Review of Rasayana Therapy: An Ancient Measure of Improving Immunity

Abstract

Preventive care is need of the era; there are different measures to improve general wellbeing and increasing immunity against disease. In conventional medical system stress is given to developing immunity against specific antigen using vaccination. This system has proved its effectiveness in certain bacterial disease (especially with attenuated vaccines), but in other pathogens it has limitations. The other two varieties of vaccines i.e., dead pathogens or toxoids needs regular or frequent inoculations; they are effective against specific antigen and not all antigens of the same pathogens. Thus there is need to divert the preventive care from specific antigen to general host defence system. Ancient Ayurveda scholars had ideas of both phenomenon and on the basis of their observations they proposed a unique therapy that not only promises freeness form disease but also complete wellbeing, which is known as Rasayana therapy. Rasayana means proper nourishment of tissues, this is a measure to correct nutritional principle that improves host defence system and also helps in synthesising immunoglobulins (antibodies) such that it improves specific and nonspecific immunity or humaral and cellular immunity. Hypothesis for inculcating Rasayana therapy as a measure of increasing immunity has been described in the full paper.

Keywords: Rasayana therapy, immunity, disease, immunoglobulins, antigen

Cite this Article

Nishant Shukla. Review of Rasayana therapy: An ancient measure of improving immunity. Trends in Drug Delivery. 2016; 3(2): 22–24p.