Educator Spotlight: a conversation with Dr. Basmaa Ali

Dr. Basmaa Ali is as dynamic as is her experience in the field of Medicine. Just one conversation with her is enough to know that she carries a wealth of medical and health-related wisdom from across cultures. Trained initially as a medical doctor from King Edward Medical College, her journey has taken many fateful turns from completing a residency in Internal Medicine from the University of Illinois, Chicago, to training in the practice of Ayurveda with her colleague, Pratibha Shah. She is also a Clinical Instructor at the Harvard Medical School.

“Health and Wellness – A Manual”, the course she developed with LUMSx, translates her rich knowledge and experience into a concise manual that could be life-changing for learners who choose to take it. We have her with us to offer a glimpse into what the course offers.

Dr Basmaa, you have quite a unique blend of expertise. Could you share the story behind what influenced you to incorporate Ayurveda into your practice?

Well, my first most important teacher was my paternal grandmother, who was 104 when she died. As a young girl, I always struggled to keep a healthy weight and I remember I would eat rice with a little bit of milk, a bit of sugar and a banana on top in front of her as a snack. She would tell me that all these ingredients make you gain weight to which I would respond, “What are you talking about? This is just 250 calories .

Ironically, the year she died, the landmark paper that showed that behind this massive explosion of obesity in the US was refined carbohydrates was released. After which I went back and I revisited all the things she had ever told me. My grandmother was a woman of her times and a very dynamic person. She knew all the mushrooms that grew in Punjab as well as their medicinal properties. She could treat most common illnesses from her pantry with just dry spices.

I’m a Western trained physician – I went to medical school in King Edward, did my training at University of Illinois at Chicago – but by my 30th year when my grandmother died, I had come to realize that there was a lot of wisdom that you can learn just from living 100 years. I eventually sought out Dr. Pratibha Shah who was a well-known  Ayurvedic practitioner, and she and I practiced together for five years.
Then once you begin your medical practice, your biggest teachers are always your patients.

What benefits did Ayurvedic practices bring into your patient’s lives? 

Ayurveda admits upfront that we are different. I have a brother who could eat anything and still be rake thin while I would gain weight much more easily. I could work all day and not feel tired while my sister would be done after working a couple of hours. You can attribute these to character traits for a little while, but then you notice from research that the DNA for these people is also different.

In Western medicine, we start with the very flawed assumption that all of us are the same, and therefore that the same solutions work for all of us. That may work for infectious diseases like pneumonia and TB but it does not work as effectively when you are aiming to achieve a healthy lifestyle. Decisions such as what food you should eat, how much work you can take on or how much should you exercise, all need to be made keeping in view of who you are.

Any success stories?

There was a patient of mine – a woman who was a consultant in Boston. She came to me because she had insomnia for which she couldn’t find a solution. This woman had two kids, worked full-time and had a husband who was also a consultant, traveling five days a week and working fulltime. She was one of my very conscientious patients – ate what she was supposed to eat, exercised, made time for hobbies and all of that. She started experiencing insomnia after she had her second child. At the end, I asked her to write a diary and bring me everything that she did from the time she woke up till the time she went to bed for about five days.  I looked at it and saw that she had scheduled away every minute of every hour. I told her, “You must start working part-time. That is why you can’t sleep because you have no room in the schedule to wind down.”

It took six months to be convinced of this and we got her work hours down to 75% so that she was not traveling every week. Within six weeks, her sleep was back to where it was. Also, since her second child, she had gained these 15 pounds that she couldn’t lose no matter what. 12 weeks later, those 15 pounds were also gone.
This is an example of where you just need to know the person well and tailor their life to who they are.

What do Ayurvedic practices have to say about mental illnesses?

Some people just have more mental health issues to deal with than others. About 2% of people have what we call endogenous anxiety and depression, which means that they’re just born with more anxiety and depression.

Anxiety was an important tool when we lived in the African Savannah – it helped people survive and protect each other. Depression drives people to action. These are evolutionary tools that have been retained in humanity for a reason. To fight them as an enemy is counterproductive. You have to acknowledge their presence and then come up with strategies to deal with them.

How does Ayurveda personalize medicine?

Ayurveda says that there are three energies. There’s Vata where all the imagination and creativity comes from but also where all the lack of respect for routine comes from. Vata energy is what makes one prone to anxiety, insomnia, and just general angst. There’s the Kapha energy, which is the energy of the person who sits on the sofa, watches TV, eats chips and thinks that that is the epitome of joy.

And finally, we have the Pitta energy, more commonly known as the type A personality – that person who is like, go, go, go, let’s get this done. There’s no bad body type or good body type and very few of us are just one of these energies. Good health is a process of balancing all three and most people have two energies present and one energy which is lacking. For example, you might be Vata-Pitta and you need to work on your Kapha energy. If you’re lucky and naturally have a balanced body type, you’ll still need to make choices that keep your body in balance.

Think of your inherent energy make-up as your hardware and the lifestyle choices you need to make as softwares to balance your energies. So just like a Mac and a Windows need different softwares to support their hardware, different people need different life choices and habits to achieve better health. How well you use your lifestyle to balance these energies equates to how healthy are.

How much of this information is encapsulated in Health and Wellness – A Manual, the course you’ve created with LUMSx?

All of it. What we’re talking about today is a very abbreviated version of all that is there in the course. You’ll be able to know much more about the Ayurveda body types as well as discover your own unique energy make-up. We will walk you through preparing a care plan tailored to your needs. You will learn to use your gut as your friend and food as medicine. You will discover how to regularize your sleep cycle, manage stress and exercise according to your body type.

The course is an excellent starting point but there is so much in self care that I can’t say that this is the only course you will ever need. However, it effectively sets you up to be the pilot of your own health in a very comprehensive fashion.

What were the main motivations behind creating this course?

I ran Zanjabee, my practice in Boston, for 10 years and these were things I repeated in my exam room again and again. I often used to joke with my medical assistants that I should just tape them as orientation videos for any new patients. I wanted to create a course with a mixture of best practices from both Western medicine and Ayurveda that was accessible for people to learn from and live better lives. I firmly believe that knowledge does not change behavior. What changes behavior is when we are moved emotionally and when a story touches us in such a way that our emotional being incorporates it.

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman says that there’s a big elephant, and on top of the elephant is the elephant keeper, and the elephant keeper has a small rod. So the elephant keeper has a vantage point to look further out and he has a small rod. But if the elephant doesn’t want to go that way, the elephant keeper would have no choice in the matter.

Our emotional lives are the elephant and our cognitive mind, the mind that knows, analyzes, and says, “this is good, this is bad”, is the elephant keeper.
So the cognitive mind can give you direction, but unless the elephant shifts, you’re not going to have a change in behavior. Our goal in developing this course was that people should change their behavior.

Who is this course for?

For anybody who wants to look after themselves. This is why the course is called Health and Wellness – A Manual. When you buy a car or a washing machine, it comes with a manual which tells you how to look after it. But human beings just come into the world and we don’t have any rules about how to look after ourselves. This is a basic attempt at helping you understand the tendencies of your body, and how you can balance them out so that you have a rich life.

The purpose of life is not just to live. The purpose of life is to live richly, to sleep deeply, to feel deeply and yet be able to recover from that, to have rich relationships with your family, your friends and your children so that when you die, you’re a little bit sad at dying. Not too much, but just a little sad about leaving your life behind. If you are somebody who thinks that there’s a particular aspect in their life that can be improved by being more in touch with who you are and living more in line with balancing your inner constitution, then this course is for you!