In my practice, which combines allopathy with holistic medicine and a backbone of Ayurveda, I use a combination of herbs with great success for immune issues. I use the good clinical reductionistic biomedicine I learned. I frame the care with the holistic attitude I developed traveling to ancient teachers. I include time for building healthy awareness of the mind-body-senses-spirit. This seem to be a great recipe for interfacing with today’s patients who want to heal.
For example, for skin issues, I use herbs which have an inherent lack of heat transfer energy, known as cooling virya. Herbs like Guduchi, Shatavari, Kutaki, combined with the principles of Ayurvedic structural physiology and emphasizing the role of our mind, our senses, and our choices makes a great combination. Patients are often cured of diseases they were told would be lifelong.
For cancer patients, and those with growths currently benign by modern medicine, but classified as purvarupa, or premonition-ish symptoms of Ayurveda, I use a set of herbs produced widely. The formulation includes the smooth, sweetish root of shatavari (Asparagus racemosus); the horse-odoured rough, tough root of ashwagandha (Withania somnifera), the accumulation-removing, channel-cleansing, heart-livening rhizome of the small mighty Himalayan kutaki (Picrorhiza kurroa); the spiky, hoof-catching fruit of Tribulus terrestris; the phallic, penetrating srotamsi-srodhana fruit of Piper longum; the round, rich, heating and phlegm-reducing, lipid-bilayer shrinking fruit of black pepper, Piper nigrum; the heat-transfer increasing rhizome of ginger, Zingiber officinale; and the thin-barked Sri Lankan cinnamon, Cinnamomum zeylanicum.
Hungry opportunists will jump with this combination to their labs, analyzing and blending the whole plants, their alcohol extracts, or their essential oils, trying to find the active ingredient through a spike of their expensive equipment. They will try to copy its effect in rats and quickly apply for a patent before I do. They will apply for research grants to the NIH, and get funded by review section scientists who know just as little about the root vs. the stem and have never dug a rhizome without killing the plant, who spent three weeks interviewing natives on a root in the south Pacific and extrapolate their knowledge to the entire botanical Universe.
They will try to replicate what I do, in the name of science, never thinking to learn the pattern of discovery from me or from my teacher. We use these herbs but we increase or decrease their amounts based on the qualities of heat transfer and kleda (excess mucous) and pace in the body of the person we will give the medicine to. We see how each patient processes food, indicating their ability to take in nutrients across their intestinal wall. We ask about fatigue patterns, sleep, appetite, bowel movements, cravings, and mental focus. We feel the energy in their pulse, look at their tongue, their skin, and their eyes.
Then we dose the herbs singly or in combination at a time of day that correlates with the level of heat transfer energy they will have in their body, called Bhaisajya Sevana Kaala. We put the herb in different form, liquid, solid, paste, gel, depending on the strength of the body, the time of year, the person’s age and constitution. We adjusting for meal patterns and routines. We give the same medicine with one food vs. another, and it changes the rupa/color of it, just as two cans of paint mixed vs. applied side by side. With certain liquids, called anupana, it has different penetration. With certain carriers, the nutrients head to a particular organ for which the liquid has affinity, called yogavahi. The patient tries the experiment and comes back to us with a report of what worked and what did not, called upasaya, and we make adjustments to optimize the experience for the patient.
This may seem complicated, but it is a set of well-repeated patterns that have been replicated over millenia by minds that can handle the details and have the passion and curiosity for watching what can happen to the human body. In fact, just knowing the herbs in the cancer formulation is enough for a good Ayurvedic physician who studied Dravya Guna and Kriya Sharira, who can easily unravel the combination and why they are used together.
For those who think in terms of pills and LD50 curves, they will not understand. They will reject the energy combinations that lie in the formula. Ayurveda teaches about the body in patterns. These herbs work to reverse, or balance those digressive patterns.
I have learned through live clinical learning, how to use it from my teacher, who made it. I have used it with lymphoma patients, ovarian cancer patients, thyroid cancer patients, kidney tumors, uterine fibroids, lung cancer, and sarcomas. With great success. Documented in CTs, MRI, blood reports. I have used it when the physicians cannot make a diagnosis and fail to see the trend in 8 tumors (“all benign”) and a failing kidney. I have used it when the histology in the slides were interpreted screaming cancer, and later screamed inflammation, and finally went silent. I have used the formulation alongside chemotherapy and radiation and pre-surgery and post-surgery. But these results are only in individuals. The sample size is insignificant, chimes in another parrot of evidence-based medicine, and the discussion stops as he opens his NEJM journal to read the regular column, entitled, Case Records of the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Yet, the bottom line for those same materialistic, prove-it-to-me physicians who challenge yet hungrily visit my practice, is that the formulation works. They look down their noses at me when they sit in their white coats, as they were trained to do. Later, they come quietly, sheepishly, when their bodies fail them, and they are afraid to use the same medicines with which they have poisoned their own patients. Straightening their spine, and claiming that they are also part of the fraternity of healers, they ask for that same formulation of herbs that they could not, would not, give to their patients because it was not evidence-based. They tell me of the tumors that have gotten hold inside of them. I pause, knowing the tumor started long before, when they had closed their mind to what evidence really is.