After a week on the prescribed diet, it was time for the main treatment: Sneha Paana, or ingestion of medicated ghee.
Typically, ghee drinking is a form of oleation therapy undertaken in preparation for panchakarma, but at times it is used as the treatment in itself. Philosophically, Dr. Rajah believed in treating his patients with the minimal amount of medicine needed to bring about a cure while incurring minimal cost, which made sense to me from the standpoint of logic and economy: why take two pills when one would do the trick, and why pay for more treatment than you needed. According to him, only about 5% of all patients actually needed panchakarma, and I was not one of them.
His philosophy flies in the face of almost everything I have read about detoxing with panchakarma, which is universally prescribed for practically every medical complaint. I found only one source that spoke of treating with ghee alone, while everything else I read explained that ghee was meant to loosen the toxins from the cells so that the panchakarma treatment could finish the job by flushing them out of the body from one of its exit paths, be that the mouth (vamana), anus (virechana and basti), nose (nasya), or through the skin (rakta mokshana) aided by the use of leeches (yikes!).
When I asked Dr. Raj what happened to the toxins if they were not expelled using panchakarma, he said that toxins cannot be simply pushed out—they must be neutralized. As cow ghee has an affinity for human cells since the time of birth, according to Ayurveda, it neutralizes the toxins and makes the cells receptive once again. He said the 5% of cases where panchakarma was recommended were when people had the sickness lodged deep in their viscera, whether that was the stomach, the small intestine, or the large intestine, and he did not think I had that.
He explained that the lack of receptivity in the cells in my body was what had led to my hypertension. While my systolic (when the valve closes) readings were usually fine, my diastolic (when the valve opened) pressure was high. What happened when my heart tried to circulate fresh, healthy blood into my cells was that it was not fully accepted due to the principal of “like attracts like,” and all the cells in my body were a bunch of Brie-eating, Cabernet-swilling, Nicorette-popping rock stars who stubbornly refused to take in any salubrious substances. Like the naughty teenagers I imagined them to be, they had to be lovingly reconditioned to learn to like the annoyingly clean blood circulating in my body all the time now. According to this rationale, my issues with chronic dryness were due to the same root cause: my bratty, party animal cells were on strike until I consumed something toxic they could relate to.
The Protocol
The saying about how nothing worse will happen to you in the day if you eat a frog first thing in the morning is something I kept remembering as I drank ghee on an empty stomach before sunrise.
As much as the taste disgusted me, I was ready to get the treatment over with so I could get back to a regular diet. At that point, I had been eating my own cooking for a week, and while usually I do not mind that, the struggle of trying to cook Indian food without oil, a full repertoire of spices, or decent cookery was starting to be a drag.
Adding to my eagerness to start the treatment were the promises from Dr. Rajah that it would address all my ailments: the hypertension, my dry skin, and—can we talk?—the constipation that was came with following a diet devoid of insoluble fiber. I had been suffering pretty much the entire week before we started the treatment on October 6, so I happily chugged down the 50 ml of ghee (that’s almost a 1/4 cup) on the first morning.
This ghee was not just ordinary ghee, nutty and golden, like the kind you spoon onto your dal for extra flavor. This was Mahathikthakam Ghrutham, which, if you Google it, is supposed to be good for skin and heart conditions, among other things. In addition to the ghee used a base, there are about twenty different herbs that are infused into the fat, which renders it a greenish color and gives it a terrible smell. And while it was pretty easy to slam the initial 50 ml, Dr. Rajah kept ratcheting up the dosage until by day 4, we were up to 150 ml.
Dr. Rajah had told me that the treatment would probably last five days but could go up to seven. On the fourth day as I stood in front of the sink with the last 50 ml of ghee in my glass, I seriously wondered if I was going to be able to get it down. One of the signs of successful oleation is the inability to think about the ghee without becoming nauseated, and I was there by that morning. I finally was able to finish it by imagining that my daughter had been kidnapped and all I had to do was finish this final shot to get her released. I still almost puked.
As the day wore on, I started to get some of the relief that Dr. Rajah had promised me, and by my fifth bathroom report (it’s flattering in a weird way when your doctor wants to hear about your every “move”), he messaged me back to tell me that the treatment had concluded and that I was to scale back to 25 ml the next morning. Pshaw, 25 ml? Piece of cake.
The Results
For the first few days after the treatment, my skin was absolutely glowing, and much of the dryness has disappeared. My hair also felt moisturized despite not using any conditioner, but there’s also a lot of humidity in the air here, and having recently ingested a pound of butter also may have contributed.
As for my blood pressure, I had my first normal reading (diastolic under 90) in a doctor’s office before we began the medicated ghee therapy, so simply changing my diet was enough to bring it down to acceptable readings. In the days that followed the therapy, my diastolic stayed in the low to mid-80’s, although there was one morning when I woke up with anxiety and got a reading of 120/92. That’s nowhere near the 160/110 I had back in Bombay at the doctor’s, but I’m shooting for optimal blood pressure without the use of drugs that only mask the symptoms. Only time will tell if my diastolic will stay low once I return to enjoying some of my favorite foods in moderation, which was not what I was doing when I arrived in Bombay.
I also had issues with constipation again, and that didn’t clear up until I was back to eating insoluble fiber, mostly from raw apples as they were one of the few sources of high insoluble fiber I could find readily in the small north Keralan town where I was doing the treatment.
Nor has my insomnia abated. Although I typically feel rested when I arise at 3 am as long as I am in bed by 9 pm the night before, it’s sub-optimal to keep that schedule. I have the sort of insomnia that will wake me at 3 am regardless of whether I’ve gone to bed at 9 or 10:30 pm, so I conform to its schedule rather than trying to make it go away by staying up later.
I really wanted for this treatment to work. Dr. Rajah and his wife are committed to giving the best care they can for a minimal price, and they focus on treating people first before asking for their nominal fee. Committed to the cause of updating Ayurveda with modern understanding of metabolic processes, they are warriors against solutions proposed by so many healers, either here in India or abroad, that include over medicating and charging outrageous prices.
The only problem was that the treatment did not have the results I was promised. The doctor has asked me to return for a second treatment in December to instill the benefits, which he assured me would build with time. But I need a better response before I do this again—my no-oil cooking is just not good enough to sustain me for another round.
