The world’s major healing traditions are commonly categorized as Eastern, influenced by Asian-Pacific philosophy or Western, molded by Greco-Roman philosophy and later the scientific revolution of the 16th or 17th century. While modern medicine in the west has developed quite independent of religion, Eastern healing traditions that developed in the East before the Christian era are strongly and inextricably founded in the religious and philosophical thoughts of their cultures. While several indigenous healing traditions in the East have been preserved and are being practised today as discrete systems, Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine remain among the most heavily practised traditions in their respective regions. These two oldest extant and expounded systems of traditional medicine dating several thousand years into antiquity are relevant today for all people throughout the world.

It has been argued that Ayurveda is the basis for traditional Tibetan medicine, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and later Greek, Roman and Arabic (Unani) medicines. All these traditional healing methods share a common body-mind-spirit orientation, meaning that disease and health are the result of interaction of all three aspects of being.