I spoke at ICTM 2025, the international conference on traditional medicine, ethnomedicine and natural therapies, with a talk on panchakarma understood as a deep reset of body and mind. I am setting down here what I said, because the content of that talk is still the backbone of how I work and because it deserves more rigour than fits on a slide.
What ICTM 2025 is and why I accepted
The International Conference on Traditional Medicine, Ethnomedicine and Natural Therapies brings together practitioners of traditional medicines from different countries: Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, indigenous ethnomedicine, herbal medicine. It is a forum where those traditions are presented in academic format and discussed among themselves and against biomedical research.
I accepted for one specific reason. Ayurveda is popularised enormously and documented very little, and that asymmetry damages it. When a tradition circulates only in popular format it ends up looking like a catalogue of promises. Presenting it somewhere a person can raise a hand and ask you for the source demands a different kind of precision, and in the long run that protects it.
What I presented
The talk made one simple argument: that panchakarma is not a cleanse, it is a sequence. That its value lies in none of its procedures taken separately but in the order in which they are applied, and that removing the order turns it into something else.
The five points I developed were these. Panchakarma clears ama, the residue of poorly digested food that blocks channels. It rebalances the doshas, returning the organism to its starting point. It strengthens digestion and with it the dhatus, the tissues, which is where vitality is held. It settles the nervous system, and that is where the oil therapies come in. And it opens mental space, which is the hardest part to measure and the one most often reported by people who have been through it.
Panchakarma is not a procedure, it is a sequence. What heals is the order, not each piece on its own.
If I were giving the talk again today I would add a section I did not include then: what has been measured and what has not. That is what I have since set out in panchakarma benefits and what the evidence shows, where I go through the metabolomics study in Scientific Reports and also the claims that circulate without support.
Why panchakarma is a good bridge
Of all the tools in Ayurveda, panchakarma is probably the one that converses best with modern research, and not by accident. It is a bounded protocol, with defined phases and a fixed duration, which allows a before and an after to be measured with a methodological cleanliness that other ayurvedic interventions do not permit.
That does not mean it is validated. It means it is investigable, which is a different and considerably more interesting thing. The full structure is in what panchakarma is, with its three phases and five actions, and the specific pieces I use most are developed separately: basti, the principal answer to vata; shirodhara, which works on the nervous system; and abhyanga, which prepares the ground for everything else.
What I brought back
Two things. First, that interest in traditional medicines is no longer marginal or exotic: there are serious research groups working on it, above all in India, publishing in indexed journals. Second, that the biggest obstacle is not other people's scepticism but our own lack of rigour. Every exaggerated claim circulating about Ayurveda costs credibility to the ones that do hold up.
I came away convinced that the way to defend this medicine is not by promising more but by documenting better. That is what I try to do in every article I write, even when it means saying that something is not demonstrated.
Where to read on
If this talk interests you, what I covered in it is developed in more detail and with verified sources in what panchakarma is and in what the evidence shows about its benefits. The accompanied, structured version of all this is the ayurvedic reset programme.
And if what you want is to know whether a cleanse suits you right now, that is assessed case by case in an ayurveda online consultation, with pulse reading when we are in the same room.