Vaidya Balendu Prakash

Born in Meerut on 14 March 1959, Balendu Prakash grew up inside a tradition. His father, Vaidya Chandra Prakash, was a master of Rasa Shastra — the demanding Ayurvedic discipline of purifying and calcining metals and minerals into medicine. The son learned it the old way: at his father’s side, by observation, correction and repetition. But he also took a science degree, and that second training never left him.

It shaped the question he would carry for the rest of his life. Ayurveda said its treatments worked. Could that be shown — carefully, honestly, in numbers a sceptical physician would accept?

In the late 1980s he moved to Dehradun, set up practice, and founded the Vaidya Chandra Prakash Cancer Research Foundation in his father’s name. He began recording outcomes patient by patient, year after year, long before “evidence-based Ayurveda” was a phrase anyone used. He built a Ras Shala so that the mineral preparations he prescribed were made to a standard he could vouch for. He worked with farmers in Dehradun’s Raipur belt to grow medicinal crops such as Mucuna pruriens, so the raw material was as reliable as the process.

The work took him into the hardest corners of medicine. He treated patients with acute promyelocytic leukaemia and published their long-term follow-ups in peer-reviewed journals. He noticed that many of his pancreatitis patients had no history of alcohol at all, but did show micronutrient deficiency — an observation that led to a treatment protocol which spared thousands of people a disease that had been considered largely irreversible. That protocol is protected by an Indian patent. He headed clinical research units at the Regional Cancer Centre in Thiruvananthapuram and at Shri Dhanvantri Ayurvedic College in Chandigarh, served as advisor to the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences and to the Central Council for Indian Medicine, and was Honorary Physician to the President of India from 1997 to 2000.

More than forty international papers came out of that discipline, along with two international patents and an Indian patent for the pancreatitis formulation. So did the Padma Shri in 1999. But those who knew him tend to remember something else first: a physician who answered his own phone, who took the cases other doctors had given up on, and who was unfailingly courteous to the many colleagues in modern medicine who began as his critics and ended as his collaborators.

He died on 7 August 2026, in Rudrapur, of a sudden cardiac arrest. He was 67. He is survived by his wife, Gopa Indu, their three daughters and their son. His daughter Vaidya Shikha Prakash carries the practice and the research forward.