Curated Paper #1 Trevor Muray

     When thinking about Ayurveda I was completely in the dark, I had no previous knowledge of ayurveda or what it could even entail. Being part hispanic, I actually presumed the word to be a Spanish word at a quick glance. There’s no direct translation for ayurveda into Spanish, but by breaking up ayurveda into two different words with ayuda meaning “help”, and vida meaning “life” you get to create a translation. With these words you get “life help” or “helper of life”, and after digging into what ayurveda actually is, that translation isn't too far off. The ideology and lifestyle of ayurveda as explained by the Directorate of AYUSH is the, “union of physical body, sense organs, mind and soul.” These aspects are also known as dosha(meta physiological entities), atma(soul), indriya(sensory organs), and manas(mind). Showing that the purpose of ayurveda is to bring the whole body together to work as one, and create balance within the system. And seeing as this is the case, the Spanish translation of “helper of life”, does correlate pretty closely to the function of ayurveda. By keeping the body in balance and while also getting rid of what they call mala from the system. That would help people have a healthy life.
    Reflecting more on the topic of ayurveda and seeing its focus more on balancing and relaxing the body and soul. One of the main things that’s brought up with ayurveda is stretching the body and helping the body gain balance in exercising, such as yoga. This form of relaxation is again used to of course help the body reconnect with the mind and regain focus. And while I've never done yoga before, thinking of this type of body and mind connection, it reminded me of when I was younger with my abuelita. When my brother and I would get sick our abuelita would give us a massage to comfort us. Granted it was never a full body massage, it was just shoulders, massaging our arms, or the most common one that we got was one where she was massaging our wrists. While I never really paid attention to it, I felt good because I was getting to spend time with my grandma, which alone lifted my spirits and made me feel better.
    However when researching the idea of massaging helping with sickness, I actually found that massage therapy is practiced everywhere. One blog post from Shield chiropractic discussed how massaging can actually offer relief from common cold symptoms year round. But at the same time it allows for improved, “circulation in the body, which may help your immune system fight the virus that causes the common cold. Moreover, massage therapy can provide a boost to your immune system so that it’s at full strength, reducing the severity and duration of cold symptoms.” They even mentioned how massage therapy can work on sinus congestion, by finding a certain point to allow for the sinuses to drain.
    When reflecting more on the idea of ayurveda and how essential it is to keep a balance within the body, I think of a major disease that is caused by an imbalance, that disease being diabetes. Diabetes can take on a bunch of different forms of how it affects the body, or even when it affects the body. Prediabetes is one of these forms, with an increase in blood sugar, leading towards type 2 diabetes.Yet, the body still has a chance to bounce back with the help of a healthier diet and exercise. Another form that can affect the body is gestational diabetes, which occurs during pregnancy so it only affects females. This form of diabetes is also similar to type 2 diabetes with the placenta putting strain on the pancreas for insulin secretion. While doing this it can also cause insulin resistance to occur in the cells, since the body is diverting energy from the mother to the baby. Interestingly though, this form of diabetes can actually dissipate, reverting blood sugar levels once the baby is born. Yet this isnt always the case, if sugar levels can’t decrease it would lead to a prolonged diabetic infection.
    While pre diabetes and gestational diabetes  are interesting topics that I was able to learn about, type 1 and type 2 diabetes are the ones that plague most people around the world. With type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks the beta cells that produce the necessary hormone insulin to regulate the body’s glucose levels(Lucier & Dulebohn). And while the reason why the body attacks its own beta cells is still unknown, “ researchers believe there is a genetic predisposition with a strong link with specific HLA alleles”(Lucier & Dulebohn). With HLAs being Human Leukocyte Antigens(Nordquist & Jamil). And while type 1 is mostly due to genetic properties, type 2 diabetes is caused by the same imbalance in insulin production, but it also deals with the cells in our bodies being affected by insulin resistance. Meaning that while there may be insulin in the system, sugars can’t get into cells due to fatty cells gumming up the locks that are bound in a cell membrane. This stops receptor proteins within the cell to keep it from opening. This in turn causes high blood sugar levels to start rising, causing other organs and other properties of the body to start malfunctioning.
    One main malfunction that interested me the most was the body’s ability to slowly heal, or lose the function of being able to heal. This is caused by various factors. With higher glucose levels in the blood, this can actually lead to damaged blood vessels(Dresden). Likewise diabetics are also susceptible to infections with high blood sugars dampening the effects of the immune system  by affecting macrophages, which help dispose of bacteria or other infections agents that enter the body. The period of inflammation is also increased, halting any progress that the body is trying to make to heal the wound.(Dasari, et al.).
    Living in Guatemala for a period of 7 months during the year 2019-2020 right before the COVID-19 pandemic. I was able to see how diabetes affected a lot of people socially. For most, insulin therapy was not an option. And while it is believed that most people had access to insulin or strips. When I was there, only those who had enough money got the chance to receive insulin therapy. While a lot of other indigenous people who had diabetes or even prediabetes, would solely rely on diet to keep glucose levels in check. At that point while their body was out of balance, they had to learn how to live as if it were balanced. It became their new normal. The hard part of course is as mentioned before if a person were to cut themselves while either at work, or even at home. They’d be at a higher risk of prolonged infection. Which if that weren’t enough, many people suffer from a combination of other diseases: tuberculosis or even Giardiasis, causing their immune system to be even more compromised.
    Seeing this societal and even economical burden that diabetes has caused, it's interesting to see how the numbers are able to break it down throughout a period of time. One of the research papers that was given to us titled, The Costs of Diabetes in The U.S. in 2012 by the American Diabetes Society, shows that spending on diagnosed diabetes was roughly $245 billion. Breaking this number down we see that “People with diagnosed diabetes incur average medical expenditures of about $13,700 per year, of which about $7,900 is attributed to diabetes” Those who have diabetes are expected to have medical expenditures 2.3 times higher than what expenditures would be without having diabetes. When doing more research on the subject the Diabetes journal shows that costs have increased to $306 billion in 2022 for the direct medical costs of diabetes. However another part of the article shows the direct and indirect cost of diabetes has risen all the way up to $412.9 billion. And by the year 2030 global economic costs of diabetes  would rise to be about $2.1 trillion.   

      Overall, thinking about the societal and economic burdens that diabetes poses, my first thought was that there has to be a way to help regulate or control diabetes apart from modern treatment. When doing some  research on the subject it has been shown that an imbalance in not just in blood sugar but an imbalance in a strand of bacteria in the gut microbiome can cause type 2 diabetes. An article from Harvard Medical School states that a certain strand of, “Prevotella copri — a common gut microbe ​​that has the capacity to produce large quantities of branched-chain amino acids — was more commonly seen in the gut microbiomes of people with type 2 diabetes”. Seeing this strand create branched-chain amino acids, wasn't the only thing they observed. The article also states that they saw how bacteriophages could also decrease or increase the possibility of type 2 due to the fact that the bacteriophage would change how the bacteria is supposed to behave normally. The research shows that by helping those people change their diet to lessen the number of these bacteria could reverse effects of type 2 diabetes, or even buy them more time.
 

References:
https://ayush.delhi.gov.in/ayush/fundamental-principles Directorate of AYUSH
https://www.shieldschiropractic.net/blog/massage-relief-cold-symptoms
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10146621/ Microbiome and Depression/anixety
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK546662/ (nordquist and jamil)
 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507713/ (lucier and dulebohn)
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317483 (Dresden)
https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/41/5/963/36522/Global-Economic-Burden-of-Diabetes-in-Adults (Global costs for Diabetes)
https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/47/1/26/153797/Economic-Costs-of-Diabetes-in-the-U-S-in-2022 (Economic costs in the U.S.)
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/changes-gut-microbiome-may-increase-type-2-diabetes-risk (Gut microbiome and type 2 diabetes conenction)