggest certain things for their doctor to check out that might be helpful, things that they may not have thought of. But I don’t try to get into managing people’s asthma, for instance, with both western meds and ayurveda. That would take too much of my and my staff’s time to manage, so we just provide a complementary approach.

GS: Does this require a lot of transposing? Westerners by and large are not vegetarians, and there must be other genetic and long term cultural differences.

NL: I would say there are. I’ve become at least a semi-expert in applying and integrating western culture and western physiologies with ayurvedic treatments and approaches. I started using ayurvedic approaches with westerners eighteen years ago, and you learn a lot as you go along. I’ve also worked with ayurvedic physicians from India. They have a tremendous background in ayurvedic from training in India, and some of them come from families where their fathers and grandfathers and so on for generations were ayurvedic physicians. They are so incredibly steeped in this knowledge. In working closely with them, I’ve learned from their insights as to how the western liver and stomach and mind and everything are different, not only genetically but because of the food that we ate when we grew up. For example, they feel that the western liver is much more sensitive because we didn’t grow up with all these antioxidant spices like turmeric, that cleanse the liver, and that we grew up on diets which were heavy in transfats and refined sugars and chemicals and pesticides. We need to put special attention on approaches and herbs that are gentle on the liver and help to cleanse and support it, but aren’t too harsh. I’m still learning, obviously.

GS: Are the doshas the same for westerners and Asians?

NL: The doshas are the doshas. Even in a bunny rabbit or your favorite pet, they’ve got the three doshas. The doshas are universal to life.

GS: For our readers who may not know, give a brief explanation.

NL: The three doshas are Vata, Pitta and Kapha. Vata relates to the movement or flow at the energetic level of the body. It is the flow through the brain and the nervous system, the electrical system, of all the ions and the electrical impulses moving both consciously through your nerves and unconsciously, like peristalsis and all those processes. Pitta has to do with biochemistry, transformation, digestion, metabolism, that whole area. Kapha relates to material matters, the structural things like the fluids, the muscles, the bones, the actual physical material of the body. If we were talking about your car, Vata would be the electrical system, Pitta would be the combustion process, and the Kapha would be the chassis, very simply said.

GS: People are primarily one or the other?

NL: Everybody has all three of these. You need all three to make up a body and everyone has all three functioning within them. Ayurveda describes how people have an inborn tendency for one or two of the doshas to be the more dominant qualities in each person. This dominance can express itself in a person’s body structure, such as whether they’re thin and light or they’re heavy and stout; whether their metabolism is slow or they can eat anything and never gain weight; and whether their mind is really quick and light, and creative and vivacious, or they’re more steady and stable and slower to learn, but never forget. Those are different qualities that the doshas will give to somebody’s personality and their body structure and the way their metabolism functions. We know everybody has different tendencies and ayurveda explains it in terms of these doshas being more or less active or dominant in any given person.

The other concept is that if these doshas are functioning normally, then your nervous system and your biorhythms are in balance, that’s Vata in balance, and then your metabolism and your digestion is good and strong, and that’s Pitta in balance. Then if your body is strong and sturdy, with good stamina and resilience, that’s Kapha in balance and strong. But if the doshas get disturbed, by the wrong food or improper lifestyle, or maybe by all sorts of other factors like stress, different effects of the seasons, and exposure to the climate, then there can be imbalances that develop in the function of the doshas, and that can lead to a variety of symptoms that are characteristic of each dosha being out of balance. That’s sort of a pre-disease condition according to ayurveda, and that pre-disease condition, if not corrected, will go on or can go on over time to end up being a disease of the immune system, or ulcers in the stomach, or arthritis. But if you can correct that imbalance through changing the diet and applying some oils or some herbs, and doing some cleansing of the body, or whatever, you can turn back that imbalance. You can create balance again; good health without ever having to get disease.

GS: The aim of ayurveda, then, would be to create the proper balance of the doshas?

NL: Right.

GS: Are people already in disease mode by the time you see them?

NL: That’s probably true of half the people, the other half are just out of balance. In fact, some people will use that expression, “I’m really out of balance,” because they feel that they’re not sleeping well, they’re gaining weight, they’re gassy and don’t digest their food. Maybe they’ve been to doctors who say, well, we’ve checked you out and there’s nothing wrong.

But if they are in a disease state, of course, ayurveda has its own approaches. Its aim is to get at the underlying imbalance and really try to create health again, rather than just interfering with the mechanism of disease which is what western drugs tend to do. That approach is, well, you’ve got inflammation, so let’s give a drug that breaks the cycle of inflammation. But if you stop the drug, you’ve got inflammation again.

GS: Then there is the whole side effect issue.

NL: And then you end up adding more and more drugs. You get in that vicious cycle of treating drug side effects with more drugs, and it’s really very damaging to a person’s health.

GS: I don’t understand how that isn’t seen as a downward spiral that people get stuck on.

NL: I don’t know. It keeps doctors busy. They’re so busy, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re so busy putting out fires, they don’t realize they’re creating them.

GS: Right, and it keeps the profits up for the drug companies.

NL: Oh, it’s really very misguided. I met Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa a few weeks ago and he said, you know I’m all for helping our seniors, but I actually have a personal problem, another reason why I don’t really support Medicare’s paying for prescriptions for seniors. It’s because I think it just fosters more dependence on drugs. I think we need to take that money and start teaching people that if they get up and they walk for twenty minutes a day, go swim, drink more water, eat less sugar, get better food, they are going to be so much better off than getting two or three more drugs.

GS: That’s wisdom rare to find amongst our elected officials.

NL: He’s the one who put forward a prevention bill before the Congress for the next session, and he’s the most forward thinking of all the Senators on health. We don’t have to get into politics, but there is some hope for the future. There are some people that are trying to change the whole system.

GS: Would you like to talk about your recently released book?

NL: Sure, it is called The Ageless Woman, Natural Health and Beauty After Forty With Maharishi Ayurveda. I wrote it for women, beginning from that point in their lives where their hormones start to change, to guide them through not only that changing phase, but then to give them techniques that will help them stay healthy naturally in the decades after that.

Because there’s been a lot of attention to hormones, as you know, in the past few years, everybody thought that taking hormones later in life, after the natural hormones trail off during menopause, that that was going to be the key to staying ageless and youthful, and having good memory, strong bones and joints, and preventing heart attacks and all those things. What they found, though, from The Women’s Health Initiative where they actually did a randomized controlled trial, was that it was all really just false information. It was simply that women who were taking hormones were the ones who were thinking about health. They were the ones that were exercising and eating better, and they were healthier in spite of the hormones. They were healthier because of their other good habits, not because of the hormones, and in fact, the hormones contributed to more heart attacks and other problems for women that didn’t have the other healthy habits.

So I wanted to provide women with the approach that I had found through my clinical experience, and of course it has all of these thousands of years of history behind it and a growing body of scientific research validating the approaches of ayurvedic herbs and diet and lifestyle and meditation and all those things, the power of ayurveda for really keeping you healthy. I wanted to be a voice for that because I felt that that was where the real power lies and that women weren’t hearing enough about it.

The Ageless Woman talks about the western approach and the limitations, mostly, of the western drug and hormone approach to treatment, and then it talks about the common things that we have learned in scientific research about exercise and diet and all the kinds of natural lifestyle things that you can do that are generic. I tell them about all those things and review the research on these and on the other areas of interest, bones and heart and mind and emotions. Then in each of those areas, I also talk about specific ayurvedic insights, and they take little tests so they can see what dosha type they are, and what specific recommendations are right for them. So they get the ayurvedic angle, too.

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Doctor Lonsdorf received her M.D. from Johns Hopkins and did her post-graduate training at Stanford University. She is one of America's foremost clinical authorities on natural medicine for the prevention and treatment of disease. Dr. Lonsdorf has seventeen years of clinical experience with over 15,000 patient visits during that time. Her practice is based on Maharishi Ayurveda, the revival of the authentic practice of the world’s oldest and most comprehensive system of natural medicine. Dr. Lonsdorf is currently the Medical Director of The Raj Ayurveda Health Center, North America's oldest and largest in-residence Ayurveda Health Center. Previously, she served as Medical Director of the Maharishi Ayurveda Medical Center in the greater Washington, D.C. area.

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