A Vedic Jiva Upakara Cikitsha Tantra (Vedic altruism) based telemedicine program for rural health care in India

In this post-covid19 era, there is an immense need for telemedicine care for rural people of the developing world including India. Through telemedicine care, novel digital therapeutic devices may be operated to provide rural health care, specially bio-social care. Here, we are reviewing a new public health approach that combines the ancient bio-social medical approach of the Indian Knowledge System with modern medical digital health devices. We have done a two-decade-long research on a piece of the Indian Knowledge System, the Vedic Jiva (living being) Upakara (altruism) Cikitsha (Medical) Tantra (system of knowledge) or Vedic altruism, a near-extinct mind-body-based bio-social medicine approach used in the rural communities of Kamrup, Assam, India. The key metaphysic is the “Avatar”, a Vedic Sanskrit term meaning the emergence (bhava) of a higher being to provide altruistic support to the community under immense stress. Thus the Vedic altruism based public health approach is based on Avatar Kosha, a transient, latent kosha (meaning “sheath” in Sanskrit) that appears only in times of high stress. As per the metaphysics, during stressful times such as epidemic or pandemic, the Avatar Kosha takes on a powerful healing role over the Pancha Kosha system (the five layersof mind-body that surround the Atman (Self) as per Ayurveda) to return the mind-body to homeostasis. Based on this metaphysics, the tantric practitioners of rural Kamrup organized a network of local temple-based healing systems to activate “Avatar Kosha” in the community to combat diseases such as smallpox, cancer, and tuberculosis. The bio-social healing system is a combination of Nigudah yoga-pranayama (yoga focused on breathing), herbal nutrition, and group kirtan chanting in a coordinated manner among the temple networks to induce Sahasa-ojash, a mind-body subtle energy capable of activating the dormant “Avatar Kosha”. Our phenomenological ethnographic research approach indicates that the Avatar Kosha-based healing may have been an indigenous bio-social healing method. In this review paper, we attempt to describe the historical root of the Vedic Altruism-based public health care approach, and our effort to use standard clinical scales such as SF-36, and self-efficacy scale to develop a clinical score to measure Sahasa-Ojash. We also discuss a digital therapeutic device that we found to provide bio-social medical care to a group of patients of the temple complex. This review may stimulate health policymakers to give a new look at indigenous methods of bio-social healing. Understanding the metaphysics behind such methods may help us develop novel telemedicine-based digital therapeutic devices for bio-social healing.This is a review article originally presented and reviewed in the North East Research Conclave, Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati in May 2022 https://iitg.ac.in/rnd/nerc/programs.htm