What Is Ayurveda? Doshas, Common Herbs, and Buying Safely

Some Ayurvedic medicines, especially those made with metals or minerals, have caused lead and mercury poisoning. Tell your doctor about any Ayurvedic product you take, and be extra careful if you are pregnant, breastfeeding or giving it to a child.

What is Ayurveda?

Ayurveda is one of the oldest medical systems in the world. Its ideas grew out of the Vedas, and its best-known classical texts are the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita (Jaiswal and Williams, Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine, 2017). It is still practiced widely and remains one of India's traditional systems of health care (NCCIH).

Ayurvedic care is broader than taking herbs. A practitioner considers your constitution, health history, lifestyle and surroundings (Jaiswal and Williams, 2017), then combines diet, exercise, lifestyle changes and natural products into a plan (NCCIH). Most remedies come from plants, but some traditional formulas also contain animal products, minerals or metals.

In the United States, about 240,000 adults use Ayurvedic medicine, according to NCCIH. No state licenses Ayurvedic practitioners, and there is no significant national regulation of Ayurvedic training, so it is worth asking any practitioner about their education.

The three doshas: vata, pitta and kapha

Ayurveda teaches that everything is made of five elements: space, air, fire, water and earth. In the body, these combine into three doshas, the working forces said to run physiology (Jaiswal and Williams, 2017).

• Vata is linked with movement: transport inside cells, fluid and electrolyte balance, and the removal of wastes. Dryness is said to increase it, and it is associated with breaking-down (catabolic) processes.
• Pitta is linked with heat and transformation: body temperature, hunger, thirst and metabolism. Heat is said to aggravate it.
• Kapha is linked with structure and lubrication, such as cushioning the joints, and with building-up (anabolic) processes. Sweet and fatty foods are said to increase it.

Each person is believed to be born with a particular mix of the three, called their prakriti, which stays the same for life. Classical Ayurveda describes ten prakriti types depending on which dosha or doshas dominate (Gupta et al., Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine, 2025). Illness is understood as an imbalance, and treatment aims to bring the doshas back toward that person's own baseline.

These are concepts from a traditional framework. They do not map neatly onto anatomy or lab tests, and they are best understood as Ayurveda's own way of describing the body.

What is an Ayurveda dosha test?

The "Ayurveda test" or "dosha quiz" you find online is a self-scored questionnaire. It asks a series of questions about your body and habits, then turns the answers into percentages of vata, pitta and kapha and names your dominant type. Practitioners may use a questionnaire too, but usually as one part of a wider assessment that can include a structured interview (Dunlap et al., 2017).

These quizzes are fun and can prompt useful reflection on your habits, but they are not validated diagnostic tests:

• When researchers gave 19 adults three different online constitution questionnaires twice, a month apart, the numeric scores were fairly consistent, but the final dosha label often changed. Questions meant to measure the same dosha did not hang together well, especially for kapha (Dunlap et al., Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine, 2017).
• A 2025 scoping review of 32 studies of prakriti assessment tools found that only a few questionnaires had been checked for both reliability and validity, and that only one of the eleven device-based methods had been validated (Gupta et al., 2025). The authors concluded that questionnaires, while the best-studied option, still have limited reliability.

So treat a quiz result as a starting point for conversation, not a diagnosis. It cannot rule out a medical problem, and it is no reason to delay seeing a doctor about symptoms.

Common Ayurvedic herbs and what research looks at

Ayurveda uses hundreds of plants. These are the ones customers ask us about most. Traditional uses come from Ayurvedic practice; the research column describes what modern studies have examined, not proven benefits.

What does the research say about Ayurveda?

Ayurveda has been written about in many scholarly articles, yet only a small number of clinical trials have appeared in Western medical journals, according to NCCIH. The best-known results are modest:

• A 2013 trial in 440 people with knee osteoarthritis found two Ayurvedic plant-extract formulas eased pain and improved function about as well as glucosamine or the drug celecoxib.
• A small NCCIH-funded pilot study of 43 people with rheumatoid arthritis found a classical Ayurvedic treatment and the drug methotrexate performed similarly.
• Some trials of Ayurvedic formulas for type 2 diabetes look positive, but reviewers have said their designs are too weak for firm conclusions.

Individual herbs have their own evidence. Ashwagandha has several supportive trials for stress and sleep (NCCIH). For most other herbs, the research is still early. A fair summary is that Ayurveda includes some promising remedies and useful lifestyle habits, but few have been tested to the standard of modern drugs.

Safety: heavy metals, interactions and buying wisely

Heavy metals. A traditional branch of Ayurvedic pharmacy called rasa shastra deliberately combines herbs with metals, minerals and gems. Researchers at Boston University bought Ayurvedic medicines online and tested 193 of them. About one in five (20.7%) contained detectable lead, mercury or arsenic, and every one of those exceeded at least one standard for acceptable daily intake. US-made products were just as likely to contain metals as Indian-made ones (21.7% versus 19.5%). Rasa shastra products were more than twice as likely to contain metals as others, and three-quarters of the metal-containing products claimed to follow Good Manufacturing Practices (Saper et al., JAMA, 2008). NCCIH also cites a 2015 survey in which 40 percent of people using Ayurvedic preparations had elevated blood lead.

How to buy more safely:

• Choose brands that say they test each batch for heavy metals, and ask the company for results if you are unsure. A "GMP" claim on its own is not enough.
• Be cautious with products that list metals or minerals as ingredients, unless your practitioner and doctor both agree and you know how they were tested.
• Prefer single herbs or short, clearly labeled formulas over long lists of unnamed ingredients.
• Do not assume a US website means a clean product: in the JAMA study, 95% of the metal-containing products were sold by US sites.

Interactions and health conditions. Herbs act like medicines. Triphala may raise side effects of drugs broken down by the CYP3A4 and CYP2D6 liver enzymes (MSKCC). Ashwagandha may interact with thyroid, diabetes, blood pressure, sedative and immune-suppressing medicines, and is not advised in pregnancy (NCCIH). Licorice containing glycyrrhizin can cause dangerous heart rhythm problems in large or long-term amounts (NCCIH). Tell every clinician you see what you take.

Do not delay care. NCCIH advises against using Ayurveda to put off seeing a doctor about a medical problem. If you are pregnant or nursing, check with your provider first, since some products may contain harmful ingredients.

Find it at William's

We keep a short shelf of well-known Ayurvedic products from established brands:

• Organic India triphala, 90 capsules: the classic three-fruit blend in capsule form, certified organic.
• Planetary Herbals ashwagandha, 300 mg veg capsules: a standardized ashwagandha root extract (the KSM-66 branded extract).
• Organic India Tulsi Ashwagandha tea, 18 bags: a gentle way to try tulsi and ashwagandha together as a daily cup.
• Planetary Ayurvedics shilajit extract, 500 mg veg capsules: the maker states these capsules are tested for heavy metals and mold.

Not sure where to start? Our staff can talk through what each product is, and we encourage you to bring any questions about your health or medications to your doctor or pharmacist.

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