Beau Blake’s Curated Paper 1

     Honestly, I first thought Ayurveda sounded like a deadly disease. When first assigned the topic I expected to be looking at some gruesome disease that has left a ton of people in hospitals around the world. So, surprise, it's the study of life and the life force of an individual. So I thought to myself, “Great now we have learned about this health nut mumbo jumbo yoga crap”. I should have learned by now to stop judging things at face value because the more I learned about the topic of Ayurveda, the more I became intrigued by the idea.

The concept of ayurveda begins back in the 2nd century BC in the Vaisheshika, a group of Hindu Philosophical teachings. It focuses on the five elements (water, air, earth, fire, and space). While this may sound like I might start reciting the intro for Avatar: The Last Airbender,  I will focus more on the topic of imbalances and balances in a person's body that are critical to an individual's health. While most people will look at first glance and think “Well, duh, that's common sense”. What comes to mind for me is my family and their stories about imbalances in their lives.

Before I get into their different stories I should first mention my family history with metabolic disorders. Most students are haunted by all the many hours studying, drawing, and memorizing the many different components of metabolic pathways that are in a human’s body. While I am in the same boat as most of those students, I also have been trying to learn more about the different reasons as to why my family is affected by these imbalances in our bodies. So to start, I should talk about my grandfather.

My Grandpa Has two different types of metabolic disorders. The first one that I will talk about is type two diabetes. My grandpa served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and was exposed to Agent Orange.

Agent Orange is what they called a chemical herbicide and defoliant that soldiers sprayed during the Vietnam War. One of the chemicals used in Agent Orange is a highly toxic chemical called Dioxin. Dioxin is a highly toxic chemical that can cause a variety of different things in humans but it has been shown that low exposure to it is related to type two diabetes. While there have been repeated studies that show that Agent Orange has been related to the increase of risk for type 2 diabetes, scientists cannot explain the reason as to why. All they know is that dioxin causes some sort of imbalance that increases the risk of insulin resistance in those soldiers who were exposed to Agent Orange. While my grandpa’s lifestyle probably didn’t help him prevent the development of type 2 diabetes, it is something to think about when talking about how imbalances in our lives can cause bad health consequences.

The second metabolic disorder that my grandfather has, and has now passed on to his kids and now to me and my cousins is Hypothyroidism. This is when the thyroid gland doesn't produce enough thyroid hormones for your body. It usually isn't that serious with the side effects being weight gain and other things that are pretty easy to deal with. It can lead to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, Which really scares me personally. But because of the hypothyroidism in my family, me and my brothers have to watch out for becoming pre-diabetic. Weight gain is one of the symptoms of hypothyroidism. 

So far, me and my two older brothers have been okay because we stay somewhat active and take daily hormone replacement tablets called levothyroxine. My older brother runs, my other brother works construction, and I wrestle and coach wrestling. But my younger brother, on the other hand, is pre-diabetic. He is pushing 450 lbs right now. Back when he was 16 he reached 400 lbs and my parents got him on keto and got him down to 240 lbs. But when he went on his mission he gained it all back and he refuses to do any diets or try exercise. I am really worried because I really want him to be healthy so he can have a long life.

This is the part of the paper where I ask the reader, and myself, to take a step back and hear me out for a little bit. While yes I am talking a lot about weight and weight gain. And of course, the easy thing is to assume that this weight is what is causing the imbalance, and if my brother would lose the weight then he would fix his imbalances. This is where I think that Ayurveda could get too out of hand, that by focusing too much on one imbalance they ignore all other possible imbalances. While I’m not saying that losing all that weight will help his life, I just ask you to listen to my mom’s story and then judge.

Just like my grandpa, my mother has had problems with her thyroid, but way more than any of us has had to deal with. At the age of 32, my mom was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Due to this, they had to perform thyroidectomy where they had to remove the whole thyroid that the cancer had spread to. And then after this, she had to go through chemo and radiation. Then after all of this, a year later she was involved in a dune buggy accident that left her with a broken neck. With her thyroid gone and not being able to be as active as she was, she began to put on a lot of weight. After her neck was healed up, her body still was broken. She was constantly in pain and couldn’t do many things that she used to be able to. And every time that she went to the doctor they all said the same thing: lose the weight. This always left my mom in tears because she was trying to but all the pain and the increase of difficulty made my mom feel like it was all her fault and that she wasn't trying enough.

Finally, it got to the point that my mom went and had gastric bypass surgery so that she could lose weight and start to feel better. After the surgery my mom started to lose the weight like she was supposed to, yet she wasn't feeling better. It was making things worse. Her neck pain was getting worse, the pain around her chest was increasing, and then on top of all of this was the pain from her surgery. It got bad enough that we had to go to an emergency room and there we found out that she had a tumor growing in the top of her left lung. All that weight she lost was making things worse for her. They also found that bone spurs were growing where she had broken her neck.

Now I give this story because sometimes we go chasing after imbalances to fix for so long that it 1: can make things worse or 2: becomes too late. A large portion of my mom's problems could have been avoided if my mom’s doctors hadn’t focused so much on her imbalance of weight and more on finding other imbalances that could have been affecting her. It was lucky that we found out before it was too late.

In summation, in learning more about Ayurveda, metabolism, and imbalances, I have learned a lot about how life is an effort to keep things as balanced as possible. Sometimes it's as easy as fixing one aspect of your life, and other times it seems like there are a million different things that are all trying to throw us off balance. Our health, and the health of others, depends on how we choose to fix these imbalances. So those of you who read this, I hope you can take something good out of the stories that I have shared about my family and use them in your future professional careers by fostering an approach to people or patients that values individual experiences. I also hope that, unlike myself throughout this paper, we don’t rush to judgment and listen to our bodies more.