My history as a doctor and homeopath
Let me first introduce myself to you. I was born to a family that always had used homeopathy. My maternal grandfather was a lay homeopath and from birth I had been treated almost exclusively with homeopathy with the exceptions of some vaccinations. Even these were stopped when my mother understood the implications of vaccinations on health.
I had seen many effective cures with homeopathy. This inspired me to take more interest in this gentle method of treatment. I knew that I would like to become a doctor as a means to helping reduce the suffering in the world. The option of using harsh chemical medications which I would worry about taking myself was not an option. This is why I chose to go to a Homeopathic Medical College instead of the regular medical college.
For me, the aversion to chemicals also extended to chemicals in food and in the environment. I would always chose healthy wholesome food over readymade and eating out. Even as a child, soft drinks represented a bottle of water with chemicals and I would never drink them. Foods laced with pesticides tasted different to me, so whenever possible I would choose the organically grown foods. This was not such an issue in my childhood as it has unfortunately become today.
My teachers
It was with real conviction about the homeopathic line of treatment and the wish for holistic understanding that I did my LCEH at the CMP homeopathic college in Mumbai. I then studied under the late Sarabhai Kapadia, an expert in repertory who had devised an extensive homeopathic questionnaire, and also the late Dr Usha Maniar, his student. Through their meetings I had the opportunity to meet Dr Rajan Sankaran who I consider to be a genius.
I had the luck to study with him, and work with him and other members of the “Bombay Group” and it is to him that I owe my real love and knowledge of homeopathy. My other teachers included Vithoulkas, Jan Scholten, Jeremy Sherr, Nancy Herrick and Roger Morrison, Misha Norland, Anne Schadde, Juergen Becker, Alize Timmermann, Tinus Smits and others of whom many are also close friends. To these people I give sincere thanks for teaching me and joining me on the path of understanding homeopathic truths.
My view about homeopathic treatment today
After years of practice, and teaching homeopathy both in India and abroad I realize that sometimes patients treated very successfully with homeopathy come back with recurrences after a number of years. Often patients take the treatment till they get rid of their physical complaints but do not continue the treatment till they reach the highest potential that homeopathy has to offer them. Many do not understand the true potential of homeopathy. And even worse most of them come for homeopathic treatment while continuing “allopathic lifestyle.” I now believe that the doctor has as much a responsibility to cure the patient as to help him understand his role in his own cure. This has lead me today to conduct seminars and talks on how each one of us can take responsibility for one’s own health.
Today many of my patients are different. Many have heard of my work and make an appointment with me because of what they have heard or because they have met others who have recovered from severe diseases. Many of them are willing to take responsibility for their own cure and require only guidance. I am happy to see this because these are the ones that reach my ideal of permanent cure.
Disease, a path to personal growth
I now understand that disease is a path to personal growth. The only way that our body can speak to us is through symptoms, sensations and alterations in function. If we are willing to listen to the only entity that is always working in our favour, we will achieve not just relief from symptoms but incredible personal development that perhaps no teacher in the world can provide. It is my pleasure to be a vehicle in the personal development of so many people, and to know that many of these people will start working to spread this knowledge themselves to make the world a better place.
We are all connected. When we truly heal ourselves we spread the healing energy to others in our sphere as well. One of my favourite quotes is from Dr. Joel Kreisberg, Teleosis Institute: Healing means to ‘make whole.’ Our personal health is interconnected to all the other beings on this planet. When we approach the process of healing with integrity for the whole, we create a healthier and more just society.Homeopathy, a holistic therapy, a spiritual path
Having been trained as a homeopath, and being a homeopath at heart, I’m always looking at things from a holistic point of view. As the homeopath we all see a patient as a whole, and disease as a result of problems at the level of body, mind and spirit together. Homeopathy is based on Nature’s laws and requires a practitioner to have a very deep insight into everything connected with nature. Homeopathy requires from the practitioner to have a very deep insight in to the state of the human mind, maybe even beyond the level of a psychotherapist. And of course homeopathy requires from the practitioner to have a medical knowledge of the human body. Homeopathy, to my mind, is a process of growth, of mind and body, to reach a higher spiritual purpose.
The connection between the Nature and our mind and body
As a homeopath I was fascinated with the connection between nature and the human mind and body. Patients would get better miraculously, if their remedy were clearly found. To take a good case and to find the right remedy was exhilarating.
A Permanent Cure?
After many years of practising homeopathy, I found that many of my patients came back to me after years, or months, or even weeks with the same complaints that I had given them a remedy for. This was not what it should be. Homeopathy was supposed to be a permanent cure. Why was this not happening? These questions came to my mind. Even when the correct remedy was chosen and the cure was miraculous the patient could fall back. Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, had already described the cause of these fall backs. There is little that he did not know. But there is a lot that we as practitioners did not follow. We did not understand so much that Hahnemann had clearly stated in his book, the Organon of Medicine a century ago. Hahnemann described the maintaining causes for a disease as our unhealthy habits and sometimes the unhealthy environment or thoughts. Today, because of our conditioning, it’s hard to even recognise that some our habits are unhealthy.
Arriving at the truth through de-conditioning or unlearning
Having always been interested in healthy living, and in a healthy diet, I found myself in this very same boat. Because of my conditioning, I was a vegetarian who consumed plenty of dairy, just because I was conditioned to think it was good for me. About 28 years ago, still in my early stages as a doctor, I heard about the process by which milk from cows and buffaloes is obtained. Being a staunch vegetarian, because of the cruelty issues, this information was a shock to me. It started me on the path to becoming a vegan. And this is what opened my eyes. For the first time in my life, I started seeing medical literature and articles related to health that I had never seen before. One of the first ones was an article in the Vegetarian Times, which explained how because of the high protein levels in cow’s milk, calcium was not absorbed from it. It was only because I was already averse to cow’s milk because of the cruelty aspects, that I recognised the significance. But there I was. When I read it I realised that all the patients with osteoporosis, who regularly taking extra dairy, they were taking calcium tablets, and they were never getting cured.
Inspiring People to make the Change
One thing led to another, and I read the many links to medical literature on Robert Cohen’s Notmilk website and in his e-mails. I read Dr Dean Ornish’s book, Reversing Heart Disease, which made a lot of sense. After largely changing my own diet, I began suggesting these methods to my patients. I did not have a lot of success. Patients were attached to their conditioning, and were not open to change, especially change in their diets. This made me think about how I could get them to follow the suggestions. And that opened a whole new process. I started with talks, then seminars and workshops always learning and growing to see how my work could be more effective in helping people de – condition and unlearn the wrong things they had been taught. For me this became all consuming. This was even more holistic than homeopathy. It made my homoeopathic practice look like mere puzzle solving. And I could see why many homeopaths were so involved with it sometimes to the point of addiction. But I recognised that I had to move on. Food as a medicine encompassed all. It was holistic, but not just holistic for a single human being. It had a wider significance for our planet, for the animals, and for every single person as well. If everyone in the world were to change their diet, it appears that we could reverse climate change, we could save water, save energy, feed every hungry person on the planet with food that is now being used to raise animals only to kill them so that a few ‘fortunate’ people can get sicker on them. It could save billions of helpless animals from intolerable cruelty. This was even more natural than homeopathy. What is natural about eating food that is not suitable to our anatomy and then taking medicine, albeit homoeopathic medicine or any other natural healing system medicine to counter the effects of it? Our number one killers today – heart disease, hypertension, cancer and diabetes are all linked to our ‘rich’ diets.
Getting to the Core
But even for people who want to continue to practice homeopathy or other therapies, I notice that most of them allow the patient to continue their medications and add their therapy to the whole lot. This will never cure. This does not help get to the core, because every part of the patient is connected. I have seen patients with mental diseases like manic depressive psychosis reverse this disease when they got off their diabetic medications. When we are treating patients at the level of the mind, if we cannot remove their physical illness first we are at a disadvantage.
Removing the Maintaining Cause is Essential to the Cure
For real cure, we have to first remove the maintaining cause. Once we do this, cure may ensue by itself or may need the help of a homeopath. Homeopathic remedies can work wonders once the cause is removed. But to work the other way around can be an uphill task all the way, never producing the results that are really needed. In order to help people understand the maintaining causes of their diseases and how to remove them, and to help them undo years of conditioning I conduct health workshops. Currently these are in the form of the following workshops – Peas vs Pills, Reversing Diabetes, Reversing Heart Disease and Hypertension. Other workshops are planned and updates will be available on this website.
Homeopathy, a holistic therapy, a spiritual path
Having been trained as a homeopath, and being a homeopath at heart, I’m always looking at things from a holistic point of view. As the homeopath we all see a patient as a whole, and disease as a result of problems at the level of body, mind and spirit together. Homeopathy is based on Nature’s laws and requires a practitioner to have a very deep insight into everything connected with nature. Homeopathy requires from the practitioner to have a very deep insight in to the state of the human mind, maybe even beyond the level of a psychotherapist. And of course homeopathy requires from the practitioner to have a medical knowledge of the human body. Homeopathy, to my mind, is a process of growth, of mind and body, to reach a higher spiritual purpose.
The connection between the Nature and our mind and body
As a homeopath I was fascinated with the connection between nature and the human mind and body. Patients would get better miraculously, if their remedy were clearly found. To take a good case and to find the right remedy was exhilarating.
A Permanent Cure?
After many years of practising homeopathy, I found that many of my patients came back to me after years, or months, or even weeks with the same complaints that I had given them a remedy for. This was not what it should be. Homeopathy was supposed to be a permanent cure. Why was this not happening? These questions came to my mind. Even when the correct remedy was chosen and the cure was miraculous the patient could fall back. Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, had already described the cause of these fall backs. There is little that he did not know. But there is a lot that we as practitioners did not follow. We did not understand so much that Hahnemann had clearly stated in his book, the Organon of Medicine a century ago. Hahnemann described the maintaining causes for a disease as our unhealthy habits and sometimes the unhealthy environment or thoughts. Today, because of our conditioning, it’s hard to even recognise that some our habits are unhealthy.
Arriving at the truth through de-conditioning or unlearning
Having always been interested in healthy living, and in a healthy diet, I found myself in this very same boat. Because of my conditioning, I was a vegetarian who consumed plenty of dairy, just because I was conditioned to think it was good for me. About 28 years ago, still in my early stages as a doctor, I heard about the process by which milk from cows and buffaloes is obtained. Being a staunch vegetarian, because of the cruelty issues, this information was a shock to me. It started me on the path to becoming a vegan. And this is what opened my eyes. For the first time in my life, I started seeing medical literature and articles related to health that I had never seen before. One of the first ones was an article in the Vegetarian Times, which explained how because of the high protein levels in cow’s milk, calcium was not absorbed from it. It was only because I was already averse to cow’s milk because of the cruelty aspects, that I recognised the significance. But there I was. When I read it I realised that all the patients with osteoporosis, who regularly taking extra dairy, they were taking calcium tablets, and they were never getting cured.
Inspiring People to make the Change
One thing led to another, and I read the many links to medical literature on Robert Cohen’s Notmilk website and in his e-mails. I read Dr Dean Ornish’s book, Reversing Heart Disease, which made a lot of sense. After largely changing my own diet, I began suggesting these methods to my patients. I did not have a lot of success. Patients were attached to their conditioning, and were not open to change, especially change in their diets. This made me think about how I could get them to follow the suggestions. And that opened a whole new process. I started with talks, then seminars and workshops always learning and growing to see how my work could be more effective in helping people de – condition and unlearn the wrong things they had been taught. For me this became all consuming. This was even more holistic than homeopathy. It made my homoeopathic practice look like mere puzzle solving. And I could see why many homeopaths were so involved with it sometimes to the point of addiction. But I recognised that I had to move on. Food as a medicine encompassed all. It was holistic, but not just holistic for a single human being. It had a wider significance for our planet, for the animals, and for every single person as well. If everyone in the world were to change their diet, it appears that we could reverse climate change, we could save water, save energy, feed every hungry person on the planet with food that is now being used to raise animals only to kill them so that a few ‘fortunate’ people can get sicker on them. It could save billions of helpless animals from intolerable cruelty. This was even more natural than homeopathy. What is natural about eating food that is not suitable to our anatomy and then taking medicine, albeit homoeopathic medicine or any other natural healing system medicine to counter the effects of it? Our number one killers today – heart disease, hypertension, cancer and diabetes are all linked to our ‘rich’ diets.
Getting to the Core
But even for people who want to continue to practice homeopathy or other therapies, I notice that most of them allow the patient to continue their medications and add their therapy to the whole lot. This will never cure. This does not help get to the core, because every part of the patient is connected. I have seen patients with mental diseases like manic depressive psychosis reverse this disease when they got off their diabetic medications. When we are treating patients at the level of the mind, if we cannot remove their physical illness first we are at a disadvantage.
Removing the Maintaining Cause is Essential to the Cure
For real cure, we have to first remove the maintaining cause. Once we do this, cure may ensue by itself or may need the help of a homeopath. Homeopathic remedies can work wonders once the cause is removed. But to work the other way around can be an uphill task all the way, never producing the results that are really needed. In order to help people understand the maintaining causes of their diseases and how to remove them, and to help them undo years of conditioning I conduct health workshops. Currently these are in the form of the following workshops – Peas vs Pills, Reversing Diabetes, Reversing Heart Disease and Hypertension. Other workshops are planned and updates will be available on this website.
View my upcoming event details
Keep checking this page for details of upcoming residential workshops and retreats.
Diet for positive health
Understanding disease and what we can do to preserve health.
Disease is a survival mechanism. It is the body’s way of informing us that something is wrong, something needs to be changed. One way of getting rid of the disease is to say, “shut up” to your body rather than listen. This is easily done by taking pain-killers or other symptom suppressing medications. A backache may be a warning that a certain movement will obstruct healing. By taking a painkiller and ignoring that warning, one may end up with a chronic complaint.
The best results are obtained when we follow nature rather than oppose it. When we consider the meaning of disease it transforms from being a hindrance, to being a path to personal growth. To follow the path we may have to change something radically.
One of the reasons human beings are prone to so many diseases is that we are far removed from our natural state. Often the solution is to revert to this natural state. The most common causes of disease are –Of all these the easiest to change is our eating habits.
A look at our anatomy makes it obvious that we are predominantly herbivorous. Our dentition, our long intestinal tract and our absence of claws are evidence. All carnivores drink by lapping, and herbivores by gulping. We drink by gulping. We are descendents of apes that are predominantly herbivorous but can also eat insects and small animals. During evolution the mind is much quicker to adapt than the body. We have developed new and varied eating habits by means of our mind but our bodies lag behind in adapting to this new diet.
The best way to regain health is to revert to our natural diet. One of the most unnatural, foods in our diet is milk and milk products. Humans are the only animals that drink milk after infancy and that take another animals milk. Cow’s milk contains 2 times the protein and 3 times the fat of human milk since cows grow to full size much faster than we do. Protein is a growth food. By logic, at no time in our lives should we need more protein as a percentage of our diet than in infancy. Calcium and protein are basic components of each and every living cell in the universe. Its no wonder the cow is able to make protein and calcium rich milk from her diet of grass.
Reverting to a 100 % natural diet alone is a cure for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and many forms of allergies including asthma, constipation, indigestion, arthritis and gout, and other diseases. Just as the herbivorous cow succumbs to BSE (mad cow disease) when fed slaughterhouse by-products, so we too suffer from diseases through eating foods not meant for our species.
News articles and Medical Journals testify to this.
“A 24-year-old vegetarian has been diagnosed with Cruetzfeld-Jacob disease (the analogue to Mad Cow in humans) Scientists fear that milk and cheese may be the source of infection.” - London Times, August 23, 1997 Michael Hornsby
“In the case of the eight year old female subject, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis was a milk allergy. After avoiding dairy products, all pain was gone in three weeks.” - Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine,1985, 78
“Scientific data suggest positive relationships between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for several chronic degenerative diseases and conditions, including obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and some types of cancer.” - Journal of the American Dietetic Association, November 1997, 97(1)
“Many cases of asthma and sinus infections are reported to be relieved and even eliminated by cutting out dairy.” - Frank Oski, M.D., Chief of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical School Natural Health, July, 1994
“Cow’s milk has become a point of controversy among doctors and nutritionists. There was a time when it was considered very desirable, but research has forced us to rethink this recommendation…dairy products contribute to a surprising number of health problems…” - Benjamin Spock, M.D., “Child Care,” 7th Edition
Today there is yet one more reason to quit food products from animals. They contain far higher levels of pesticides, mercury and other contaminants compared to vegetable food, being higher on the food chain.
From the environmental point of view, raising animals for food spells disaster. It takes 500 litres of water to produce 1 kg of potatoes, 600 for 1 kg of wheat, 2000 for 1 kg of rice, but 100,000 for 1 kg of beef. Livestock consume 80% of the world’s water supply.
It takes approximately 16 kilos of grain to produce 1 kilo of meat or milk. It is far more ecological to grow grains, fruits and vegetables than raise animals. It takes just .07 hectares to produce enough food for a vegan.
How to improve your diet in order to regain health –
1. Slowly change from a conventional diet to vegetarian and then vegan diets. You can improve further by going towards a raw food diet.
2. Make sure the food items you eat are whole rather than refined products (sugar, oil, white flour). Use whole grains, unpeeled fruit and vegetables where possible.
3. Eat foods grown locally and in season and organically grown wherever possible.
4. Understand and use food combining to plan your meals.
5. Read more about this lifestyle, especially the value of vitamins B12 and D.
The benefits of changing your diet will become self evident – you are likely find a positive change in the state of mind, including stress reduction. You will be contributing to improving your environment, and of course you will be in charge or your own health. Last but not least, you will in your own lifetime reduce the suffering of hundreds of animals that are being raised for food by not supporting this industry.
Nandita ShahTo make an appointment for a consultation, please follow this link https://sharan-india.org/consultation/
or Email: consult@sharan-india.org or call +91 2267423080 / + 91 9167572123