Mahendra Sawarkar has spent his professional life studying what conventional medicine cannot fully explain — first the lungs, then the body’s own capacity to heal itself — and has arrived at conclusions that his colleagues do not always share. This does not appear to trouble him. “I believe in simple living, mysterious thinking and following laws of nature in a true sense,” he said, and left it at that.
The simplicity is genuine. The thinking is harder to categorise.
From Nachangaon to Nagpur
Mahendra was born in Nachangaon, a village near Pulgaon, 43 kilometres east of Wardha, into a family of primary school teachers. He went to Yashwant High School, Bhidi, in Wardha district, before moving to New English School, Mahal, in Nagpur, for higher secondary education. He spent a year at the Institute of Science and entered Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1973.
After graduation, he interned with Shyam Bawage, Balkrishna Tayade, Padmakar Somvanshi, and Sudhakar Sawdatkar at Wadner primary health centre, 70 kilometres southwest of Nagpur in Wardha district, and completed his urban internship at GMC Nagpur.
His first move after internship was not towards a specialist qualification but towards the rural hospitals of Maharashtra. He went to Swami Ramanand Teerth Rural Government Medical College, Ambajogai, for house jobs in Medicine and Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases — a deliberate choice to ground himself in the disciplines that mattered most in a region where respiratory illness was common and resources were thin. He obtained the Diploma in TB and Chest Diseases in 1982, then returned to GMC Nagpur for his MD in Medicine, completing it in 1983 under Dr (Mrs) Barua. His thesis examined high-fibre diet in the management of diabetes mellitus.
The Physician and the Professor
From July 1985, Mahendra served as Assistant Professor at GMC Nagpur. In 1991, he joined ESIS Hospital as a Physician, Class I Officer, and Unit In-Charge — a post he held until retirement in November 2013. During that long stretch at ESIS, he worked alongside Avinash Joshi, the psychiatrist, and Sudhakar Dupare, the radiologist, in a collegial arrangement that the three sustained for more than two decades.
In parallel, from 1991, he built his own practice: Sawarkar Multispecialty Hospital at Gandhi Sagar, Mahal, Nagpur. A decade later, he added a critical care unit equipped with ventilators — a practical response to what his patients in the city’s older neighbourhoods needed and could not always find elsewhere.
His sons both entered medicine. Sushrut took MD (Medicine) at NKP Salve Institute, followed by intensive care medicine training; he married a microbiologist, Pratiksha Gandhare. Ameya completed MBBS and then MS (Orthopaedics) at Miraj, and married Ankita Kapse, a physician. Ujwala, Mahendra’s wife, built her own career entirely — she is a BE (Electrical) engineer and retired as Deputy Executive Engineer with MSEB, Nagpur.
The Turn Toward Alternative Medicine
In 2003, an illness of his own redirected Mahendra’s thinking. He began attending conferences on yoga and spiritual medicine, studied with yoga teachers, and established a Yoga Centre at his hospital. The interest was not casual. On 11 June 2011, he formally launched what he calls Midline Therapy — a concept, he argues, that challenges conventional medicine’s assumptions about aging and musculoskeletal disease, and offers a path toward extending functional life without joint replacement. He has published a 250-page book on the concept and is pursuing a patent.
Whether the concept will find a place in evidence-based medicine is a question he leaves open. He does not claim certainty; he claims observation and experience.
On 20 January 2014, he performed bhoomi pooja for Mahendra’s Health Retreat, a residential wellness resort on a 60-acre plot, 24 kilometres from Nagpur on Wardha Road — a physical manifestation of the turn his thinking had taken a decade earlier.
Mahendra Sawarkar began as a teacher’s son from a village near Pulgaon. He became a chest physician, a critical care practitioner, a professor, a yoga advocate, and an inventor of therapeutic concepts. Not every thread pulls in the same direction. He appears comfortable with that.