The Training That Ended Where the Real Question Began

She treated new mothers through postpartum recovery for years. Her own daughter's birth showed her the part of it she could not solve.

---

The gap she fell into

Dr Vijeta Shukla trained as an Ayurvedic physician across five and a half years of BAMS and three years of postgraduate study. When her daughter was born in Dehradun, feeding did not work, and she could not find a lactation consultant anywhere in the city.

She tried online sessions. They did not help. She eventually travelled back to Karnataka, where she had trained, to see an expert she knew there. It took until her daughter’s third month before feeding worked, a stretch she describes as genuinely difficult.

What she took from it was not the difficulty but the emptiness around it. She reports that mothers she met were receiving scattered and often outdated advice about a process she describes as ordinary physiology.

Why an Ayurvedic doctor trained twice

Shukla had been treating postpartum mothers as an Ayurvedic doctor, prescribing remedies that worked partially. "But half of the problems used to remain," she says. What was left was counselling and technique, a separate discipline from Ayurvedic medicine and one a mother has to be shown rather than prescribed.

So she trained again, completing a lactation consultant course through Begin Ed India over roughly eighteen months, and opened Vatsalya Lactation Centre in 2024.

How they decide on treatment

The clinical practice behind Vatsalya is Achintya Ayurveda, which Shukla runs with her husband Dr Diwaker Shukla, who holds the same MD in Panchakarma. He treats liver and gut health; she works on hormonal conditions, migraines and sinusitis.

Both came to it from teaching. Shukla continues as visiting faculty at a college and hospital, work she reports she enjoys and which remains a significant financial support, but the move to her own centre gave her the freedom to choose how she treats.

Both are Panchakarma specialists, and most patients who arrive requesting Panchakarma are thoroughly evaluated before starting with therapies. Both believe not everyone needs Panchakarma, but when prescribed it should be customised based on the patient’s disease, basic constitution and requirements.

The proof

Growth has come by referral, largely mothers passing her name to other mothers. Shukla reports around 120 mothers have come through lactation consulting since Vatsalya opened in 2024, and around seventy consultations across online and offline services in the last quarter.

What comes next

Her plans point past the clinic. She writes that she intends to take Ayurveda to the grassroots through workshops on Ayurvedic diet and lifestyle and on individual prakruti analysis, the constitutional assessment that determines what a given patient needs. She also writes that she wants regular workshops for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, to support them through lactation.

The harder problem: food

"I will start my clinic much earlier," she says, asked what she would do differently.

The bigger challenge in the consulting room now is food. Older patients arrive with inherited rules; younger ones arrive with targets. "There should not be any measurement when you are eating actually," she says. Her objection is less to the arithmetic than to the attention it takes up. "We are never alone even while having food."

The workshops she is planning are for women in the position she was once in: a new mother in a city with nobody to call, waiting on a third month.

Key Takeaways

• The gap was personal before it was a business. Shukla could not find a lactation consultant in Dehradun when she needed one herself, and trained as one afterwards.

• Two disciplines, not one. Ayurvedic medicine and lactation support address different problems, so Shukla added a lactation qualification through Begin Ed India alongside her MD in Panchakarma.

• Evaluation comes before therapy. Both founders are Panchakarma specialists, and patients who request Panchakarma are thoroughly assessed first, with any treatment customised to their condition and constitution.

• The numbers come from mothers. Shukla reports around 120 mothers through lactation consulting since 2024, and growth almost entirely by referral.

• The next stage is education, not treatment. She writes that she plans grassroots workshops on Ayurvedic diet, lifestyle and prakriti analysis, plus regular sessions for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers.

~Editor

Shobhit Mehandiratta