Introduction

In the Hindu epic Ramayana, in the great war in Lanka against the demon Ravana, Shri Lakshmana gets injured. To cure him, Shri Rama requests Hanumana to fly to the Himalayas in search of a herb (Sanjivany) on mount Dronagiri in the Himalayas. Unable to locate the exact herb, Hanumana brings the whole mountain to Lanka so that Ayurveda practitioners in Lanka can heal Lakshmana. Through time, Sanjivany has become mythical today and nobody knows for perfection which of today's herbs it refers to.

Ayurveda is a traditional Indian medicine, the practice of which dates back 1000s of years. Ayurveda believes that diseases could be healed by a balance of 'doshas' or elements that make up the body, namely 'vata', 'pitta', and 'kapha' (air, fire, and phlegm) and one of the tools it uses to perform this is administration of herbs as medicine. However, each herb contains multiple chemical compounds which are digested by the body, absorbed in the blood, and transported to the various parts of the body. These processes can be understood using laws of physics and written as mathematical equations, following which they could be simulated on a computer.

In current use, Ayurveda declares a disease cured by observation of disappearance of symptoms rather than an analysis of disease identifiers disappearing. Mathematically describing the outcome of an administration of a herb can help develop an accurate and precise understanding of how an Ayurvedic drug helps cure a disease. In scientific parlance, this process of mathematically describing a physical phenomenon is called modeling, and using the model to predict what might happen in an untested scenario is called a simulation.

This blog and post marks the beginning of a quest to understand Ayurvedic treatments in depth using mathematical equations and laws of nature. As Sanjivany is a popular mythical herb, I chose to call the blog by this name. The purpose of this blog is to generate interest in the unexplored field of mathematical modeling of ayurvedic drugs, entice collaborations, take criticisms, and improve the concepts explained above.