Since April 2008 Dr. Maarten Bode is Adjunct Research Faculty at the Medical Anthropology and Sociology Research Unit, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands and at the Foundation for the Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions, Bangalore, India. In 2004 he received a PhD for his thesis Ayurvedic and Unani Health Products: Reworking India's Medical traditions.

He has published on the modernisation and commercialisation of Indian medical traditions in international academic journals and scholarly volumes. In February 2008 his book Taking Traditional Knowledge to the Market: the Modern Image of the Ayurvedic and Unani Industry, c. 1980-2000 appeared with Orient Longman in the series "New Perspectives on South Asian History".

At present he conducts a new research project titled "The Politics of Value and the Commercialisation of Ayurveda: Medicines, Prescribers, Dispensers and Patients, 1980-2010", which deals with the use of Ayurvedic medicines in the clinical context and the consequences of the proliferation of Ayurvedic branded medical products for the poorer sections of Indian society and the representation of Ayurveda. Since 2002 he is on the council of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine, an organisation of people who study social-cultural and filological aspects of Asian medical traditions. He is also on the editorial board of the Electronic Journal of Indian Medicine.