Birgit Frohn - The Oil Pulling Miracle: Detoxify Simply and Effectively

The Long Tradition of Oil Pulling

The practice of oil pulling can be traced back for over a thousand years. That this practice has such a long tradition should come as no surprise, for the insight that our body must be regularly cleansed of waste products and toxins to maintain our health is not new. Certainly, various methods of purifying and detoxifying the body have played an enduring role in the treatment regimens of many branches of the healing arts, in many cultures, since the beginning of medicine.

The purpose of this book is to introduce you to the practice of oil pulling and to provide tips and guidelines for its use. As well, there are a variety of other detoxification techniques that beautifully complement oil pulling that we shall touch on later in this book. To stay healthy, our body requires cleansing from the inside as well as the outside. As already noted, this is not a modern insight. Long ago, the physicians of ancient Egypt prescribed special therapies designed to purify the body of toxins. Some of these involved laxatives, while others consisted of herbal preparations for internal consumption to bring about specific cleansing effects in the organs. Oil pulling, too, found a way into the repertoire of the great ancient medical traditions. Because oil pulling was regarded as a comprehensively effective method for purifying and detoxifying, it was only natural that it would be incorporated into the materia medica of those classical systems of healing.

It may surprise a few people to know that the roots of our modern Western medical system reach all the way back to India, China, and the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean region. The founding fathers of these ancient systems of medicine include the scholar Charaka and the surgeon Sushruta, both of whom helped establish the ayurvedic tradition of India; the Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, the legendary founder of traditional Chinese medicine; and Hippocrates, who along with his students established the healing traditions of the ancient Greeks, on which much of our current medical model in the West is based.

Ayurvedathe Mother of Medicine and Oil Pulling

An ideal medicine not only heals illness; it provides effective, long-lasting prevention of getting sick in the first place. On this point, all of the Asian medical traditions agree. This is the reason why these ancient healing traditions continue to advocate the use of detoxifying and purifying regimens for maintaining health and well-being. Many of these resemble the practices of ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, in which oil pulling plays a central role in both the prevention and the treatment of illness.

Ayurveda dates back to prehistoric times, to as early as 3000 BC. The word itself is a combination of ayus, life, and veda, knowledge. Thus the ayurvedic system is based on the knowledge of life, a perspective that well agrees with the principles of traditional Indian medicine: that the medical arts and the art of living are one and the same. Because the concepts of ayurveda encompass all aspects of daily life, they can be applied equally on both healthy and sick days.

Ayurveda formed the basis of many healing systems outside of India, including traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Our Western medicine has also been decisively influenced by ayurvedic insights, for it has been said that the treatment methods of the Hippocratic physicians were closely based on many of the principles of classical Indian medicine. Ayurvedas reputation as the Mother of Medicine is still acknowledged in our time. Although the traditional medicine of the Indian subcontinent was suppressed from 1858 to 1947 under the British Raj, ayurveda has reemerged today as an essential part of the Indian system of health care. And with our growing interest in all types of natural healing methods in the West, the Mother of Medicine has come to play an important role here as well. This has led to many scientific investigations of the efficacy of various ayurvedic therapies. The results of these investigations demonstrate that ayurveda has enormous potential as a modern system of holistic medicine that can be used to successfully treat a number of illnesses for which Western medicine has not yet found a cure.

Dr. Fedor Karach

Many people who have searched the Internet to learnmore about oil pulling have repeatedly encountered onename: Dr. Fedor Karach, a physician from the Ukraine.Dr. Karach claimed to have learned a simple and veryeffective health practice from Siberian shamans: eachmorning for at least four weeks in a row, one spoonful ofsunflower oil should be thoroughly chewed and swishedand sucked through the teeth and around the mouth forat least ten minutes, after which you spit the liquid out(being careful not to swallow any) and brush the teeth asusual. This practice could draw out and remove all kindsof harmful toxins, including even heavy metals, from thebody. This corresponded to a similar ayurvedic technique,except that sesame oil is used in ayurveda, and the oil isswished for only about two minutes.

Dr. Karach gave a lecture about this practice of oilpulling during a late 1980s meeting of a group known asthe All Ukrainian Association, which was attended bya number of oncologists and bacteriologists who weremembers of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.The title of his presentation was One of the ManyPossibilities to Provide Assistance to an Ill or No LongerSo Healthy Body. At the time, the practice of oil pullingwas not well known in the West. The reaction to thispresentation by those in attendance was overwhelminglypositive. Of course, there were also critics, but the mainmessage did not go unheard.

It should be underscored that this time tested healthpractice described by Dr. Karach to his colleagues did notoriginate in Russian or Ukrainian folk medicine, although oilpulling goes back centuries in the traditional medicineof those countries. All Dr. Karach did was remind thoseof us in the West about something that has been knownand practiced in India and China for a long, long time.

The Five Elements and the Three Types

The basic assumption of ayurveda is that all of nature is composed of one or a combination of the five elements of ether, air, fire, water, and earth, and that all five of these elements are found within the human body. As well, from the perspective of traditional Indian medicine, everything that exists is in interrelationship with everything else. As a result, the diagnostic methods of ayurveda are complex and not based solely on the examination of a persons physical body; they also consider a number of other factors, such as the persons psychological state, lifestyle, and nutritional status, and even the climate in which the person lives.

The second principle of ayurveda is the doctrine of the three doshas: vata, pitta, and kapha. The Sanskrit term dosha can be translated as support, a term that indicates its function; the doshas can be understood as the biological principles or bioenergies that support and control all of an organisms processes. Because the relationship between the doshas is established for each person at the time of birth, the ayurvedic system assumes that people have different constitutional types. These types make it possible to identify and address a persons health weaknesses and strengths.

The Five Treatments for Maintaining Health