Relationships Are Complicated

            Single. Married. It’s complicated. A relationship status label helps us to define and share the condition of our relationship. It can be posted on social media to be shared with the world or it can be discussed privately between partners. There is often no right or wrong status for relationships. It’s complicated. Like physical and emotional relationships, everything we interact with inside and outside of our bodies has relationships, and it’s complicated. As I have studied Ayurveda, diabetes, and microbiomes I have noticed a common theme between them all. They are all based on relationships.  Whether it be blood sugar levels or the number of microbes in our gut, it all comes back to the topic of Ayurveda, which is all about keeping relationships happy and in homeostasis.

 

            First, it is important to understand what Ayurveda is and how it applies to relationships. “The term Ayurveda is derived from the Sanskrit words ayur (life) and veda (science or knowledge).” With these definitions, Ayurveda means the knowledge of life. This also means knowing and understanding the relationship between life and science. The more we know about our lives and our health, the more we can help, support, and heal ourselves specifically. How we care for our body’s relationships in our life determine our quality of life. If we take care of our bodies and maintain relationships properly then we are less likely to get sick. In Ayurvedic medicine, its main goal is to promote good health, not fight disease. Ayurvedic medicine believes in the delicate balance between mind, body, and spirit. 

The definition of Ayurveda reminds me very close to the definition of Osteopathic medicine, which is a holistic form of medicine. The PCOM website says, “Osteopathic medicine is a "whole person" approach to medicine—treating the entire person rather than just the symptoms. With a focus on preventive health care, Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine (DOs) help patients develop attitudes and lifestyles that don't just fight illness, but help prevent it, too.” With this definition, I would believe that Ayurveda and Osteopathy come from the same root concepts. This concept is helping and healing through natural methods. Believing our body can heal itself and prevent diseases effectively is important in these forms of medicine. Caring for the relationships that have been made in our body helps us not only heal ourselves but to prevent disease. 

 

One of the diseases that is directly affected by the balance and relationships in our body is diabetes. I have some personal connections with diabetes. I have multiple family members that have been diagnosed and are living with diabetes. One of them is my grandpa who was only diagnosed with type two diabetes after he had been fighting and beat lymphoma cancer. I haven’t talked to him too much about how diabetes developed, but I know that it was in correlation with his other treatments and other health problems. This continues to encourage the idea that all diseases can be connected to each other in our bodies. He tells me stories about how active he was and how he used to run marathons very easily, but after the got cancer his entire health and wellness declined. This can call back to my research earlier in the field of Ayurveda and about how everything is connected in our bodies. Cancer treatments and other factors interrupted and affected his metabolic relationships which resulted in diabetes. His relationships got complicated. 

 

Diabetes can be caused by glucose or insulin imbalances in our bodies. In studying beta cells and what really causes diabetes, it is easy to see that there is a domino effect with diabetes. Beta-cell function causes hyperglycemia, affecting the brain, muscles, tissues, kidneys, etc. Diabetes can have a great effect on lots of different parts of our bodies. When applying that to the general idea of metabolism and relationships, there are many chemical reactions that need to take place for our bodies to work. That means that we need substrates, enzymes, and cofactors as well as the correct conditions like temperature and pH for these chemical reactions to take place. If something up the pathway isn’t working and producing correctly, then other things towards the end of the pathway will not work either. Glucose and insulin are both just single parts of a greater relationship between our bodies and the world, but if their levels are incorrect, then other reactions are affected negatively as well. 

 

Overall, we have been making relationships our entire lives. Before we were born, we were creating chemical relationships. As we developed, we made connections between cells. While growing our organs learned to work together. Since then, we have made many more relationships, as well as tried to keep our previous ones intact. But it’s complicated. Ayurveda is an idea that can help us to maintain and prevent disease, or complications, in our health. Diabetes is an example of a disease in a “complicated relationship”. As we study relationships and understand the relationship status, we can better understand and prevent disease.