Mahatma Gandhi, India’s "Father of Naturopathy"

Michael Cronin, ND

AANP President 

The entrance to S-VYASA's Prashanti Kutiram Campus

I am writing this from the Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthanain University (S-VYASA) near Bangalore, India in the state of Karnataka. I was invited (with 4 weeks notice) to give a presentation on the evolution of the naturopathic profession and naturopathic education in North America at the first International Conference on Yoga, Naturopathy and Arogya (ICYN) in Bangalore, known as the Silicon Valley of India. Naturopathy as a healthcare profession is considered to include Yoga, and there are 12 universities across the country offering a degree in Naturopathy and Yogic Sciences, as well as numerous inpatient facilities. Mohandas (often referred to as Mahatma, meaning “great soul”) Gandhi revived naturopathy in India and is often referred to as the "Father of Naturopathy." Gandhi's birthday, October 2nd, is to be celebrated here by the profession as Yoga and Naturopathy Day.

The ICYN was sponsored by the state government of Karnataka’s Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH). They see Naturopathy as an intrinsic part of the healthcare system and just this week announced that 10% of the state's overall healthcare budget would be dedicated to patients receiving AYUSH care. There is an epidemic of non-communicable disease in India, including diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases are the country’s leading cause of death. There are also other provisions in the works to improve the public access to Naturopathy care, including adding outpatient naturopathic services in all municipal hospitals. 

The scope of practice in Naturopathy includes hydrotherapy, fasting, diet therapy, massage, Acupuncture and Yoga. It does not include medicine administered orally, Homeopathy or Botanical Medicine. Steps are being taken to bridge this divide in order to use evidence-based practices, following the established principles of Naturopathy. Historically, Homeopathy, Ayurveda, and Unani (Persian herbal medicine, widely practiced in Southern Asia) have existed as separate branches of traditional knowledge systems in India and traditional Chinese medicine is not practiced.

The Jindal NatureCure Center

Most naturopathic care is currently delivered through inpatient services. Patients frequently stay for two to four weeks if not longer. The patients fast and juice and afterwards eat natural organic foods, massage, hydrotherapy and learn therapeutic yoga as well as relaxation and meditation techniques for their specific health condition. I just visited the Jindal NatureCure Institute, a beautiful 275-bed, 100-acre inpatient naturopathic and yogic hospital/sanatorium, established as a charitable trust. 

Naturopathic evidence-based research is alive and well in India. At S-VYASA, where we are staying, they have Ph.D. candidates in Yoga who are focusing on many aspects of naturopathy. One Ph.D. candidate I spoke with is researching hydrotherapy for hypertension, another on diabetes and a third on migraines. There is much published work on the physiologic effects of meditation as well as work towards understanding which specific yoga asanas (postures), breathing, relaxation and meditative techniques are best for specific conditions.   

An international working group on naturopathy and yoga convened the day after the conference with participants from over 20 countries. There were four subgroups established, including education, research, clinical practice and regulatory advocacy. Participants from the United States included representatives from Harvard Medical School, the Department of Defense, the Samueli Institute and the AANP. The working group is being funded by the State government of Karnataka’s Department of AYUSH. The government perceives the promotion of Naturopathy and Yoga as not only good for public health, but also an economic engine, separate from their conventional medical tourism. The state has 3 colleges and many hospitals/sanatoriums including, one 275-bed facility and another 200-bed facility. There is clearly dynamic development of Karnataka’s medical tourism capacity and naturopathy is seen as an important component. 

The Indian educational system offers a Science pre-university “stream” in what would be considered an American 11^th and 12^th grade. They have a four-year academic program and a fifth year of internship. They have also established a two-year advanced degree program offering an MD in Naturopathy. 

Learning about India’s unique relationship with Naturopathy was very exciting, but the enthusiasm of the students, doctors, educators and officials was by far the best part. They are all so pleased to connect with the North American profession, as we are to connect with them!

Namaste,

Michael Cronin, ND

Courtesy: http://www.physicianswholisten.blogspot.in/

Posted on: Thursday, February 16, 2012

Wellness versus illness: An Article by Dr. B M Hegde

The ghost of Adverse Drug Reactions staring at our face as the biggest cause of death in modern medicine, couldbe avoided if we follow the holistic management of illnesses to bring man back to his/her state of wellness

“The secret of getting things done is to act!”— Dante Alighieri

Wellness is the overall well being of human beings. Illness is a state where one does not feel well. While quantum physics has opened a new vista in the field of human physiology of wholeness in place of our reductionist, mechanistic, biochemistry based human physiology, the world has now come to realise that the conventional definition of health by the World Health Organisation (WHO) needs change. In this context the IOM, the audit body of US medical establishment, in their February 2010 meeting, had accepted the new definition of Whole Person Healing (WPH) as the future illness care system.

Wellness (conventionally called health) is now defined as “enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate.” Interestingly, this fits in with the time honoured definition of health in Indian Ayurveda, the mother of all medical wisdoms in the world, almost from the time of the Vedas; the latter being timeless. We have now come one full circle in the so called scientific medicine with a down to earth do-able definition of health while the WHO definition of health as a state of physical, psychological, spiritual, emotional, social etc wellbeing, according to Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, is attainable only under two circumstances—after death and during the height of orgasm, which lasts only for a few seconds, anyway!

The man who led the movement for WPH was late Professor Rustum Roy, one of the greatest scientists the world ever had. He was one of the founder members of the IOM. “Over forty? It is time to fix a date for mammogram and the cost has come down for this holiday season from Rs3,950 to just Rs1,750,” reads the prominent headline advertisement in The New Indian Express dated 9 October 2011 in Chennai.  This kind of disease mongering efforts is at the root of all our problems in medicine. They are based on the wrong science of reductionism. Cancer is not a disease in the true sense. Cancer cells are a bunch of “jobless, directionless, wandering, rogue cells” which remain in the human system for years before they show up as clinical cancer only when their numbers have swollen to many millions. Therefore, the so called early diagnosis of cancer and cancer screening in the apparently healthy populations are only myths, although they make good business sense for the cancer industry.

While I have been writing about this for years, the US government has issued a circular that screening for prostate cancer using PSA test is unscientific and unreliable. Mammogram is not far from that truth. In fact, in many places routine mammograms have been given up as mammograms themselves could help generate cancers to grow faster from those wandering cells which otherwise would have died a natural death before they become clinical cancers. Cancer research is an area where the “so called” cancer researchers can tap from a bottom less pocket of the research funds. The research has gone too far from reality into vivisectionist research from reductionism.

This year’s Nobel Prize is an example of that last statement. The three people that succeeded in finding out the small receptor on human immune cells have got the prize. That receptor or its ligand (for making a drug) will not solve any problem. The immune system works as a whole and in association with the other systems of the human being. This has been proven time and again but we do not seem to learn our lessons from our own mistakes. Our cloning efforts, our genetic engineering efforts, our stem cell (exogenous) research have all come to naught. In fact, we conveniently forget the efforts of those researchers who have shown us the right path for stem cells research.

Way back in the early 1950s Professor Robert Becker of the New York University Medical School, a great brain in orthopaedic surgery, had shown how the body cells, wherever they are, under stress and urgent need, could transform themselves into pluripotent stem cells. That is really the body's own efforts to produce endogenous stem cells. He demonstrated that the red blood cells at a fracture site under the periosteum of the broken bone could slowly change into nucleated cells and then put out pseudopodia to become real powerful pluripotent endogenous stem cells which know what to do to heal the bone.

Whereas the stem cells produced by us in the laboratory from any source, when introduced into the human body, need the help of the environment to do what we intend them to do, endogenous stem cells are born with the message to do what is needed. The internal environment for the exogenous stem cells includes not just the body as we see it but the mind. In fact, human body is the human mind seen as a solid body according to quantum physics! The exogenous stem cells could even harm the human system as happened with the first attempts to treat childhood cancers with this method. The original cancer died but a new cancer cropped up! Dolly, the first cloned animal died prematurely as she was as old as her mother (from whom the original cell was used for cloning) and suffered from old age diseases like cancer and joint damage even in infancy! Eric Drexler’s efforts to produce self replicating nanobots which do not require father and mother died a premature death before it took off. Mr Drexler made billions from his company share holders when he claimed that human beings could be made in the laboratory!  Venture capitalists poured millions into his kitty without any returns at the end of the day.

AIDS research in another example. While the protean causes of that syndrome are still very vague, researchers make hay when the research funds pour into the area in plenty. They are still going after that poor virus, the HIV, whose original sin was that it was discovered in the bone marrow of that first young homosexual in San Francisco who died of the syndrome in 1981. In retrospect, we now know that any germ could be found in such patients as their immune guard is very weak. The original paper of this association between HIV and AIDS in the prestigious journal Science was only a case history. Based on that case report the author, Luc Montaigner, got his Nobel Prize recently.

Time has come to think afresh in this area of repetitive research in preference to that of holistic refutative research. When we once understand wellness and the real definition of health, we would quickly realise that all illness management has to be holistic where the body, mind and environment of the patient are taken into consideration. The era of disease and diagnosis will replace the era of understanding the suffering human being (the patient) in trying to make him whole again. That is called healing. Research must be true “outcomes” research and not research to better surrogate end points as we do now. One example will be in order here. All the studies of cholesterol-lowering efforts with reductionist chemicals starting with the original choestyramine to the present statins have only shown the effect of their lowering the blood report of cholesterol levels while they all showed higher death rates in the treated group at the end of the day. Death is the real outcome while lowered blood report is a surrogate end point. The story seems to be similar with our efforts to lower many of the fluctuating biological levels which we have been labelling as “diseases”.

Chemical reductionist molecular therapeutics will have to give place to energy therapeutics as the human body is a bundle of jumping leptons and correction of such errors will have to use energy scientifically. Many proven methods of energy treatment have been in vogue for eons even in many alternate systems. One more reason why energy methods are better is the speed with which one gets results with energy healing methods. Whereas chemical message transmission happens at a rate of one centimetre per second, energy healing transmission happens at a rate of 1,86,000 miles per second!  Most, if not all, reductionist chemical molecules are alien to the human system and they are rejected by the liver in the first place. (The first pass effect that we teach medical students in pharmacology means that the body is trying to destroy as much of the drug as possible) .

The ghost of Adverse Drug Reactions, (ADRs) staring at our face as the biggest cause of death in modern medicine, could be avoided if we follow the holistic management of illnesses to bring man back to his/her state of wellness as defined above. Long live mankind on this planet in good health and happiness. Medical profession is always needed as the doctor is not just a drug vendor but a real friend, philosopher and guide in illness. In addition, science has now shown that all the drugs or surgical methods that we use work mainly because of the faith the patient has in the doctor, the so called placebo effect, also called the expectation effect (EE).  A good doctor, humane and human, full of empathy, will be God to patients at all times. Basically, a good doctor should be a good human being.

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion" — The Dalai Lama.

Prof. Dr. B M Hegde is former Chancellor of Manipal University.
(Professor  BM Hegde can be contacted at hegdebm@gmail.com)

Appeared in: Moneylife, November 16, 2011.