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cott Gerson, MD, attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass, where he received his bachelor's degree in philosophy. He then traveled to Europe and eventually to India where he met one of his early teachers, the highly renown vaidya Dr V N. Pandey, director of the Central Council For Research in Ayurveda and Siddha Medicine. Through this friendship, Dr Gerson began to study Ayurveda and eventually continued his studies at the College of Ayurveda in Trivandrum and the Arya Vaidya Sala in Kottakkal. He was awarded his fellowship in Ayurveda from the Institute of Indian Medicine in Poona, India.
When he returned to the United States he attended medical school once again, this time at the Mount Sinai School ofMedicine in his native New York, and continued his education for 3 additional years with residency positions at several teaching hospitals including New York University Hospital, Bellevue Hospital, and New York Downtown Hospital, completing the requirements for training in the specialty of internal medicine. Dr Gerson founded The National Institute of Ayurvedic Medicine in 1982, and since that time has integrated Ayurveda with conventional allopathic medicine.
He published Ayurveda: The Ancient Indian Healing Art (Element Books) in 1993, Ayurvedic Principles of Weight Management (Lotus Press) in 2001, and will publish The Comprehensive Textbook of Ayurvedic Medicinal Plants in early 2002. He also serves as the executive director of the Foundation for Holistic Medical Research, a nonprofit organization that conducts complementary and alternative medicine research.
Alternative Therapies interviewed Dr Gerson in his office at the National Institute of Ayurvedic Medicine in Brewster, NY
Alternative Therapies: What brought you to Ayurvedic medicine?
Scott Gerson: When I was quite young, living in the Bronx in a predominantly Jewish-Italian neighborhood, an Indian family moved into our apartment complex. They were the only Indian family in the entire community and everybody shunned them because they looked and spoke differently, and the smells emanating from their apartment were different. But you couldn't keep me away. I was constantly there. They had a son who was a few years younger than me and I remember sitting on his grandfather's lap-I was on one knee and his grandson was on the other-and listening to stories from the Mahabarata, a famous epic tale in the Hindu...