In Ayurvedic medicine, the key to healing is balance. Discomfort and disease can be healed by restoring energetic balance to the mind and body. 

Radiant health--defined as the three metabolic energies being in perfect balance--can be restored through personalized holistic practices such as plant medicine, diet, exercise and healthy lifestyle. 

To restore balance, Ayurveda applies one basic principle: like increases like. For example, if you walk into cold weather, your body will become cold. If you eat heavy food, your body will feel heavy. As such, any health problem can be balanced out by applying the opposite energies.

To understand and predict how different plant medicines and practices will affect an individual, Ayurveda devised a complex system to document the energetics of different remedies--in other words, how is any given remedy experienced by the human mind and body through the senses. 

Examples of energetic qualities: 

• Heating vs. cooling
• Light vs. heavy
• Strong vs. weak
• Wet vs. dry

For example, let’s say you have a fever due to a bacterial infection, and you want to apply plant medicine to heal yourself. You find a list of antibacterial herbs and want to determine which one is best for you. Antibacterial herbs that tend to increase body temperature may kill the bacterium, but they would make your fever worse by adding extra heat to your already feverish body. Instead, you would choose an antibacterial herb that had cooling energy, i.e. it tends to decrease body temperature, so that you could both kill the bacterium and reduce your fever. 

Once energetic balance is restored using such practices, the individual feels healthy again.