Practice
Alongside my BAMS degree, I spent five years learning Ayurveda the traditional way, under Vaidya Ashutosh Patankar, a Nadi Vaidya and Panchabhautik Chikitsak, and Vaidya Nikhil Pensde.
This was guru-shishya parampara: knowledge passed directly from teacher to student through close, daily mentorship. There was no distance between theory and practice. I was with real patients from the very first week.
Taking it West
When I moved to the UK, I didn't look for an Ayurveda clinic to join. I went to clinics that had never offered Ayurveda at all, and built it there from the ground up.
Not a treatment room added to a menu, but a fully working branch of care, with its own protocols, patient pathways, and a team able to run it.
It was not easy.
Founders asked hard questions. Investors wanted proof before they would commit. Most people in the community had never heard of Ayurveda, and those who had often knew it only as massage oils and myths. There was no waiting list, no reputation, and no one asking for what I had come to offer.
So I stopped waiting for people to come to the clinic, and went to them.
I sat across the table from founders and investors and built the case, step by step, using the AIDA framework (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) to take them from scepticism to commitment. I walked into community centres and gave talks to rooms full of curious, doubtful faces. I answered the same questions again and again, translating centuries of knowledge into words a Western patient could understand and trust.
Then came the part no talk can replace. Patients came in, followed the treatment, and felt the difference. They told their families. Their families told friends. Slowly, the doubt turned into demand.
Built to keep running
AYO Clinic · Safe Healing Centre · Karma Centre
In each clinic, I set up the branch, wrote the protocols, saw the patients, and trained the people who would carry it forward. Then I handed it over.
Three clinics. Sixteen months. Built from nothing, against every doubt.
All three are still running today.
The work, noticed
I did all of this as an international student, new to the country, building trust from the ground up. Along the way, the work was recognised.
Freelance 101 Award
For building Ayurvedic practice across three UK clinics as an international student.
SPARK Award · Best Startup Idea
The awards matter to me, but not as trophies. They are proof that the case for Ayurveda in the West can be made, and won.