Choosing ayurveda as a health care practice in Argentina

Ayurveda is an ancient Indian medicine that was introduced in Argentina in the late ´80s, and whose popularity has been on the rise among middle and upper class sectors. As a holistic approach that integrates physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions, it encompasses self-care through lifestyle changes and treatments tailored to the patient´s biotype. Treatments are provided by local physicians and other health professionals specialized in Ayurveda, and they are neither covered by the social security nor by private insurance plans. They are not part of the public health services, either. Therefore, patients have to pay for them out-of-pocket, and their costs are considerably high. Additionally, to sustain a lifestyle according to Ayurvedic precepts, their local followers usually need to buy expensive products (such as organic food, and Ayurvedic herbal products manufactured abroad) and devote time and “effort” to daily routines of self-care.  In sum, Ayurveda is a health care option available to the privileged social sectors. On the one hand, by stressing a healthy lifestyle and individual responsibility in health maintenance and improvement, Ayurveda resonates with the normative discourse of biomedicine. But, on the other hand, it represents an alternative to the dominant health care discourse because it goes beyond the physical body to understand health and illness processes, and also because some self-care practices are counter-hegemonic in the local context (to follow a vegetarian diet, to use natural remedies instead of pharmaceuticals, etc.). Based on in-depth interviews we conducted with twenty patients and followers of Ayurveda in Metropolitan Buenos Aires in 2010 and 2011, we analyze why they got interested in this healing approach and, given the diversity in how users of Ayurveda engaged with this foreign medical tradition, how they evaluated the possibilities to sustain the practice of Ayurveda in the local socio-cultural environment.