THE ROOTS of HEALTH
By: Peter Malakoff
In 2001, I had what was thought to be a heart attack. I was
taken to the hospital where a sonogram determined I had the
‘arteries of an 18 year old’. The doctors were stumped. They
finally concluded that I had ‘cardiac syndrome X’, basically, a
catchall name for unknown heart pains (angina) in people
who do not have blockage of the arteries. The doctors wanted
to do exploratory surgery. They wanted to thread a camera up
from my groin to my heart. I declined their offer and went
home to rest. I was unable to go up stairs or exert myself in
any way.
I stayed at home either in bed or on the couch. After one
week there was still no improvement. One day a friend of
mine came to visit. He asked me if I knew about Ayurveda,
the ancient Medical system of India. I told him that I had not
explored the field, but that I was open to it. He gave me a
reference to a particular practitioner and I went to see her.
Over the course of an hour and a half, she took my pulse and
did a detailed consideration of my diet and lifestyle. She told
me that I had high fire or Pitta (Ayurveda considers the world
in terms of five elements- ether, air, fire, water and earth and
describes disease in terms of an imbalance of them). Since
an excess of the fire element was at the root of my heart
problems, she told me that I needed to avoid any activities
and foods that increased this element and to perform
activities and use foods that were cooling. For example, she
instructed me not to eat tomatoes, eggplant, and potatoes. No
fermented foods (bread, cheese, pickles), no pungent spices,
no acid fruits. She told me to eat more green leafy vegetables
(with the exception of spinach), sweet fruits, zucchini, nonfermented
cheeses (cottage cheese, Paneer), and whole
grains.
The system and understanding on which these different foods
were included or excluded did not make sense to me at the
time, but I decided to try it anyway. Within a week, I was
feeling better. By the second week, I could go up stairs again.
After a month went by it was as if nothing had ever happened.
‘But this could happen to anyone’, I thought. ‘How could I
know if it had anything to do with the change in my diet?’
Then, I realized that for the first time in 15 years, I had not
gotten herpes over the course of a month. The same change
of diet that had taken away the cause of my heart problems
had taken away my herpes as well. At this point, a light went
on in a dark room.
When a leaf on a tree is sick, you don’t do something directly
to the leaf, you treat the root of the tree. The way to ‘treat’ the
root is through changing what the tree is fed, through the soil.
This principle applies not only to trees and plants but also to
animals and human beings. It is a principle at the ‘root’ of
Ayurveda and a description of the way the law of nature
works in all living systems.
The human body, like any tree or plant, is ‘rooted’ in what it
eats or assimilates from its environment. It is literally made up
of this food. If we do not like what is going on with our body, if
we are suffering from disease, if we are sick, we need to
change what we are taking in, what we eat.
Hippocrates, the father of Western Medicine, famously said-
“Let thy food be thy medicine” This may seem like a nice thing
to say but it is a profound and important principle.
It is the soil (condition of the body) not the seed (herpes virus)
that made the critical difference. Without a soil of high fire in
my body, I no longer showed the symptoms of herpes. This
was exactly what Pasteur and Bernard had been arguing
about (see my last article). When you change the soil at the
base of the tree, every leaf on the tree is affected and this is
true of most of the illness that Americans are suffering from in
America today.
I remember the first day of Ayurvedic training in Nagpur,
India. The teacher came in and said to the class, “Everything
in the world is medicinal and everything in the world is
poisonous. What we are going to learn here is how to know
the difference between the two and how to apply that wisdom
to remove the cause of disease and to create health”.
Ayurveda is no more Indian than gravity is English. It is a
medical system and way of thinking based on the law of life
itself.
Peter Malakoff
By: Peter Malakoff
In 2001, I had what was thought to be a heart attack. I was
taken to the hospital where a sonogram determined I had the
‘arteries of an 18 year old’. The doctors were stumped. They
finally concluded that I had ‘cardiac syndrome X’, basically, a
catchall name for unknown heart pains (angina) in people
who do not have blockage of the arteries. The doctors wanted
to do exploratory surgery. They wanted to thread a camera up
from my groin to my heart. I declined their offer and went
home to rest. I was unable to go up stairs or exert myself in
any way.
I stayed at home either in bed or on the couch. After one
week there was still no improvement. One day a friend of
mine came to visit. He asked me if I knew about Ayurveda,
the ancient Medical system of India. I told him that I had not
explored the field, but that I was open to it. He gave me a
reference to a particular practitioner and I went to see her.
Over the course of an hour and a half, she took my pulse and
did a detailed consideration of my diet and lifestyle. She told
me that I had high fire or Pitta (Ayurveda considers the world
in terms of five elements- ether, air, fire, water and earth and
describes disease in terms of an imbalance of them). Since
an excess of the fire element was at the root of my heart
problems, she told me that I needed to avoid any activities
and foods that increased this element and to perform
activities and use foods that were cooling. For example, she
instructed me not to eat tomatoes, eggplant, and potatoes. No
fermented foods (bread, cheese, pickles), no pungent spices,
no acid fruits. She told me to eat more green leafy vegetables
(with the exception of spinach), sweet fruits, zucchini, nonfermented
cheeses (cottage cheese, Paneer), and whole
grains.
The system and understanding on which these different foods
were included or excluded did not make sense to me at the
time, but I decided to try it anyway. Within a week, I was
feeling better. By the second week, I could go up stairs again.
After a month went by it was as if nothing had ever happened.
‘But this could happen to anyone’, I thought. ‘How could I
know if it had anything to do with the change in my diet?’
Then, I realized that for the first time in 15 years, I had not
gotten herpes over the course of a month. The same change
of diet that had taken away the cause of my heart problems
had taken away my herpes as well. At this point, a light went
on in a dark room.
When a leaf on a tree is sick, you don’t do something directly
to the leaf, you treat the root of the tree. The way to ‘treat’ the
root is through changing what the tree is fed, through the soil.
This principle applies not only to trees and plants but also to
animals and human beings. It is a principle at the ‘root’ of
Ayurveda and a description of the way the law of nature
works in all living systems.
The human body, like any tree or plant, is ‘rooted’ in what it
eats or assimilates from its environment. It is literally made up
of this food. If we do not like what is going on with our body, if
we are suffering from disease, if we are sick, we need to
change what we are taking in, what we eat.
Hippocrates, the father of Western Medicine, famously said-
“Let thy food be thy medicine” This may seem like a nice thing
to say but it is a profound and important principle.
It is the soil (condition of the body) not the seed (herpes virus)
that made the critical difference. Without a soil of high fire in
my body, I no longer showed the symptoms of herpes. This
was exactly what Pasteur and Bernard had been arguing
about (see my last article). When you change the soil at the
base of the tree, every leaf on the tree is affected and this is
true of most of the illness that Americans are suffering from in
America today.
I remember the first day of Ayurvedic training in Nagpur,
India. The teacher came in and said to the class, “Everything
in the world is medicinal and everything in the world is
poisonous. What we are going to learn here is how to know
the difference between the two and how to apply that wisdom
to remove the cause of disease and to create health”.
Ayurveda is no more Indian than gravity is English. It is a
medical system and way of thinking based on the law of life
itself.
Peter Malakoff