
Ayurvedic Adventures – February
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Listing of all the Ayurvedic Reports at the bottom of this post.
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Link to Dr. Rima’s Paper, Powerpoint and Video: http://tinyurl.com/DrRimaIndiaPaper
Continuation – Episode One
Continuation – Episode Two
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For several days the Ayurvedic Adventures blog has gone dark so now it is time to catch up.
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EPISODE ONE
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On Thursday morning last week it was rubba dub dub treatment as usual, but very, very early in the morning (which, here in Southern India is the only time of day when –
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1. The temperature is pleasant
2. The sun is not blazingly bright and scorchingly hot
3. The humidity is not completely oppressive
4. The mosquitos, gnats and flies are not looking for a feast
5. Birdsong and creature sounds abound.
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The rest of the day either the temperature and humidity are vicious or, when evening comes, the mosquitos, gnats and flies take over the vicious role.
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So, although I am not by habit an early riser, there certainly are advantages to such a modification!
Opening the Conference
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We were finished our treatments, which include hot oil medicated massage to reverse osteoporosis for Gen. Bert along with heated medicated oil poured in very specific ways on the forehead for neurological enhancement and
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1. Powder Massage
2. Steam Bath
3. Medicated heated whey poured over my forehead similar to the oil treatment for Gen. Bert.
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So we finished by about 10 AM and then came back to get dressed for the opening ceremonies ofthe First All India People’s Congress on Medical Education.
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Our driver arrived, well, if not quite on time, at least enough on time to get us there.
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Driving on Indian roads is a cardiovascular activity: your heart rate speeds up very fast, very often as cars, busses, trucks, motorcycles and various other means of transport come barrelling down the lave that you are in on the winding, twisting, two lane highway with no apparent concern for the laws of physics which stipulate that no two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time.
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Then, after you survive that high speed near miss, your heart rate and adrenal function begins to settle back to a normal level, thus giving your vascular and hormonal system some pulsatile activation. Then, at some unpredictable moment in time, which could be immediate or delayed, it happens again.
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There is usually a musical accompaniment to this drama, just as in any good movie: horns blaring from your vehicle and others, sometimes screams and what I must conclude from the activated body language of hands and arms waving about while high volume sounds emerge from the wavers, are unkind comments on the genetics and maternal lineage of the drivers involved.
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We got to KS Hegde Auditorium at Nitte University in enough time and found a very large and attractively embellished tent providing shade in front of the auditorium.
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After that long car ride (and the adrenal and cardiac activation it provided) we needed to use the toilet, of course. Asking for them, Gen. Bert was directed to a men’s room and Naty, my assistant and I were directed to a lady’s room.
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Now, if you have traveled in India you know that the usual system for cleaning oneself after using the toilet for any purpose is to use a small hose which produces a jet of water. These small hoses arealmost always located near toilets. If not, there is a bucket of water and a 1 quart measuring cup sized plastic cup for the same purpose.
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I have no idea how that is managed if you are wearing a sari, western clothes or anything else other than nothing at all.
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And the toilets can be either a familar type flush toilet or a slit in the floor with plates on the side for your feet when you squat.
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And hope that your aim is really good or you need to change your shoes!
In either case, paper is not deemed necessary and so is not provided.
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Now we have been to India before and we very, very carefully took rolls of toilet paper, tore them into useful lengths and folded them neatly into baggies which could be discretely tucked into a pocket or purse and have familiar supplies available as needed.
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Except that we forgot to bring any with us.
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SO: slit or western toilet and water. Um, er….
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BUT WAIT! General Bert to the rescue! He always has tissues with him and so we were saved from unsightly water stains on our good clothes which we were wearing for the occasion of the inauguration of the Congress.
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Since we were early, we were told that it would be good for us to go get something to eat at the student cafeteria. This campus has the college of physiotherapy, pharmacology and a few others so the cafeteria is important.
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It was directly across the road from the auditorium and we entered to find a large kitchen serving a moderate sized cafeteria. The menu was veg and non veg with a selection of juices to die for.
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We chose a coconut dosa, a flat pancake of batter (rice?) grilled to perfection and covered with a spectacularly delicious mixture of coconut shreds, onions, very hot chilli peppers (not many, thank goodness!) and some amazing spices.
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This was servied with two sauces for dipping, one of which is coconut and one of which is indeterminate but yummy.
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Each one was made to order, of course.
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I had watermelon juice and Gen. Bert had a lassi, which is a mild and delicious yogurt drink. Naty was adventurous enough to try a juice of which I have never heard which tasted like nothing with a bit of sugar to me.
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The whole feast was 80 Indian Rupees. That is about $1.40 US
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Then back to the auditorium where the crowd was assembling.
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Professor N. P. Chauby, the General Secretary of the Congress, came up to me and greeted me by name with enormous warmth and energy. I must admit I was confused because I could not recall ever having met the distinguised gentleman. I felt much better when I realized that Dr. Chauby is on our distribution list, reads our newsletters and watched our videos!
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How cool is that?
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Then we were served something so sweet, so suspiciously green and so thick that I am unsure whether its origin is biological or is actually “better living through chemistry” in plastic glasses.
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On to the Inauguration in the auditorium.
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We were treated like honored guests by each person we met including all the higherups of the University holding meeting, Nitte University. That was not surprising.
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What was surprising was that in the line up dignatories on the stage when they spoke, over and over again, they acknowledged Gen. Bert and me for our work and thanked us over and over again for our presence.
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It was really touching and meant a great deal to us. Being an activist means swimming against the tide, and a powerful tide it is. This is not work for the think skinned, nor for the faint of heart.
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So to know that a world and a half away our work was touching and inspiring people who looked to us for leadership and truthful information and were, although we did not know them, standing shoulder to shoulder with us in our global efforts.
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After the inaugural, at which our dear friend and colleague, the great Indian doctor, Prof. B. M. Hegde, MD, gave a keynote address, there was a cultural program of dance an music by the students of each of the colleges of the Medical Faculty.
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They were WONDERFUL, blending their tradition with ours in the most beautiful and inventive ways.
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I need some help to do it, but we will post the videos we took so you can share that.
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Then, off to the Hotel Maya where the speakers were, in the main, staying. We had a delegate’s buffet and mingled with the faculty and some of the dignitaries.
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GREAT food! Let me repeat, GREAT food!
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If you want great food, in my opinion, wherever you go, consider France and India as two potential destinations.
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I can list a LOT of countries that do not fall into that category but India is, in my experience, a land of gustatory delight like few other places.
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Then we drove home for two hours and got just a little sleep.
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Frankly, I felt very strongly duty bound to do this journal entry and lay down for 1 hour with strict instructions to Gen. Bert to wake me up after that time so I could do it.
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He did. I couldn’t.
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Next blog I will discuss why not. I believe you will find it useful information.
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We were invited to join the Task Force in its deliberations on how to create a new paradigm for medical education, which I, personally, was only too happy to do!
Up the next day early, food delivered early, gulped down, two hours by car back to the conference and then the programs began.
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The lectures were high level and quite interesting although I admit that some of the accents of some of the lecturers were so strong that I could not understand most of what they said.
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BUT THE HEAT! OH, DEAR GOD! “Hot” does not even begin to touch it.
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No one who has ever been this hot will forget the experience easily. In good clothes.
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Among the many areas focused on was how to integrate non western wisdoms and practices with western ones.
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These discussions could have been taking place in the US between people who practice medicine the way I do and people who use drugs and vaccines. Theoretically.
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In fact, such discussions would be about how to control and limit my kind of medicine, which is decidedly NOT “alternative” medicine rather than how to incorporate and grain wisdom from it.
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While the dedication to this outcome is by no means universally shared here, there are many people who really do appreciate how important and powerful such a fusion would be.
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In India there is a department of the government called AYUSH dedicated to Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy. The AYUSH regulations are just as rigorous as the Allopathic ones and training and licensure is formal and clear.
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So far so good.
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But there are legal issues that make what we might assume is easy integration difficult.
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Since we are talking about licensure, there are legal issues: doctors cannot cross practice, no matter how much good they might think it would do the patient.
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So Allopathic, Ayruveda, Yogi, Unani, Siddha and Hommeopathy are in separate “silos” and rigidely separated when the people at this Congress rightly saw the need for bringing them together.
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There are other issues with bringing them together: how do we know that something works?
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The big game right now is “Evidence Based Medicine” and that seems logical.
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The problem is, what is evidence?
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If you ask the wrong questions, you will get wrong answers.
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For example, there is an herb which grows wild and widely here in Karnataka which is believed to make memory better and make people smarter.
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It is prepared by the local people as a chutney and served, especially to people preparing for exams.
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Does it work?
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If it does, it would be important to know it.
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If it does not, it would be important to know that, too.
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What does the style of preparation add to the effect or detract from it?
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The sort of vessels it is prepared in?
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The time of day that it is harvested (as the tradition specified is important)?
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And so on.
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So, “just for fun” to show that such superstitious nonsense means nothing, a group of researchers in a major department of pharmacology dedicated 1 Million Indian Rupees to a 3 year study designed to prove that the whole thing was nonsesense.
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Using an animal model, they fed the chutney with the leaves or a chutney without the leaves to different groups of animals.
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After 3 years they were able, to their great supprise, to document changes in the part ofthe brain associated with memory, the hippocampal gyrus, which showed new neuronal connections, new cells and other positive features.
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In other words, the chutney had a massive and positive impact on memory and learning.
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There are 4000 drugs known and recognized worldwide.
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There are more than 300,000 Ayurvedic, Unani and Homeopathic preparations.
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Is it good enough evidence to track the histories of people who use these remedies and compare them statistically?
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The mechanism of change in the chutney experiment was not elaborated. Do we need to know that in order to have the evidence base we need to use it?
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No toxicity studies were done on the chutney so is that enough evidence without that?
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What do we mean by evidence? How about the evicence of htousands of years of traditional experience in Ayurveda and the hundreds of years in homeopathy? These are thorny questions and aroused some heated debate, including some serious shouting.
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Friday night task force meeting, then dinner and off for two hours back home.
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Wake me up in an hour so I can do my blog.
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Time to get up so you can do your blog.
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I simply can’t. (Highly unusual for me, I can absolutely assure you!)
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Saturday I was due to give my presentation.
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I asked Professor B. M. Hegde, a man who has never shied away from controversy in the interest of truth, whether most of the doctors here, progressive thinkers that they were, already knew that vaccines are pseudoscience based on corporate marketing and depopulation agendas.
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He said no so I was prepared to through a bombshell into the crowd.
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When it came time for my lecture, which was an invited Special Lecture presented at a plenary (joint) session, I was asked to cut it to 15 minutes by the chair of the session.
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Ordinarily I would have tried to meet the request but 1. I had travelled from the other side of the world to give this 30 minute paper
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2. The information is so important and, for many, so difficult to hear, that there was no way to condense it to 15 minutes so I said that I was not able to do that but I would fo what I could.
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By the way, the other plenary sessions were professionally recorded so I expected to have a great video of the talk. Unfortunately (and I do not think this was a conspiracy) this one was not so the video is of lesser quality.
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Using this slide show, LINK, I delivered this paper, LINK.
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There were stunned faces and a very silent audience with one or two exceptions.
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I expected much more energy in the response but did not understand the silence.
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At lunch, which immediately followed my presentation, there was a circle of avoidance around me from people who previously had been seeking me out.
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I found that fascinating and asked my friends about it.
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The public health people at the meeting, I was told, are part of the vaccine mafia, at least one has a large NGO supported from the US by, you guessed it, Mr. Gates.
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So here is their delemna: as long as they can pretend that vaccines are good for you, they can take money and vaccinate as many people as possible.
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Frankly, with the data presented as clearly and irrefutably as it was, there is no way that anyone could pretend that they do not see the vaccine lie.
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So now they either have to acknowledge that they are doing harm where before they could pretend that they were doing good OR they can acknowledge that any pretense of doing good things is irrelevant and they are actively and knowingly harming people for their own purposes
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I believe that my paper presented not only data, but an existential crisis for the good people among the group and a crisis of exposure for the not so good ones.
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After the lecture, lunch and some more sessions, we had the Valedictory Address by another dignatory (whom Gen. Bert and I actually had private meetings with in his home some years ago). During it, the doctor next to me was checking his email on his phone and showed me an item which said that an Indian authority has suggested that all doctors who speak against vaccines have their licenses lifted.
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Well, well, well.
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So India’s insanity and ours are the same.
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Free speech and human rights sacrificed to… corporate control.
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Let me point out that you have absolutely no say or control over what is injected into you or your loved one when that syringe comes at you.
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Nano Chips?
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Smart dust?
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Stealth viruses?
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Monosodium glutamate?
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Polysorbate 80?
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TWEEN?
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Fetal cells?
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Live viruses?
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And on and on and on and on.
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And you are simply the receptical for whatever they wish to corrupt your immune system and genetic matrix with.
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Resist? As if your life depended upon it.
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Here is the Action item you need to take and share absolutely as widely as possible:
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http://TinyURL.com.VaccinationISViolation
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We still have time. A roar of protest can, in fact, still turn the tide.
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But the time for that tide is running out as the collaborators gather steam.
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This is a man made crisis and we must avert it before the irreversible damage is done.
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Yours in health and freedom,
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Dr. Rima
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PS: An Ayurvedic concoction freshly compounded of a combination of herbs specific to my composition type and needs was brought warm to our room. It was so important to keep it warm that the lady who brought it insisted that the ceiling fans be turned off.
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I was in the shower but dutifully drank what has to be the worst taste I have ever had in my mouth and a LOT of water right after it.
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Based on the age old and near universal principle that things that are good for you taste bad, this has to be the best EVER!
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Tomorrow morning I should be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Or something.
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This vile brew will show up twice a day. Oh, GOOD!
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REL
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EPISODE TWO
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Ayurveda Adventures #13
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When you are a stone age person confronting advanced computing technology, you sort of make it out in a general fashion after a while, but a lot of the explanations that are offered to you by the kind technologists just don’t make a lot of sense in specific terms because you haven’t got the cognitive and technical background to appreciate what they are saying at any depth.
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You sort of get how to use the phone or the computer after a while, but you have no real understanding of the bedrock upon which the technology stands.
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Well, that is sort of how I feel talking to the Ayurvedic and Naturopathic doctors here at Alva’s Ayurveda Resort, a unit of Alva’s University which includes a full Ayurvedic Hospital, a full Homeopathic Hospital a full Naturopathic Hospital and colleges in each of these disciplines, a College of Journalism, a College of Engineering and more. Much more.
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The Chairman of this enormous enterprise, Dr. Mohan Alva is a visionary with the ability to step into the vision in real world terms. The head of the Ayurvedic section is Dr. Prasana Aithal. The head of the Naturopathic section is Dr. Mahesh Pandit.
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Gen. Bert and I would like to work with him. Perhaps that will happen.
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Now before we got here I thought I was, if not the cat’s meow in Ayurvedic and Naturopathic medicine, at least pretty knowledgeable. And, in North America, for an allopathically trained doctor, I guess I was.
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But here I am, primitive to the technologists listening to a range and depth of knowledge and mastery that leaves me breathless. Of course, the Ayurvedic part is especially bewildering because it is in Sanskrit (although Dr. Aithal translates it for me).
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Dr. Aithal was Dr. Mahesh’s student and then went on to specialize in Ayurveda, getting India’s first PhD in that topic and establishing himself as a leader in that ancient, venerable and highly precise discipline.
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Dr. Mahesh was a more-or-less conventional doctor with a natural bent and training with a HUGE practice of 130+ patients per day working with the other doctors in his family until one day he said “Enough! I am not happy living this life and I am not serving my patients the way I want to and I can.” He left the family practice and came here where teaching and private practice on an engaged and meaningful level are his passion.
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The Colleges of Homeopathy, Yoga and Naturopathy are housed on this campus. The Engineering College is around the corner.
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There are two reasons why I am sharing all this with you.
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First, I promised to share where I am, what I am learning and what we are doing with you in this journal blog. Let me do that now.
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Next time I’ll describe some examples of how Ayurveda and Naturopathy approach some medical problems.
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Dr. Rima
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Here are all the Reports:
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http://drrimatruthreports.com/ayurvedic-adventures-coming-to-an-end-or-just-beginning
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http://drrimatruthreports.com/dr-rimas-ayurvedic-adventures-continue/ (March)
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http://drrimatruthreports.com/dr-rimas-ayurveda-adventures-continue/ (February)
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http://drrimatruthreports.com/continuing-ayurveda-adventures-start-of-week-three/
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http://drrimatruthreports.com/dr-rima-and-gen-bert-on-their-way-to-india/