Often devotees ask me about how to better maintain their health. Actually, I became quite sick a few years ago when I was doing traveling sankirtana. Just like many, I had pains, weakness, brain fog, and other symptoms that would come and go without a definitive solution for an extended period of time. In my case, I was like that for years.
At that time I came to understand the shortcomings of Ayurveda, homeopathy, and other natural forms of medicine. I’m sure that many will disagree, and they are free to do that. I’m not a doctor, so here I’m just sharing what I discovered along the way, everyone is free to agree or disagree, make their choices, and reap the fruits.
So, going to the polemic part, my conviction after years of attempts is that both Ayurveda and homeopathy don’t really work most of the time. Homeopathy is more or less like a placebo, based on giving very diluted forms of active principles that don’t have much therapeutic use. It’s hard to just sit and tolerate when we have some health problem, therefore homeopathy can help by giving some mental relief with the idea that one is getting some kind of treatment. As many studies show, a placebo can indeed help, often patients who receive a placebo indeed become healthy much faster (the mind is a powerful thing), but one should not expect that it will solve any serious health issue. People can believe in what they want to believe, but over time I came to understand that often it’s not just about faith.
Then we come to Ayurveda. As we all know, Ayurveda is a branch of the Vedas, but it is quite a misunderstood one. Real Ayurveda is a lifestyle, a set of recommendations that help one to maintain his health, which includes natural living, regular fasts, eating natural food, and so on. However, that’s not what most are interested in. People want magic pills and treatments that will quickly solve their problems without demanding them to change their habits. Most Ayurvedic doctors are just people who exploit this demand, trying to use Ayurveda to treat symptoms, much like in allopathic medicine. This is a kind of abuse of the Ayurvedic system that doesn’t offer very great results. Devotees spend lots of money on this, often paying for expensive trips to meet doctors in distant places, but the results are very uncertain.
This kind of Ayurveda can also be quite dangerous sometimes. It’s dangerous in two senses.
The first is that it delays one seeking an effective treatment, which can make the disease worse. A few years ago, a lady who was close to us lost her life to cancer that is considered easily treatable in allopathic medicine, because she insisted on a treatment with an ayurvedic doctor who was promising to cure her cancer until the cancer metastasized and there was no more hope for a cure.
The second is that sometimes so-called Ayurvedic doctors use mercury, arsenic, or other toxic substances in an attempt to cure diseases. The complaints of Prabhupada being poisoned came originally from an Ayurvedic doctor who gave him a medicine containing mercury. He didn’t die because of it, but he was feeling quite unwell for a few days. There are a few cases of devotees in Vrindavana who died due to the treatment of a so-called doctor who was treating them with heavy metals and arsenic, promising to cure cancers. Just like bogus gurus, such doctors often manipulate the feelings of their patients, making them develop some kind of blind faith, that leads them to insist on the treatment, even when it’s not working, or giving negative results.
Of course, Allopathic medicine is also based on the usage of toxic drugs, but they at least conduct trials to measure the safety of such drugs. It’s still a quite misguided system, based mostly on the treatment of symptoms and not the treatment of disease, but if one wants a magic pill, I believe that’s his best shot. As Srila Prabhupada commented on occasion, allopathic medicine is the medical system of the demons, based on technology. It has many side effects, but on the other hand acts very quickly.
If both Ayurveda and allopathic medicine have their shortcomings, and homeopathy is just a placebo, what is the solution I found?
Instead of looking for magic pills, I started researching about changing my habits. I spent time researching the workings of the body and the effects of different foods, and thus I gradually learned to change my habits. That’s what I found can create changes. As long as we try to hold to our diet of refined carbs and chemically extracted oils, trying to find magical cures to the problems that originate from such a lifestyle, we will be baffled. I shared many of these points in the book about health I published some time ago.
Today I wanted to bring to your attention another point you can consider when you face serious health issues: doing a log water fast.
Fasts longer than 3 days carry some risks and should not be done without medical supervision, or if you don’t know what you are doing. They are a powerful tool, but like all tools, it can be dangerous if misused. However, when properly used, it’s possibly the most powerful tool to restore health that we have access to.
Our bodies have a very interesting system called autophagy that is activated during a fast. The translation (to eat oneself) is not very inspiring, but this is a system that makes the body attack and destroys all kinds of damaged structures, tumors, and so on. It’s a process much like we do when we renovate a house, taking out what is broken and later replacing it with new structures. Yoshinori Ohsumi, the Japanese doctor who researched the workings of this system was awarded the Nobel prize in 2016.
Long fasts also dramatically increase the level of human growth hormone (HGH) which stimulates the regeneration of tissues, helping with the cure of all kinds of lesions, and promoting even the regeneration of neurons.
The levels of both autophagy and HGH gradually elevate during the first four days of the fast, reaching a peak around the 5th day. One can benefit from any kind of fast, starting from 16 hours, but as long as the fast goes, the more potent the benefits become.
A 6-day fast can be two times as potent as a 4-day fast in terms of curing diseases and healing lesions, while a 14-day fast can be three times as potent as a 6-day fast. Relatively simple health problems can be cured by just a series of 2 or 3-day fasts, while serious health problems, up to cancer can often be cured by longer fasts. You can easily find many stories of people who put their cancers into remission by water-fasting for 21 days, for example.
A research by Dr. Walter Longo also found that fast can potentialize the effects of chemotherapy, while simultaneously reducing the side effects. In this way, fasting can be also combined with allopathic treatment to increase your chances of survival in case you ever have to battle a cancer. You can easily google for this information, it’s worth getting familiar with.
Just now I’m on the 9th day of a fast I’m doing with the purpose of trying to cure a series of pains I was having in my back, shoulders, and knee. It worked to help other problems in the past, so I’m hopeful it will help again.
As I said, a change of habits and fasting was the solution I found to solve my health issues. Over time I lost my faith in magic pills.