Healing Naturally

Today I’m going to share few of my personal stories that had changed the way I see medications and inspired me to look deeper into natural healing.

What is natural healing?

Natural healing is giving your body a chance to work organically to solve a health problem. Like for example – if you've a tiny cut or scratch on your skin and you wait for a day or two, you see that your body takes care of it and heals it. But the problem comes when the cut is large enough that you need to aid your body to fight against it.

Let me clarify first – I’m no way advocating to stop going to doctor's office or visiting CVS but my soul purpose of this post is to discover how we can limit those.

Do we really read the label on the medication seriously? I certainly not. Because if I read those warnings given on it, I won’t be able to swallow any of those. And more over those warning changes periodically. For example, now FDA is saying to not to give any cough medications (e.g. Delcym) to child under 5 years of old. I clearly remember it was 2 years and under. So what happened to it that I gave my daughter cough medicine when she was just three. It declared safe a few years ago but with discoveries of more data on side effects now has proved it harmful. What’re the side effects she went through due to this misinformation? You can’t sue pharmaceuticals or FDA as they've all those fine prints to protect them.

If you think vitamin tablets are risk free or have no side effects, read the new research findings. You won’t take them if you know that apparently candy like vitamin tablets are not free of side effects.

Let’s check out few warnings of a very popular medication:

• Clinical trials of of up to three years duration have shown an increased risk of serious cardiovascular (CV) thrombotic events, myocardial infarction, and stroke, which can be fatal.
• It can lead to onset of new hypertension or worsening of pre-existing hypertension, either of which may contribute to the increased incidence of CV events
• It can cause congestive heart failure and edema
• It can cause serious gastrointestinal (GI) adverse events including inflammation, bleeding, ulceration, and perforation of the stomach, small intestine, or large intestine, which can be fatal.
• Long-term administration of this medication has resulted in renal papillary necrosis and other renal injury.
• It can cause serious skin adverse events such as exfoliative dermatitis, Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS), and toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), which can be fatal

So, can you guess the name of the medication for which I’ve mentioned the side effects? It’s very famous, over the counter medication - Motrin (an NSAID), which is a brand and the generic ingredient is Ibuprofen.

Let’s now check how a medicine gets approved by the regulatory body i.e. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA approves a medicine when the pharmaceutical companies can prove a drug is sufficiently safe for human to use. The word “sufficiently” is interesting as that scale is determined by applying to a sufficiently large number of people with certain level of benefits and limited amount of adverse effect. For example “Claritin” tablet was trialed with 90,000 of people and got FDA approval. As a side note, there's an ongoing debate on the funding sources of FDA that may have put them in a place where an independent review of the drug and drug related processes are very tough, if not impossible, to take place which provides a plausible explanation to withdrawal of some FDA approved drugs voluntarily by the pharmaceutical companies.

So what are our options? should we be dependent on medications for every little things? My answer is definitely not. We should look back on natural healing - giving our body a chance to heal itself. This body is an amazing machine - which has regenerative process inbuilt and can cure a lot of things without any external help. And when an supplementary supports are given, it can prevent and cure lot of day to day life health problems, which it’s been doing for millions of years.

To see how natural healing works, I have been doing some experiment on me for last couple of years. Let’s see some of the amazing results:

My back pain started few years ago which turned so worse that I had to call sick often, specially during the cold days in winter. And with every visit to my primary physician, I was getting prescription for Motrin tablets for one to two weeks. One day I thought I don’t want to go my entire life with Motrin every now and then, specially after reading those side effects. As my mother had advised me to rub mustard oil heated with garlic (which is pretty stinky, so I have to take bath afterwards) at the paining muscles. That drastically changed the frequencies of getting the back pain. With that I also changed the mattress with which in last 2 years I had zero sick call due to the back pain.

I had done another experiment in this Spring. I got bad cough and itchy throat which is not so abnormal for Spring. Instead of rushing to CVS or Walmart pharmacy, as an experiment, I had started drinking ginger and clove tea - the suggestion I had gotten from my mother. It took me three to four weeks to fully recover but my cough was completely cured without taking a single allergy tablet. Until it was cured I was carrying a ziploc bag of cloves and put one clove into mouth to suppresses the immediate coughing when I was outside: on the train, at work etc. It was very tempting to fall into the trap of attractive adds on TV showing happy people who are on allergy medications for the entire length of Spring. But I pushed that out to prove that it's possible to realistically heal cough with natural means.

If you think that natural healing works only with small issues – that’s wrong. Even you can control your high blood pressure if you eat one apple every day, lowering intake of sodium, and exercise regularly.

Finally I would like to close this post with a simple comment - we've lost tremendous amount of things in our life for the sake of getting speed in our life which came with a very high cost. Let's look back, seek solution from nature - it can provide us solutions for majority of our problems which we have decided to overlook for long.