Why yoga isn’t just exercise and Ayurveda isn’t just medicine

Ayurveda and Yoga are often described as “alternative” or “complementary” practices. Neither, however, emerged as a supplement to anything else. They were conceived as complete frameworks for living, grounded in an understanding of human beings as biological, psychological, social, and moral entities at once.
Their global popularity, herbal remedies on one hand, yoga studios on the other, has been accompanied by a persistent question: do they really work? Critics point to inconsistent outcomes, limited evidence, or benefits no greater than those offered by modern medicine or conventional exercise. This scepticism is not entirely misplaced, but it may be aimed at the wrong target.
At the heart of both Ayurveda and Yoga lies a foundational assumption that differs from modern biomedical thinking: health is emergent, not additive. It arises from the interaction of diet, daily rhythm, mental discipline, ethical conduct, physical movement, and alignment with one’s environment. None of these elements was intended to function in isolation.
Ayurveda is often reduced in popular use to herbal formulations. Classical Ayurvedic thought, however, places medicines within a broader architecture that includes diet, lifestyle, daily routine, seasonal adaptation, and individual constitution. Medicines are corrective tools, not substitutes for a way of life incompatible with health. When this framework is ignored, outcomes predictably vary.
A similar reduction has occurred with Yoga. Today it is widely practised as a system of physical postures, often indistinguishable from other forms of exercise. Historically, these postures were preparatory rather than central. Breath regulation, ethical restraint, mental discipline, continuity of practice, and inner awareness were equally, often more important. Detached from this framework, Yoga becomes one fitness modality among many.
In both cases, the systems are non-modular by design. Remove key components, and the logic of the whole weakens. More subtly, the nature of what is practised and therefore evaluated changes.
An Ayurvedic remedy used without dietary alignment or lifestyle discipline ceases to be Ayurveda in its own terms. It becomes a herbal compound judged solely by pharmacological effect. When outcomes vary, it is labelled inconsistent. A Yoga posture practised without breath awareness or mental restraint becomes biomechanical movement useful, perhaps, but no longer transformative.
When holistic systems are disassembled, they do not merely become less effective; they become something else entirely. Judging them by standards appropriate to that “something else” may be methodologically neat, but it is conceptually flawed.
Modern evaluation frameworks reinforce this reduction. Clinical science excels at isolating variables. Randomised controlled trials demand standardisation, repeatability, and measurable endpoints. These requirements are not wrong, but they are selective. Holistic systems are personalised, context-sensitive, and adaptive. Approaches dependent on diet, sleep, mental state, seasonal rhythm, and sustained practice resist single-variable testing. When forced into such frameworks, outcomes appear inconsistent not because the system lacks coherence, but because its conditions of operation are stripped away.
Everyday experience bears this out. Patients who take Ayurvedic medicines while maintaining incompatible diets or erratic sleep often report limited benefit. Yoga practitioners who treat postures as workouts and ignore breath and attention frequently plateau. When results fail, the conclusion is simple: it doesn’t work. Yet what may not be working is the fragment, not the system.
Critics argue that if something truly works, it should work even in parts. This reflects a mechanistic view of efficacy. Antibiotics work regardless of lifestyle; Ayurveda and Yoga do not claim to operate that way. Nutrition, psychotherapy, education, and public-health interventions also depend on context and compliance.
Others worry that “holism” becomes an excuse to evade evidence. The concern is legitimate, but misplaced. Acknowledging complexity is not rejecting scrutiny; it calls for appropriate evidence, longitudinal studies, systems research, and practice-based evaluation.
Another objection is that lifestyle-based systems are impractical today. This may be true. Few can fully commit to traditional regimens. But impracticality does not negate conceptual validity; it explains why diluted versions yield diluted results.
Historical context sharpens the point. Classical Ayurvedic texts define health as dynamic equilibrium, not merely absence of disease. Classical Yoga texts devote little space to postures, placing ethical discipline, breath regulation, and mental training at the centre. These systems emerged in cultures where medicine, ethics, and daily life were not institutionally separated.
Colonial modernity disrupted this integration. Indigenous systems were forced into rigid categories—medicine, religion, exercise to be recognised. Techniques were extracted from their conceptual soil to make them legible to dominant knowledge systems. Global wellness markets have since deepened this fragmentation, favouring what can be standardised and sold while sidelining restraint and continuity.
What is assessed today is often not the tradition as conceived, but a residue shaped by colonial reclassification and market convenience. When Ayurveda is reduced to herbal remedies and Yoga to physical exercise, they are shifted into categories they were never meant to occupy.
And yet they remain strikingly popular across the world, despite repeated claims of inadequacy or irrelevance, a persistence that itself invites reflection. Perhaps what many people experience in practice is not a failed technique, but a misjudged whole. To dismiss Ayurveda and Yoga on those grounds is not scepticism but a category error: mistaking integrated ways of living for isolated interventions, and then judging them for failing to behave like the fragments we have turned them into.