Centerpiece : Rx: A Mantra a Day : A 6,000-year-old system of medicine from India is being practiced in Oxnard as the way to perfect health. Critics say it’s just an elaborate marketing scheme conjured up by a cult.

It doesn’t take a medical expert to figure out that patients at the Center for Perfect Health are treated a bit differently.

Take Dr. Philip Lichtenfeld, one of the clinic’s consulting physicians. Thoughtfully placing the tips of his fingers on a patient’s wrist, Lichtenfeld begins by diagnosing an imbalance in the person’s vata , pitta or kapha .

Then, quite matter-of-factly, comes his Rx: Transcendental Meditation twice daily, a combination of herbs from India, regular hot oil treatments and aroma therapy as needed.

If Lichtenfeld’s bedside manner weren’t enough of a tip-off, there’s also the medical clinic’s setting. Step outside and the golf course is on your left. Turn right and you’re at the pool.

“Right now we’re just starting out, and we’re mainly just offering educational seminars and setting up consultations with ayurvedic doctors,” said Diana Makeig, executive director of the county’s first ayurvedic medical center, a two-story cottage on the grounds of the Radisson Suite Hotel in Oxnard.

“By August, though, we’re hoping to have everything that the center in Pacific Palisades has,” she added. “We’ll have a full-time ayurvedic physician and nurse, music therapy, aroma therapy, color therapy and the warm oil treatments” called panchakarma .

Since the Oxnard center opened to the public in March, consulting ayurvedic physicians from Santa Barbara, Encino and Pacific Palisades have treated about 40 local patients, Makeig said. And just about every day, employees at the hotel’s front desk say, someone calls to ask what ayurvedic medicine is all about.

But figuring out the best way to answer that question isn’t so easy.

Ayurveda is a 6,000-year-old health system from India. Its proponents say that ayurvedic medicine has recently been modified and introduced in the United States. Across the country, advocates say, ayurvedic medicine is being practiced by more than 600 Western-trained physicians. Most of the physicians say they can diagnose illnesses just by feeling a patient’s pulse. They also say that patients who follow ayurveda’s 20-pronged approach to living--which includes everything from meditation and herbs to music and wearing expensive gemstones--will experience perfect health, happiness and well-being.

Some of the nation’s premier medical journals and consumer watchdog organizations describe ayurveda as something quite different. Ayurveda, they say, is actually an elaborate marketing scheme by members of a meditation cult whose leader is the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In an attempt to recruit new members, they assert, practitioners have used deceptive means to establish credibility in the Western medical community and they have cited unproven and now seriously questionable medical studies.

“I just say that what it is is debatable,” a desk clerk at the Radisson said as he pulled out a map of the grounds and directed a visitor to the Center for Perfect Health office down the road. “They have all kinds of philosophies about different things.”

It is a Friday afternoon and Makeig is busy making last-minute arrangements for the center’s upcoming monthly lecture and ayurvedic dinner, to be held at the Radisson on Sunday. It is a chance, she says, to introduce people in the community to Eastern medicine--through their intellects and through their taste buds.

Makeig, who has no formal medical training but studied holistic health at the Maharishi University in Iowa, says the presentation will barely scratch the surface. It will, however, offer attendees an overview of the beliefs of ayurveda:

* That each person generally is governed by one of the three main doshas , or “mind-body types.”

* That ayurvedic physicians can determine if a person is primarily vata , pitta or kapha --as well as detect conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease to cancer--just by feeling the patient’s pulse.

* That having an unbalanced dosha can lead to illness.

* That using the 20 approaches to ayurveda--the most vital ones being Transcendental Meditation and various patented herbs and food supplements--can balance the doshas , bring about perfect health and create inner peace.

Why meditation?

“The benefits of TM already have been scientifically proven,” says Tom Makeig, Diana’s husband. Tom says he doesn’t have a direct hand in running the Center for Perfect Health. But as a longtime meditator, he says he knows the benefits of it firsthand.

Last year, after he and his wife moved to Ventura County from Iowa, he opened a Transcendental Meditation center in Camarillo. Since then, he has passed on information about ayurveda to several of his students.

“There have been a lot of studies about the ayurvedic products too,” he says. Since he began taking an ayurvedic food supplement called Maharishi Amrit Kalash, Tom Makeig feels he has “much more clarity and a greater sense of well-being and happiness.”

The product, he says, “has been shown to scavenge free radicals (cell-damaging agents in the blood) and is good for the immune system and longevity. It’s an ancient recipe. . . . The more people who take it, the better society will be.”

He isn’t the only one who sees value in the food supplement, which costs about $85 for a month’s supply. A brochure that Tom Makeig hands to a visitor quotes Dr. David Doner, a Santa Barbara physician who practices ayurvedic medicine and has treated patients at the Center for Perfect Health. The formula, it says, contains “an enormous amount of intelligence. . . . It helps protect us from stress and creates a sense of happiness, balance and harmony.”

Lichtenfeld adds: “I don’t know if we have anything analogous in Western medicine. . . . It strengthens life.”

There are other ayurvedic products as well. Rasayanas , the brochure says, are traditional herbal formulas “to awaken the full potential of mind and body.” Different formulas have been designed for men, women, students and “people who do mental work.” For some reason, the one for men--at $28.50 for 60 tablets--is about $10 more than the rest.

There also are herbal seasonings, teas, aroma oils, music tapes and compact disks “designed specifically to balance each mind-body type.” And ayurvedic skin creams. And skin care oils. And something called Blissful Rest I and II to promote “a quality of sleep that is refreshing and rejuvenating.”

And ordering is easy. There is an 800 number.

Diana Makeig has a stack of the brochures next to her desk. She doesn’t know how many people will come on Sunday, but turnouts so far, she says, have been good. Still, it won’t be anywhere near the number of people--between 500 and 800 by various accounts--who showed up a few months ago to hear Dr. Deepak Chopra when he came to town, Makeig says.

But then, Chopra draws in an audience because he is both a respected Boston endocrinologist and one of the two men most responsible for bringing this ancient knowledge to the public, Makeig says.

In his book “Return of the Rishi,” published in 1988, he wrote about his onetime overriding belief in Western science, his eventual disenchantment and his exploration of ayurvedic medicine. In his best-selling book, “Perfect Health,” published last year, he wrote what many followers have called the bible of ayurvedic medicine.

Snagging a guy as busy as Chopra was no minor accomplishment, either. The fee to attend one of his one-day seminars on “quantum healing” is usually $100. He also teaches two “special” ayurvedic health techniques around the country. One is on how to concentrate on the heart while meditating. The other involves a special “health mantra” he gives to patients. Each technique costs $700 to learn.

“He was brilliant,” said Elizabeth Reynolds, a massage therapist from Ojai who paid $95 to hear Chopra speak in Oxnard in March. “If your vata is imbalanced, you can eat something sweet to calm you down. . . . Some of the scientific facts blow your mind. It is so far beyond what we commonly think of healing.”

But even Chopra would be considered small potatoes compared to the man widely credited with single-handedly saving ayurveda from being lost to the world. From the look of things, he won’t be available for speaking engagements anytime in the near future.

Ten years ago, physicians such as Lichtenfeld and Doner had never heard of ayurveda (pronounced eye-yur-VAY-dah and meaning “the science of life”). Even in India, where ayurveda was set down in Sanskrit texts more than 2,000 years ago, it wasn’t faring much better, followers say. Passed down orally over generations and then suppressed at one time by the British, its true essence, practitioners say, had faded.

“Ayurveda was still around, but it was down to ‘take an herb and call me in the morning,’ ” said Dr. Brian Rees, medical director of the Maharishi Ayurveda Medical Center in Pacific Palisades and a consulting physician at the Center for Perfect Health. “True ayurveda had deteriorated.”

But then came the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For those in need of a memory jog, he is the same guru who, thanks to a little help from his friends the Beatles, popularized Transcendental Meditation during the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s, practitioners say, the Maharishi approached some of India’s leading sources of ayurvedic knowledge, gathered information about how the health of everyone in the world could be enhanced and eventually came up with 20 “lost” approaches to ayurvedic medicine.

“Everything he (the Maharishi) does involves consciousness,” said Charlie Heath, a Transcendental Meditation instructor and practitioner of maharishi jyotish , a kind Vedic astrology that is one of the Maharishi’s 20 approaches to ayurveda.

Like many believers in ayurvedic medicine, Heath said he first found out about the Eastern system of health through a newsletter for “graduates” of Transcendental Meditation. In 1986, he learned, the Maharishi had established the Maharishi Ayur-Veda Assn. of America in Massachusetts. Followers say the Maharishi inserted a hyphen in the word ayurveda to distinguish it from the ayurvedic medicine of the past.

“Maharishi Mahesh Yogi revived ayurveda into its purest form,” Diana Makeig said. “The clinics that are opening now--the one in Pennsylvania, ours, the one in Pacific Palisades--all are Maharishi clinics.”

Makeig said she “made a commitment” to the association to start a clinic in Ventura County and jumped at the chance to have it in the Radisson, after being approached by the hotel’s owner, Glen Hartman. Hartman, who reportedly has gone to the ayurvedic center in Pacific Palisades on several occasions, refused to comment on either his affiliation with Maharishi ayur-veda or his arrangement with the clinic.

“They want to open a thousand clinics,” Makeig said of the association.

“They’d like one on every corner,” Rees said.

Whether that desire will go unchallenged remains to be seen. Faced with increased criticism and charges that Maharishi ayur-veda is little more than a shrewd marketing scheme, many practitioners say they are feeling the heat.

“There are people who are trying to undermine what we are doing and there’s also a lot of skepticism,” said physician Lichtenfeld, who added that ayurvedic doctors don’t “throw away” their training or access to technology, but rather view Maharishi ayur-veda as a “valuable adjunct.”

“I’m not saying skepticism is bad,” he said, “but blindly rejecting something is.”

Dr. George Lundberg knows about ayurvedic medicine. And, as editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., he says he’s not blindly rejecting anything.

But ayurvedic practitioners, he charges, are interested in a lot more than just achieving health and inner peace. They also want to sell it.

“Maharishi ayur-veda is a marketing method . . . to promote a broad product line of information, various herbs and other chemicals worldwide,” Lundberg said in a recent telephone interview.

Lundberg was introduced to the ayurvedic medicine when three Indian-born physicians--including Chopra--wrote about it in an article that JAMA printed last year. Afterward, JAMA printed letters from some of the physicians who practice ayurvedic medicine.

“The elements of an ayurvedic examination give me insight into who my patients are and what disease afflictions they may develop,” one physician wrote.

“As a board-certified neurologist, I have found that my training in Maharishi ayur-veda has been absolutely invaluable,” wrote another.

But even those letters weren’t enough to keep editors of one of the nation’s premier medical journals from reaching a new conclusion: They had been hoodwinked.

All articles submitted to the magazine are subject to a review that involves being read and sometimes researched by the author’s professional peers. Nonetheless, Lundberg said, the controversial nature of modern ayurvedic medicine--as well as the authors’ possible conflict of interest--wasn’t known at the time of publication.

Editors also had not recognized what Lundberg called the “great difference” between ancient ayurveda and Maharishi ayur-veda. The latter, he said, has “a national following and a great deal of economic impact.”

“These people (the authors) did not make clear how they would gain financially from these (ayur-veda herbal) products they were writing about,” Lundberg said. “We . . . subsequently learned that there was a financial interest.”

Chopra, for his part, has denied that he stands to gain financially from anything printed in JAMA about Maharishi ayur-veda. The sale of his books alone, he said, keeps him quite comfortable.

But Andrew Skolnick, JAMA’s associate editor, thinks differently. After learning that until 1988, Chopra had been the president and only stockholder of Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International, the sole distributor of Maharishi ayur-veda products such as herbs and food supplements, Skolnick wrote an unprecedented, seven-page attack on Maharishi ayur-veda and on Transcendental Meditation.

Published several months after the initial article appeared, Skolnick’s piece charged that the Transcendental Meditation movement was a cult, that Maharishi ayur-veda was only an attempt to boost lagging enrollment in Transcendental Meditation and that the so-called “scientific studies” cited by members were actually conducted by Transcendental Meditation members. Any scientific claims about ayurvedic products, he added, are completely unproven.

“This campaign appears to be aimed at earning at least the look of scientific respectability for the TM movement,” Skolnick wrote, “as well as making profits from many products and services that carry the Maharishi’s name.”

Lichtenfeld, along with many other ayurvedic physicians, denies it.

“I wouldn’t say there is no marketing of (Maharishi) ayur-veda, but I certainly don’t see a discrepancy between that and Western medicine,” Lichtenfeld said. “I have pharmaceutical reps calling me all the time. Why is it OK to do that with pharmaceutical drugs with potentially outrageous side effects, and not OK to market something natural with essentially no side effects? It sounds like a double standard to me.”

Lichtenfeld added that, as a physician, he gains “nothing financially” by recommending ayurvedic products or meditation--and does so only because he believes that both are beneficial to patients. That sentiment is shared by Rees of the Pacific Palisades center.

“I have yet to see any definition of cult that TM would fit in,” said Rees, who studied meditation under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1973. “And as for a lack of research about TM, you can find all kinds of changes that occur. No field is untouched by the ramifications of TM.”

Rees, however, also came under JAMA’s fire for writing a letter to the magazine in support of Transcendental Meditation. He failed to mention that he was medical director of a Maharishi ayur-veda center or that it shares a parking lot with the Transcendental Meditation center next door.

“So it shares a parking lot,” Rees said recently. “We are not in bed together. It’s a relationship. We’re not trying to hide it.”

So far, consumer watchdog groups tend to side with Skolnick. Dr. William Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud in Loma Linda, said he sees nothing wrong with meditation in and of itself. Disguising it as medicine is a different matter, he said.

“This is Hinduism masquerading as science,” he said.

Jarvis also rejected out of hand the idea that physicians can diagnose an illness simply by feeling a person’s pulse, likening it to “reading tea leaves.”

Although there may be anecdotal “success stories” about seriously ill patients who have been treated with only ayurvedic medicine, he said there also are no studies to confirm it.

“As for the talk about ‘perfect health,’ that’s the typical gobbledygook of quackery,” he said. “I still don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. Does it mean I will win the Olympics this summer?”

Perhaps a more pressing question is what will become of ayurvedic clinics such as the Center for Perfect Health.

For now, Jarvis said, chances are good that the response by the public will be the greatest determining factor.

“If these people are physicians, they are judged by the Medical Practice Act. And in California, a physician can do almost anything,” he said.

Which is just fine with people such as Nancy Shuman, an Oxnard homemaker and Transcendental Meditation graduate who said she is thrilled that the ayurvedic center is opening in Oxnard. For the last three years, she said, she has had to make the drive to Pacific Palisades.

The one time she didn’t, she was unhappy with her treatment.

“I went to this one doctor with a sore throat and he gave me Tylenol with codeine and an inhaler with steroids in it. The focus (in Western medicine) is on blasting out the disease instead of working with the body’s own intelligence to create health.

“I don’t believe in that,” she said. “And once you’ve had a taste of ayurvedic medicine, it’s hard to go back to anything else.”

Vata Matter You?

Feeling out of sorts? Under the weather? Can’t pinpoint what’s wrong? Perhaps your doshas aren’t balanced.

Practitioners of the ancient Indian health system of ayurveda say there are three main doshas , or mind-body types: vata , pitta and kapha . Many people have one dominant dosha , although it’s possible to have a little of each.

What type are you? Below is a partial list of the different characteristics of the doshas as well as what can go wrong, described by Dr. Deepak Chopra in his book “Perfect Health.”

* Vata: People of this type tend to be the thinnest of the three builds, often with narrow shoulders and thin hips. Difficult for them to gain weight, they perform activities quickly, have irregular hunger, tend to have enthusiastic personalities and wide mood swings. Mental and physical energy often comes in bursts and they tire easily. When balanced, vatas are happy, imaginative, energetic and have acute responses to sound and touch.

When the vata dosha is out of balance, nervous disorders often appear, including tremors, anxiety and a hollow feeling of depression. Worry, insomnia, constipation and nervous stomach also are common symptoms.

* Pitta: This type tends to be medium in size, well-proportioned and maintains a fairly steady weight. Pittas are said to have sharp intellects and good powers of concentration, and their innate tendency is to manage their money, actions and energies efficiently. They often make good public speakers because they are articulate and have strong opinions. When balanced, pitta types are ambitious, joyous, sweet, confident and brave.

A pitta imbalance often shows up as irritability, impatience, criticism and a hot temper. People of this type develop heat fatigue easily. Because their skin is easily irritated, they tend to develop rashes, inflammation and acne. There also is a tendency to develop digestive trouble.

* Kapha: These people tend to have sturdy, heavy frames as well as great strength and stamina. They often have wide shoulders and hips and gain weight easily. Kapha types are often slow learners but retain information well. They have a relaxed attitude and graceful movements. When balanced, kapha people are affectionate, tolerant and forgiving. They are also steady in a crisis and anchor others around them.

When out of balance, kapha types frequently develop problems relating to mucous membranes, such as sinus congestion, chest colds, allergies and asthma. Painful joints aren’t uncommon. They also become stubborn, dull, lethargic and lazy. Although the symptoms tend to be worse in late winter and spring, kapha types generally fare poorly in cold or damp weather.