As the world continues to adapt itself to the ‘new normal’, one of the critical learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic has been the importance of a robust immune system and overall good health. Hence, globally there’s an attempt to explore practices that boost the body’s immunity and encourage an overall healthier lifestyle. This has evoked an amplified interest in alternative therapies like naturopathy and yoga. According to one of the leading naturopathy institutes, Jindal Naturecure Institute, there’s been a substantial rise of almost 25% in the queries the team receives online and offline for the Naturopathy treatments. This is because people have understood the importance of health and immunity, which naturopathy and yoga focus on as their main principle.
The COVID-19 pandemic and following the lockdown measures have disrupted our lives in many ways. Restrictions in many countries and across the globe resulted in people being confined for months in their homes. As the need of the hour, people are increasingly becoming more conscious about their health. It’s not just the physical fitness that people are concerned about but also their mental wellness. During lockdown and in its after-effects, a lot of people have turned to yoga and naturopathy to regain balance and strength. Many people took to their mats during lockdown to calm their minds and lift their spirits. This has resulted in the growing importance of yoga and naturopathy to post-pandemic well-being and its revival in the present times has come as a boon to mankind.
Though we had to close our institute for a few months following the lockdown measures enforced by the government but we conducted free online yoga classes and free webinars with our naturopathy doctors and the response on Social Media has been overwhelming; the online engagement has increased significantly. The increase in social media engagement has been significant as we have grown our social media engagement over the last 2 years by approximately 24%. We resumed our operations from November 2020 with strict sanitisation and hygiene protocols put in place for the safety of our patients, doctors and staff. We have also vaccinated our whole staff. We utilised the downtime to ensure a sanitised environment, put safe practices to govern the new normal and train our staff to follow the highest safety standards. Even though there is an increase in inquires, we have restricted admission for the safety of the patients.
Due to the restrictions implemented like quarantine measures, reduced social contact, and self-isolation during the pandemic, people had to deal with adverse health effects like stress, depression, insomnia, back pain and weight gain. Therefore, yoga and naturopathy emerged as the primary tools to improve physical and mental well-being under the current pandemic circumstances.
Alternative therapies like yoga and naturopathy offer a variety of preventive and therapeutic options for strengthening physical and mental resilience, which was immensely useful under the current COVID-19 pandemic. Apart from general questions regarding lifestyle diseases, people came to us with numerous queries related to stress, depression, insomnia, back pain, weight gain, diet plan and other issues which increased during the lockdown.
The author, KR Raghunath, is the Senior Chairman of Jindal Naturecure Institute.
