[On our Second Community Night, Bharat Shah shared about his journey from allopathy to naturopathy. He started his career as an allopath pediatrician and in 1998, he realized that drugs alone are inadequate because the problems that we are facing are not just because of bacteria and viruses, but it's also because of our thoughts that are not digested. He started seeing the benefit off the advantage of daily practices, simple daily practices, doing yoga every day, doing pranayam every day and eating food that is in accordance with our metabolism, simple food, easily digestible food and having a meditation practice to take care of mind issues. Today, he runs a naturopathy center, and working to restore health and our healthy systems, in a integrated way.]



I had a chance, to live with a saint Vinoba Bhave. When my father, Jagdish Shah, was 19 years old, he left college and joined the Bhoodan Movement. And probably that was the incident that gave our family the privilege to live with magnificent people and saints as I grew up. He also took care that we get enough exposure with the values that he lived for.

For about four to five years, during the Diwali holidays, when others fired crackers, we spent our Diwali at Vinoba-ji's Ashram, playing with him, walking with him while he held our hands, and taking his photographs with a pretend cardboard camera, as we did not have that real camera at that time. We spent our time cleaning the campus of the ashram every day in the morning. That was shramyagna [a labor of love] and we use to delight in helping Vinoba. I was a kid at the time, but those memories are still alive. I remember feeling joyous and serene. At that time, I was a small kid, but when I grew up, I realized it was a privilege for us.

Vinoba Bhave was a person staying in a different kind of awareness all the time. Many a times, we read or intellectualize that "we are not the body, we are the atma [soul]"; however, after a few minutes that awareness goes off. Vinoba was someone who stayed in that state constantly, and used his body for the service of humankind. For him, the body was merely an instrument and nothing more.

During the Bhoodan movement, despite walking for many kilometers, Vinoba's diet remained pre-fixed. Not only the diet, but the amount of water and food, the temperature of water, and the times was decided. He would not take an extra drop of water or food than what was pre-decided. He had great control over his senses, and it was marvelous.

After grade 12, I graduated and joined medical school. And once you come out of the medical school, you feel that the only scientific way for healthcare is allopath and everything else is unscientific. That was the status 25 years back when I came out from the medical school. And I think it is the same in India at present also.

I moved to a rural area and started to practice pediatrics. Within the first four years of my practice, I started realizing the limitations of allopathy practice. Whatever we were doing was just kind of superficial treatment. In Hindi, we call it malam patta.

I was confused and did not know what to do, especially after giving so many years of my life to study medicine. Within three to four years of practice, I was already feeling uncomfortable. Some people advised me to take a one year break from my practice.

I took a year off, and visited many places practicing alternative systems of medicine. I began studying them, and then started integrating different systems of medicine in my practice. It became an indication, and for the next 3-4 years, whenever I found allopathy inadequate, I started combining it with other systems of medicine or healing.

There was a turnaround in my life when I was morally compelled to take care and work for a naturopathy center. Up until that moment, I did not believe that naturopathy was very useful. I had read some reports saying that it worked well; however, I was not ready to completely believe it. I committed to work for a period of one year. I observed that with the change of diet and fasting, so many diseases that did not have a cure in modern medicine were able to be reversed. We could reverse diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and even psoriasis. Gradually I started working on other health conditions, such as stress, that impact health.



I came across the story of Anita Mozan, who cured her cancer by just changing her emotions. She had end stage lymphoma and was on her death bed. She was in the ICU and her organs were failing. (It is a wonderful story and you can watch it on TedX with the name ‘Dying to Be Me’). Her spirit came out of her body, and the spirit got some message from her old friends telling her, "This is not the time for you to leave your body. Go back." And she realized that the cause of her cancer was that she did not love herself. I could relate this with Shin’s story. It was the lack of love for herself and living in fear that caused cancer. She changed her feelings, attitude, and just within five weeks she was out of cancer.

Some of our friends were also working in the field of environment, and I came to know that there are so many side effects of various kinds of chemicals that we are getting exposed to every day. They work negatively on our body and the planet, and I realised that the ultimate cure happens with changing our lifestyles. We change our diet and our daily routines, and get rid of the psychological toxins. Unless we bring a change in the basic factors no pathy -- no medicine -- is going to cure the disease.

These are very simple things but very powerful practices.

We are spending billions of dollars on research in pharmaceuticals, and the market is off billions and trillions of dollars worldwide. However, if we look deeply, very simple things -- such as a change in diet and lifestyle -- are so powerful, and if we change that, we can reverse our diseases. There are studies that show that, by introducing simple changes in our life style and dietary patterns, we can change the expression of genes and also increase the length of telomeres, which increases longevity. However, we are not aware of these things.

So, I thought, this is the mission I need to take up. And with this vision, we are now working in our naturopathy center. We treat patients using simple things and we get good result and we also conduct awareness programs to take out this message further.