Dr. Josh Axe - Ancient Remedies

I was raised in a family that believed wholeheartedly in the power of Western medicine. My grandmothers conversations often began with the phrase My doctor told me I should And she followed his advice to the letter. As a result, by the time she was sixty she was on fifteen medications and taking forty to sixty pills a dayso many that she carried her plastic pill container with her everywhere, pulling it out of her purse frequently to pop yet another small tablet or capsule into her mouth. In spite of her strict commitment to her doctors advice, she was chronically unwell. Her health stood in sharp contrast to my grandfathers. He took zero medications until he was in his ninetiesand he ran a full-time business, golfed, served the poor, and remained robust until he passed away at the age of ninety-six.

My mom shared my grandmothers faith in Western medicine, so when my siblings and I were growing up, we dutifully took meds for every sniffle and cough. I was raised in Troy, Ohio, and got sick pretty much every winter, often coughing through an annoying bout of bronchitis from early December to late February. Even though we now know that antibiotics are ineffective for bronchitis, which is caused by lingering inflammation in your bronchial tubes after an actual infection clears up, back then I essentially lived on the drugs for those chilly three months. Our doctor was a good man. He was only doing what he thought was right. But when I look back at all the unnecessary, ineffective, and harmful medications I ingested, I see that they contributed to the gut and liver issues I developed laterissues that healed only when I began using traditional remedies and food as medicine.

Although antibiotics can be lifesaving if you have a staph infection or bacterial pneumonia, for instance, its best to reserve them for dire circumstances. These medications, designed to kill harmful bacteria, also wipe out the population of healthy, protective bacteria, known as probiotics, in your gut, putting you at risk for inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, anxiety, and depression. These medications weve all been led to believe are benign are actually quite dangerous. But youd never know it by how frequently doctors prescribe them during outpatient visitsnearly 260 million prescriptions in 2017 alone.

Our habitual reliance on prescription medications can be hard to change. In fact, it took a heartbreaking experience for me to finally begin to question the pill-for-every-ill mentality that pervades Western medicine. When I was thirteen, my mom was diagnosed withand treated forbreast cancer. Ill never forget the shock of finding clumps of her sandy blond hair on our bathroom floora side effect of the toxic chemotherapyor the months and years afterward, when I realized that while my moms cancer was gone, she was far from well. Before her treatment, she was an energetic, athletic swim instructor and gym teacher, who juggled her substantial work and family responsibilities with apparent ease; after, she was chronically exhausted and depressed, she had hypothyroidism, and she struggled with bowel issues. I was still a kid, but even at that age, I found it hard to accept the idea that the only way to cure an illness was to take medications that left you more debilitated than you were before.

Thats when the seed was planted: Maybe our kindly doctor didnt have all the answers. Maybe there were safer ways to heal disease. Maybe that array of amber bottles in our medicine cabinet was actually part of the problem. And maybe I could, one day, find a more wholesome solution.

Those were radical ideas for me at the time. But looking back, I see how they began shaping my lifehow they led me to question the medical and health status quo. For instance, I started connecting the dots between the foods I consumed and the way I felt. As a high school soccer player, I noticed that milk made me phlegmy, which was especially unappealing during practices. So I stopped drinking it. Not long after, I gave up sodanot because it made me feel bad, but because I read an article about it and learned that the beverages I guzzled every day contained zero nutritional value. So why was Iwhy was everyonedrinking them?

By the time I was in my early twenties, Id committed myself to learning everything I could about healing. I was living in Florida, earning a chiropractic degree, and becoming more and more immersed in the study of nutrition, as well as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Ayurveda, and Biblical medicine.

I was avidly engaged in that mind-expanding mode when I received a life-changing phone call from my mom. The moment I heard her tearful voice, I knew it was bad. She told me shed been diagnosed with cancer again. I felt sick with worry and fear, but I also knew there were strategies that might helpones that wouldnt leave her debilitated afterward. I knew about the healing power of nutrition, and Id begun learning about alternative healing modalities in TCM and other forms of ancient medicine. So I vowed to learn as much about cancer as I could.