From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You are listening to Herb Mentor Radio and HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is K.P. Khalsa. K.P. has been a practitioner of natural medicine for over thirty five years. His resume might take up the entire show, but here are some highlights. K.P. is a senior editor for the Harvard University Natural Standard, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, as well as Pasteur University's College of Naturopathic Medicine.
He is also on the board of directors for the American Herbalist Guild and is a senior research scientist for the Yogi Tea Company.
Author of over fifteen hundred published articles, authored or has been part of more than thirty books including his most recent book, The Way of Ayurvedic Herbs. This is the third in the series started by Michael Tierra and it's available at your favorite book seller. K.P.’s website is K.P. Khalsa. That's k p k h a l s a dot com. KP, welcome.
Hi, John.
And and, really folks listening, this this intro is just the tip of the iceberg as far as, all the things I could say that K.P. has done. So I'm not sure where to start but, so KP, it's one of the best places I like to start when I interview folks is your story. So, you know, what brought you into natural health? How did you how did you get started in all this?
I was very ill as a child, actually. Actually. I think it's a very common story of the wounded healer. I I when I was ten years old, I was diagnosed as having an illness that was invariably fatal, slow degeneration and everyone died before they were forty.
So to a ten year old, that doesn't really mean very much. But as I got older, I was in pain every day and I was getting pretty motivated.
The great thing about getting a diagnosis that there's nothing medically that can be done is that it completely frees you up to do anything else. So I tried various other things and began to get some relief. And slowly over time, I realized that if one or two things could work, there might be others and began a long term investigation.
Eventually, I met my mentor when I was a teenager, my mentor Yogi Bhajan, and I ended up studying with him for thirty two years and the rest is history.
And, so, you know, a lot of folks listening to the show come from many backgrounds with a lot of herbal interest and all. And do you specifically, mostly work in Ayurvedic medicine?
You know, I consider myself a global herbalist. When I began to study herbalism, there was no Ayurveda here for all intents and purposes. My mentor was an accomplished Ayurvedic practitioner, and we talked in Ayurvedic terms, but we didn't have any texts. We didn't have the materials. I learned about herbs that I I couldn't put my hands on, and so we would use Western type substitutes or Chinese substitutes or whatever we could get. So it was a global learning experience.
These days, I'm thought of mainly as the Ayurveda guide because I do have a background in that area. And when Ayurveda guy is needed, they call on me. But really, in day to day practice, I think in terms of whatever is going to work most appropriately. And, you know, over a career of almost forty years, you just synthesize things and I just think of myself now as an herbalist.
Right. Okay.
So, you know, we have on her mentor dot com, we love having practitioners like yourself come on and answer questions.
So when I put out that you were, gonna be here to, to to our members, Lots of people wrote in with questions.
So let's see.
If you're if you're up for it, we can get to some, just dive right in and get to somebody's questions because there were so many. I just wanna make sure that, you know, people took the time to to write in, had a chance to get their their questions answered.
And so I thought I'd start with someone's kinda a little more, generic just about herbs and all and whatnot. And, we had one person write in that, she would like to, hear some, recommendations for the inexperienced herbalist. She says she doesn't have many health issues, but she's looking for an overall healthy way to live. So, like, you know, she's used to run into the aspirin bottle for a headache. So in that case or others like, so just a way to start here for folks who just might wanna start looking at a natural way of of of dealing with some of their health issues.
Yeah. Sure. And I think that's a very appropriate question to start.
Herbalism in every culture in which it's practiced is an integrated part of a holistic healing system. And we have this way of dealing with these things in our culture where we license and study and approach things by modality.
So Herbalism is a topic, a subject that people learn to study in sort of isolation from other things. That doesn't happen anywhere else. So ultimately, typically, in most other cultures, people would be learning about diet and body work and exercise and lifestyle and managing their daily schedule and all those practices together. So that's really what's missing from our approach to these kinds of things. Our drug oriented mindset for the last hundred years or so in America has created a very different kind of situation that doesn't occur anywhere else where people are used thinking of exactly as you suggested, disease x gets remedy x. So headache gets willow bark Mhmm. Or aspirin.
So I think the the way to approach this for everyone who's launching themselves on this path is not to think of herbs as drug delivery systems, but to think of herbalism as part of a holistic natural living health maintenance system.
The main thing that people do in other cultures that we don't do here is to use herbs on a daily basis, as part of their their food and their life. Mhmm. On a project called culinary herbalism.
That's one of the things I'm really teaching a lot about these days. Ways to get herbs into your food and food into your herbs so that they become a part of your everyday life and you can consume herbs every day.
So most cultures have, half a dozen very special herbs that they learn to revere that they use as general tonics or adaptogens.
Usually, they're gender specific, some for women, some for men, that people begin taking at puberty, and they take them every day forever.
Ginseng would be an example of an herb like that, from Ayurveda, Ashwagandha.
Herbs that support wide variety of healing functions and systems in the body. So get going with those. The other thing that I'd mentioned is individualizing therapy.
Western herbalists usually don't have a great connection with how to decide what their particular body needs on a moment to moment basis and a long term basis.
Both are important.
So you have a bacterial infection in your sinuses, you could use Goldenseal, a potent clean herb or garlic, a potent, warming herb. Both of them will treat the infection, but ultimately over time, any given person that takes that, either one of those, about a third will get better, about a third will stay the same, and about third will get worse.
We'd like to encourage people to find out what's going on with their individual body and then craft a lifestyle that works. Remember, all these complicated natural systems are all about what works. So some highfalutin system of classification and endless hair splitting detail is only worth it if it's actually working for you. So experiment a little bit and you find out what works. You eat a lot of celery, that doesn't make you feel good. You switch over to, garlic, that makes you feel better, and you gradually craft a lifestyle that works while still standing on the shoulders of giants. So that five thousand years of herbal history that our, ancestors developed.
Okay. So, you know, there was a, Melody, wrote in that was she was looking for us, like, she she she said we'd like to hear, you talk about, like, because kind of continues along with this. What you see is, a global healthy protocol. Because you're talking about that for an, you know, a protocol that'll help keep the diet healthy in the first place. Like you were talking about before with, with diet and everything.
And then kind of going into what, like to hear your definition and what causes disease or imbalance to take place in the first place, like what's happening in the body, for example, in relation to all of that?
I don't think there is any universally healthy diet. I think, there are certain things that most people don't do very well with. Refined carbohydrates aren't very healthy for anybody. People need to have a balance of nutrients in their body.
Protein, carbohydrate, fat has to be an appropriate balance for that person's particular body. We need a a rich intake of micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. All of those things are possible if you eat a varied diet of whole natural foods. Unfortunately, most of us are starting from way behind the mark, and it's very challenging for us to get to a a place of health by eating the foods that are available to us.
Ultimately, your diet has to be individualized, and there are great techniques especially from, Chinese medicine and Ayurveda to be able to to accomplish that. So the way to live healthy is to investigate your own situation, experiment, and dig into some of those. Now, but what was the second part of the question?
Well, hearing the definition of what, like, causes disease or imbalance in the first place and what, has happening for in the body for that to occur.
Okay. So the challenge here is to find the starting point, and you can't because first, we have to talk about what constant what what aspects of your health are nature and what are nurture and those that are nature come from your parents. You can't change those. Those came from their parents.
So there's a certain amount of genetic propensity to develop certain kinds of diseases in certain ways. So for example, the human body is basically a big inflammation generator, and our basic kind of default on switch is to inflame. So the body then has to use hormones ongoingly to control and maintain that inflammation largely from the adrenal gland. So when the body doesn't have the the resources that it needs, just across the board in terms of micronutrients and healthy fats and those things, the the body can't produce those anti inflammatory hormones.
So most Americans are in a state of sort of continuous modest, moderate inflammation, and things are being developed. Well, so why do some people develop an inflammatory condition in their small intestines, some in their joints of their hands, other people in their skin?
Because of the genetic propensity.
Mhmm. So ultimately, it's some combination of genetics and breaking the laws of nature that cause disease. This goes back to what I was saying earlier about our drug oriented mindset is that we have the sense that somehow, if we can find the sin that we committed, we can, find the magic remedy to cure it or that our disease sort of dropped on us on the sky like a big surprise. Oh, today, I have a headache.
That headache started thirty years ago with your underlying basic health starting to get wobbly and not fixing it then and letting things accumulate and gradually get to a point in your body where those imbalances continued. And then you have the propensity for a headache and a little something, a little, stressful night or at less a night of good inadequate sleep or some dietary change puts you over the edge. In the meantime, I don't see any problem with treating those symptoms. But ultimately, we have to get to back to what causes these things and bring yourself back to balance, which means having your body run not too slow, not too fast, your metabolic rate, not too hot, not too cold, need to be not too heavy, not too light, the right amount of moisture in your tissues, all those things.
Those and most of these things tend to be pretty self correcting.
Your body is intending to heal if it has the resources to do it. It's just a matter of giving yourself those resources, micronutrients, herb tonics, that sort of thing. And over time, your body knows what to do with it and your health is restored.
So you're saying you're saying that really nature is gonna take its course in the healing. However, you have to make sure it's getting what it naturally needs.
Yeah. And again, in our culture, treating symptoms is what we're used to. We mentioned the aspirin bottle. And I think just for people's comfort, there's no problem with that.
But switching willow bark for aspirin is, another temporary solution that's going to yield the same thing. You're still gonna have just as many headaches, but you'll have a slightly less toxic way of treating them. Wouldn't it be great to never have a headache again? I think that's possible.
And then that's when you kind of use the tools that you have cons on a constitutional basis then. So if you're looking at somebody through either a Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic or or other methods that you use.
Yeah. That's right. Ultimately, you have to do something to get people enrolled in the process that they feel comfortable and committed with natural medicine and then treat their issues as they come up. If someone has a cold, we're gonna help them feel better from the cold.
But we know that that's not gonna prevent them from having more colds. So over time, we wanna understand what's going on with them constitutionally and bring them back to that state of balance, which for most Americans is probably, let's say, at least five years of diligent effort. And since most people have difficulty being diligent, you can maybe ten years. But, you know, so those ten years are gonna go by anyway.
And wouldn't you rather be a person who at, you know, eighty years old is more like Jacqueline than your grandmother?
That's great. Yeah. You know, a lot of times, I'll, you know, just say because so many people get so caught up in the diet thing. Like, am I doing the right exact?
And they they get kind of anxiety about it. And a lot of times, I'll just say, you know, why don't why don't you just take away, like you said, the the processed and, carbohydrates and the and the junk food. And and that's a huge start right there. Just getting more micronutrients.
I mean, may maybe you can't, maybe you're not yet have it refined to the perfect constitutional diet. But, gosh, I mean, that that's a huge part of it right there, isn't it?
Well, you're right. And that that brings you back to a place of, for most people, a very good starting point. And the remainder of the super refinement, for most people, is not the main not the best place to focus their attention. For is ends up with a two percent improvement in health.
And what you mentioned is actually a good thing to talk about and that people tend to sort of become excited about one particular thing. So I hear many people ask questions like what's the best water filter because we know that drinking clean water is the single most important thing you can do for your health or what's the perfect diet or exactly hours of aerobic exercise each week should I get all those things are important, and they're all important to a certain extent. So any you can do like that is good. I don't think there is any one thing that is the ultimate for anybody or for everybody.
That's great. I I love hearing that. Just, you know, not being so obsessive about one thing, but just, kind of just kind of, yeah, just kind of over there so many things. Like there's, like you said, there's there's there's a diet, exercise and herbs and everything. And and and gotcha if we obsess about every little bit, we'll get ourselves sicker.
So, let's so, just get a little more into some detail, questions. We have a question from a person and it kinda shifts a little bit here, because she she wants to ask, for. Okay. Let's see here.
I would like to, ask how one should approach, from shifting really. So she's starting to hear shift from reducing prescription medicines towards urban natural medicine support. My mother is on many many medications for arthritis and heart disease. She's worried about interactions as well as stopping or reducing what she currently is taking.
And that's a good point because a lot of folks starting out, they like just think that this is a, oh, you take these drugs away and then you replace them with these herbs. So when people say that to you, and I'm sure it's common, hey, KP, I've got this condition and I wanna get off these drugs. Which herbs can I replace them with and how can I do it? So what do you usually say to those those folks?
Well, gosh, we got it it only took us fifteen minutes to get to the interactions quest.
There's a lot of them. Well, you're very you're you're very efficient in your answers.
You just go through question that I get from everybody, from every audience in every way. And it's a very important question. And I think we need to do our due diligence in discussing it.
The bottom line is that we really don't know.
Herbs are multi chemical compounds that contain thousands of active substances, but they can't contain tiny amounts of those things. So again, if we go back to not thinking of herbs as a drug delivery system, but as holistic specially selected gourmet foods, foodstuffs that have a particular healing action that we select because they're convenient to use, I think it's a better approach. When I talk to my European colleagues about this, they're very surprised that we're so focused on this issue because they say, look, we've been using herbs and drugs together the whole time. We didn't have that seventy year dark ages like you had. We do this every single day. And, yeah, you have to watch what you're doing to a certain extent, but you guys are way, way over concerned about it.
So maybe in five hundred years, we will have done all the studies we need to do to determine every interaction between every possible drug and every possible herb.
The Veterans Administration did a study here not long ago where they were very concerned about this issue and they studied this with thousands of patients in many centers. And the ultimate answer to this question, and remember, you don't get much more establishment than the Veterans Administration, was it was essentially a non issue. They came up with something like two percent of all possible interactions that they studied that would be dangerous in their patients, and they highlighted a couple. And they said, essentially what I said, And they highlighted a couple.
And they said essentially what I said, do your due diligence, be aware of extreme kinds of situations and watch for things. So ultimately, the way you do it is to cross taper. You start with a person who's taking a drug, you start with an herbal medicine, you start with a very small amount, you work into it, watch for problems, be aware of what the side effects might be and then gradually bring the drug dose down. This needs to be done with the physician's cooperation, which, of course, is challenging.
Almost always, we can do it successfully, but you want to be very careful. I'm not even going to go into the legal matters, which is something you need to discuss with your attorney.
But on a practical matter, you can almost always do it quite effectively.
What ends up happening is though is that you have people who aren't committed to the holistic paradigm, they have no herbal experience and they're expecting the herbs they're taking to be the non drug drug. So when they look at their one Valium and they compare that to their fifteen capsules of Valerian to do the same thing, it's there's not a good match there and people have more difficulty with those issues than with any possibility of, problems from interactions.
I see. I see.
So this person should really be consulting a natural health professional and talking her condition straight through with that person, seeing what they can do with that.
That's right. I think our audience is quite varied and people will have to decide for themselves whether they have enough experience to manage this sort of thing. But, you know, if there's a question about how to do it, they need to see someone who has enough training and has seen this many, many times to be able to understand it. And then it depends on the person and the circumstances.
These interactions are calculated by a pharmacologist sitting in a backroom writing on a blackboard.
Virtually no public information about interactions comes from clinical herbalists who have actually experimented with those things. There are a few excellent books on that topic written by clinical herbalists. But most of the time, it's theoretical, in a Petri dish, a certain herb causes the blood to coagulate less rapidly, therefore that must be a blood thinner, therefore it must interact with Coumadin, therefore it shouldn't be taken with Coumadin. Now my perspective is, if it's such a great blood thinner, let's use it instead of Coumadin rather than worrying about the interaction. But that's just not the case. Coumadin is a sledgehammer and, our remedies are feathers.
Wow. Okay.
Let's get on to Sharon here who who says her family has a lot of health issues. And, she says we've started seeing a, she's we started seeing a good chiropractor and that's helped a lot.
Her son gets UTIs. Her daughter gets migraines and has other pro female problems. Her son has allergies, to the nightshade family. They have a grandbaby that has reflux and allergies, and she goes on and says so on and so on.
So her insurance doesn't cover an ND, naturopathic physician. What would you suggest some good resources for the in the self help direction to help get her family on track?
I would go to the, website of the American Herbalist Guild and look at suggested books. There's an extensive list there of books written by members.
So the American Herbalist Guild is an organization that is it's a professional association for clinical herbalists, and the members have, established themselves as reputable authorities, and there's some excellent books there written by clinical herbalists who actually have real on the ground experience. So you want to start with those kinds of things. The Herb Mentor website, would be a great place. Yeah.
Dig into all that information and get started. You start with the things that are basically self limiting, something like an allergy.
It doesn't have to be it's not a fatal condition. You can work with it. If you start to get results, you can work your way into it.
Ultimately, these complicated situations probably need the the advice or the touch of a professional in some way, but you can work with the professional in a way that they understand that you have financial limitations and suggest as much homework and and, home participation as possible. Mhmm. And you just work your way into it slowly but steadily until you learn enough. You know, after all, grandmas handle ninety five percent of people's health conditions all over the world. And, you know, we have this wacky system where we pay the highest paid, highest trained professionals in the world to treat scraped knees, tummy problems, and, you know, stuffed up noses. So, learn to be a good grandma.
Wow. That's that's great advice. And and it's so hard too, Katie, because where people live, if they live that way out there. I mean, if they live near us, we're on the, like, West Coast like us or, like, all up in Seattle, you're down in Eugene.
There's, there's low cost resources, going like, cause we have these, I have this naturopathic medicine school near us who does all these, you know, you can go and see them for, you know, do student consultations or whatever. And there's, there's those, but other people don't. So like, and it and it really varies the resources from place to place. And I really like that. It's like, you know, so you, just kinda learn, learning to do it and, and being like grandma, and, and, and, and taking it one step at a time. And that's what I'm really so passionate about, really helping people be the family herbalist, you know, just to help themselves and their families and local communities.
That's right.
So let's see. Dana here, works with many women, who have fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue.
Now those are big things these days. I myself as an acupuncturist treat that a lot, seems like more and more.
Josie, love to, know your recommendations for these conditions.
Well, first, let me tell you that I wrote a textbook on this subject. Perfect. So, John, I can I can connect with you to get, you know, a link for that somehow, there? My practice for ten years was ninety five percent fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. So I just, you know, I've waited very deeply in those waters for a long, long time.
My experience is that we can have excellent success with those conditions. In fact, they're much more treatable than is usually thought. I would say, absolutely, completely treatable.
The challenge is that both that disease, it's all the same disease, has it represents a total body collapse basically. And the longer you've had it, the more things have become damaged from having had it. So over time, it it it takes some serious rebuilding.
The first, we have to distinguish whether or not it's of immune or infectious origin. So there's a family of viruses that can cause this condition and these symptoms. And if that's the case, we have to investigate that and treat those or we don't make much progress. Mhmm. There are some things that can kill that virus. I'll give you two suggestions. The absolute main core remedies that I found that will treat those viruses, that's the herb black walnut hull and the herb gum benzoin.
Those two herbs, one or the other or a combination, almost always works to help a person get over the virus itself. Typical dose of that combination is about twelve grams a day. And you could use a fifty fifty combination or even better, you could experiment with them each individually in their proportions.
And, as you work up toward the dose, people often begin to feel better, dramatically better quite quickly. So that even within two, three weeks, they're noticing some difference. That takes the it may take six months to to kill the virus, but slowly but surely, people begin to recover from that. It suppresses the virus. Another thing I'd like to mention is the mineral magnesium. Well, let me mention two things as just being the the core treatments in my experience. First is magnesium.
I've seen people go from being completely diagnosable with fibromyalgia to no longer fitting the diagnostic magnet. Very dramatic. So we have to, fill their tanks with magnesium, and that means using right up to bowel tolerance, which for most people is about twelve hundred milligrams a day. And over the months, until they're eating magnesium, which should be great.
And if you have access to someone who can do IV magnesium, that makes it go faster. The other one is vitamin d, which is I think, the breakthrough of the century for natural healing. We found things about vitamin d that we were just so wrong for generations, And it's just it's rare evolution in national care. Again, I've seen people become completely asymptomatic with nothing but vitamin D.
Some people's fibromyalgia, I think is just literally a vitamin D deficiency and somewhere around eighty five percent of Americans are overly deficient when they're blood tested. So you you can assume someone has a vitamin d deficiency. You bring their blood up to the proper level, and, over a matter of a few weeks, it's really limp in, leap out Astounding.
Hey, folks. This is John. Just a little break in the interview. As you can could hear there, things started to get a little sketchy in the audio there as there was a big storm brewing outside. I left all that at the end of that intact because you could mostly make out what he was saying and there was good stuff. So I later picked up the interview where we left off when I asked KP more about vitamin d and magnesium.
So what I wanna know is, you're just talking about magnesium and vitamin d and, what are the just for most of us out there wanting to make sure we have this in our diet, or or or what are the best ways of taking it? Because I I know vitamin d, like we have, and it's a meats and eggs and all. But I've had people tell me, oh, that's not enough. You should supplement. I get a little confused in that area. So could you kinda shed some light there?
Vitamin D is we're not designed to intake vitamin D from food. There is some vitamin D in some food and you would get some. But by comparison to the amount that your body makes in your skin when exposed to the sun, the amount that you could have in food is absolutely negligible. So we're supposed to be out in the sun producing vitamin D in our skin.
It's made from cholesterol in the skin and then it's absorbed. And our body makes about twenty thousand units a day of vitamin D naturally when exposed to the sun. So you have to supplement is the bottom line. And you want to use vitamin D3 and that's easily available from any health food store.
It's very inexpensive, pennies a day.
And you need to get yourself into the normal range on a blood test. So you could the vitamin D is extremely non toxic despite what we all learned in junior high health class.
And you could assume that you're deficient and start with a daily dose. Most people that's going to be around five thousand units. And then at some point in the near future, take a blood test. And then depending on what you find, adjust the dose. Most people have to take three blood tests over a period of about eighteen months to dial in the amount that will keep them in the normal range.
Magnesium is easily available in food. It's abundant in our soil and it's what makes vegetables green. So green vegetables are the main source and then whole grains, exactly the things we don't eat, which is why it's the second most common nutrition deficiency. Doctor.
So a stinging herbal and nourishing herbal infusion would, would, would help with something like the fibromyalgia and whatnot because it's, giving you, all that magnesium but also lots of other good stuff too.
Yeah. Of course. And that's why we choose these herbs is because these nutrients are more concentrated. So something like Nettle is a great example of culinary herbalism where it's, you know, sort of between food and medicine. It's way more nutritious than a doughnut, but not doesn't have as much magnesium as a magnesium capsule.
So treat magnesium like or sorry, treat nettle like spinach and you're in good shape.
Oh, wow. Great.
Okay. So Darcy wants to know about herbs that can help with nerve pain in general and or from sciatica or neuralgia. So she's read that ashwagandha should not be taken for more than six weeks at a time.
Not be used if you have some acute arthritis or prone to diabetes. She wasn't sure about that. She's that true.
Yeah.
So that's basically what she was curious about, the nerve pain from sciatica or neurologia and how ashwagandha can play, into that?
Let's talk about ashwagandha first, then we can go back to the to the nerve pain. This is a great example of exactly what I was talking about of this Blackboard science being used to understand herbal medicine. It doesn't work very well. Ashwagandha is used for extensive long periods of time, years at a time, for an entire lifetime perhaps.
It's just the root of a plant closely related to tomatoes and potatoes. It's a food basically, And you can use it in substantial amounts over an extensive period of time. Ayurveda makes no mention of limiting any kind of use to six weeks. That said, this being an Ayurvedic herb, it is recommended for people according to Ayurvedic indications.
Now the arthritis situation, I think the idea is that it's a nightshade. It's the root of a plant in the related to tomatoes and eggplants. I've never seen anybody with Nightshade sensitivity have a reaction to ashwagandha. The amount of Nightshade toxin, if it's in the if it is in Ashwagandha, it is remarkably low in the root because it just doesn't cause that that kind of an issue. So I would consider it to be a food, a culinary herb that could be used ongoingly. And interestingly, it's an herb that is very associated with the nervous system and one of the first herbs I would think of in terms of rebuilding the nervous system in a slow gradual way. Ashwagandha works slowly and has its long term stamina enhancing and immune enhancing functions over, let's say, a period of about a year taking modest doses.
Now that said, let's just talk about another one of its properties associated with the nervous system and that is that it's a fantastic anti anxiety herb. It's the best herb I've ever seen for anxiety.
It doesn't treat anxiety immediately. You take a Valium, your anxiety is quelled in fifteen minutes. Ashwagandha is more like fifteen days. So it's rebuilding and preventive.
But I've had many people tell me that they can trade their Valium straight across Fresh Rubenda. So I usually have people start with about a gram the first day and increase by a gram a day, let's say, over about two weeks and we get to about a two week period and we get to the dose where when they stabilize on that dose, their anxiety just seems to vaporize and they just doesn't get generated.
And over time, we usually give it to them for about a year, maybe they take it for six months at that dose of something like twelve grams a day and then slowly that dose comes down and anxiety just never returns. The nerve rejuvenator, so nerve pain. The other herb I was going to recommend is Gotu Cola, which is probably the premier nerve in the world for I'm sorry, premier herb in the world for nerve regeneration. So for something like sciatica, where there's actual trauma to the to the nerve, gotu kola, is a great choice.
Most people don't understand gotu kola very well and use it in doses that are way too modest to have the spectacular success that it has in Asia. It's a a mild salad vegetable like lettuce. It grows in in the swamps, in the in the jungles, in the wet steamy tropics.
So we need to use large amounts, and a typical dose would be one ounce of the herb by dry weight brewed into tea and consuming that every day, and we could even go to higher amounts. So that's likely to help re help rejuvenate the nerve tissue itself, and that one works a little faster so people can begin to feel results within days.
The question about sciatica though is again kind of getting back to this issue of we don't have a magic bullet for sciatica. That if you just take enough gotichol, that will prevent the nerve from hurting because it's being pushed on. You have to find out why the nerve is being pushed on and get that handled through all the kinds of things that we would do, body work, dietary change, acupuncture, psychotherapy, exercise, all those things. They have to look at herbs as a slice of that whole holistic picture.
Yeah. I agree. I had a sad situation a year or two ago and I have a couple of therapies that I go to and still go to that, I've kept it away, but I kinda have to keep going. And it's really helping. I don't notice I have it anymore, but it wasn't and he couldn't just do it through food for me. That's for sure.
Yep.
Alright. So, we have someone else, kind of going off the bat was, interested in, asking about joint health, especially as we age and herbs that help with tendonitis and inflammation. I would talk a little bit about inflammation, but in context to joint health.
Right. Well, here again, this is a great example of individualized therapy. So is the problem chronic inflammation or is it, let's call it degeneration Mhmm. Cold, crunchy, crackly, unlubricated joints. And those two things require very different kind of treatment. So people in midlife often have inflammatory conditions of their of their joints, and we wanna use, anti inflammatory remedies. As people age, everybody's body cools down and has a tendency to get less lubricated, the classic osteoarthritis.
So we wanna treat that with warming, lubricating remedies.
This is a good chance to mention my favorite herb, turmeric, unknown in the herb world as Mr. Turmeric. Mhmm. I've been talking about turmeric for thirty years.
I'm just so impressed with all the things that it does and it's the number one most researched herb these days. More scientific papers are being published on turmeric than any other herb. It's hot topic in Alzheimer's, anti aging research, generally inflammation, cardiovascular disease, cancer, we just go right down the line. So turmeric is an anti inflammatory.
As anti inflammatories go, it's a little mild, so the dose has to be high. But it has some great advantages in that it has all those other properties and it helps to de inflame and remineralize joints, so it can be used with warm or cold conditions.
It probably would benefit everyone to use a little turmeric in their diet every single day like the way it's used in Asia. A teaspoon a day in your food would be adequate. Once you've got a problem though, you have to look at higher doses and you may wanna use multi tablespoon doses per day, which means that you have to find some way to hide it, stir it into a bite of yogurt or oatmeal or some way to to take it down. You'll figure out figure out your favorite way. But it's it's one of the herbs that makes the biggest difference for joint health over time of any that you could choose.
Wow. And just cooking with I love that. So you just put some turmeric. Eat a lot of curry. Great. So in other words, you want to help your joints, eat some curry.
Absolutely. And honestly, for most most people like the taste, if it's used modestly, you can throw a teaspoon in your beans or, you know, in the sauce of your vegetables that, you know, makes things, yellow. Mhmm. And, you know, you don't have to be have a fancy twenty ingredient curry, combination. Just put it in anything, that where it grabs you.
And that problem maybe for someone with tendinitis, like you said, along with some other therapies could really could really help you through it faster. Acupuncture, like you said, and whatnot.
Absolutely.
That's awesome.
And, let's see. Oh, yes. Jill.
She has a friend with diverticulitis, and was wondering what you recommend for for this. That's interesting.
Yeah. So diverticulitis is the creation of, pouchy pockets in the large intestine that tend to accumulate fecal matter that doesn't get eliminated consistently with the bowel movements and then they become inflamed. That's the it is part of the thing.
This is a challenging condition because once those pockets are there, they tend to hang around. There are two main things that we do as herbalists, let's say three. The first is to reduce inflammation or use modest ongoing long term anti inflammatories like turmeric. The other is to use astringent remedies that tighten tissues. So that could be whatever your favorite astringent remedy is, schizandra from Chinese medicine or oak bark or, you know, whatever you like.
And that will help to tone the wall of the large intestine, hopefully reduce the size of those pockets. The other thing is to eat a very high fiber diet so that that fiber as it kind of scratches its way down the large intestine and sweeps the walls is able to kind of grab that leftover material in the pouches and keep the pouches emptied out. It's also critical to make sure that a person has adequate bowel function. So natural healing, we would like from one per meal to one per day would be acceptable, but no less than that range. Alright.
So All right.
So, you know, the interesting I'm looking through some of these questions and how many you were talking about, like, about inflammation and how many are are itises or inflammations here.
So And we're really learning that it's the scourge of the modern American lifestyle and so many things from Alzheimer's to cancer to heart disease start as like a slow cook.
We're all just sort of simmering ourselves to death in our own, you know, hormones and it comes from, lack of healthy fats in the diet, lack of micronutrients, excessive stress and lack of sleep. And ultimately, those things come together and finally, that slow chronic damage, finally, the tissue has had enough and something some kind of crisis happened.
I'm feeling like this call is like the, that we're doing here is like the the basic, handbook for the, for, for, for basic American health.
Yeah. It's amazing. And, and, and also if I'm correct me if I'm I don't know. Our, our connection was a little broken up, when we were talking about vitamin d, but, a friend of mine was telling me about vitamin D also being really helpful for preventing inflammation. Is that true?
Oh, it's spectacular. It's one of the most dramatic things I've ever seen. It's a very, very potent anti inflammatory.
And basically, that's what it does. It's it's the most ubiquitous nutrient in your body. Every cell has a receptor for vitamin d, and it does hundreds of things. It's a multipurpose, hormone.
It's not a vitamin actually. It's a pro hormone that our body makes. It's made out of cholesterol like the other sex and stress hormones, and our body uses it to treat inflammation. And it's one of the most dramatic things I've ever seen.
So we use a a high loading dose, and that's something that people could investigate with their practitioner to bring the blood level up to the proper level and inflammation just vaporizes. It's just a spoundrel.
Hey, Molly.
Eczema, lifelong eczema gone in a week. Now I just mean the underlying condition is gone. It just means that the inflammation is brought down. And then we bring them down to a maintenance dose where they can sustain that level, and these inflammatory conditions and pain conditions just, disappear in an incredibly short time. It's just astounding.
Wow.
Wow. Looks like we have another it is question here. We have someone that says Luann, that's diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when she was nineteen. She's now forty nine. She knows from experience that all dairy products, no matter how minute, will initiate this condition in her, the symptoms.
I don't know if it's true for others, but for most part, I have been able to keep the disease in remission for most of my adult life. Through dairy free diet, stress free lifestyle.
But recently, this is not so. She's going through, some hormonal changes in menopause and wondered if this might be causing the problems. She wants to know if, you believe that there's a correlation with diet and hormonal changes and ulcerative colitis and if there's any Ayurvedic theories to the root of this illness?
How old did she say she?
She's now forty nine.
Yeah. So she's in that midlife, time that I talked about where people tend to inflame, the most easily. People start to kind of on the upward road of inflammation in their, let's say, early or mid twenties, and it tends to peak around forty and then start to wind down toward about sixty. So she's well over the peak, but still in that middle time where inflammation is challenging to control.
So she's done all these preventive measures by removing things that tend to aggravate it, but she hasn't handled the underlying issue, which is the body not controlling its own inflammation. Why does she have colitis? Somebody else has gastritis. Somebody else has dermatitis.
Somebody else has bursitis. It's those genetic propensities that we talked about earlier. So ultimately, she needs to investigate she needs to do exactly the things she's doing, the stress free lifestyle, and then investigate a cooling, diet, which would include things like cucumbers and, celery and green vegetables.
And then in terms of controlling the specific symptoms, my main pillar herbs for colitis, for keeping it keeping a flare from happening or treating a flare if it happens is marshmallow root, which is a demulcent that soothes the lining of the digestive tract and the turmeric again, which is astringent, which is what we want in that kind of condition and also anti inflammatory.
So my typical dose is two heaping tablespoons of marshmallow root and two heaping tablespoons of turmeric. Those can be taken individually or mixed together, but they need to be mixed in something that's a little mushy to make them, possible to swallow. So it could be a bite of oatmeal or anything like that. It's important to remember to take plenty of water with the marshmallow root because it absorbs many times its weight in water. So once it goes in, drink a couple tall tumblers of water so that it can swell up and create that beautiful lubricating slime that lubricates the large intestine.
Another great herb for this condition is licorice root. Licorice root is one of the most well known anti inflammatories and one of the best. So it's also demulcent. So you got an herb that has demulcent and anti inflammatory activity.
Unfortunately, licorice is a little stool loosening. So most people can't get in more than about five grams before they start to have loose stool. And people with ulcerative colitis tend to lose stool anyway. So that's a little more challenging, but, it's one more thing to consider.
You know, the, there I see some I I I'm starting to see this, you know, once again, pattern. A lot of these kind of, more inflamed or kind of heated conditions. So So another person writes in about night sweats and hot flashes, and they started about two weeks ago. She's forty three.
Started drinking sage tea before bed, but it doesn't really help. I wanna hear your views on it. So to some of these kind of, like, treatments that you're talking about or therapies or culinary medicine, they kinda overlap. I mean, can can she also takes, like, you know, lot use some of these herbs and and and dietary advice that you've been saying for other things?
Yeah. Very much so. Now, of course, there's a hormonal base to her situation, and that needs to be handled. And the way we handle that is to go back about forty years and have her start using long term sustaining hormone balancing, remedies.
But of course, we can't do that. So now we're stuck with with what we have, and it is what it is. So she needs to get going with some things that are known to support hormone balance while using some things to help her feel a little better temporarily, in addition to the cooling diet. So let me recommend a couple things that that work pretty well temporarily.
The first one is the Ayurvedic herb, Shatavari, which is the root of a a type of asparagus. Again, a very food like plant that over the long term is the main remedy in Ayurveda for female hormone balance, and it works very, very well for hot flashes if taken in higher doses. Mhmm. So a typical dose for Chateauvary for hot flashes would be, about, twelve grams a day.
And, that's a very neutral tasting herb that can be taken, just in powder form. Could be stirred into oatmeal or yogurt, or it could be taken in, capsules. And you basically just start start with something like a gram a day the first day, and just work up gradually, step by step until she gets relief.
And that often will work well. The other one I want to mention is another a tonic or adaptogen or stamina enhancing remedy that also is great for hot flashes, and that's the Chinese herb Schizandra berry.
Schizandra is, has many of the same features we just talked about with, with Chatevary, kind of a woman's herb. It's a kind of a mild minor tonic or adaptogen.
And the beautiful thing about it is that it, fantastic for night sweats. It's very specifically, very much a specific for night sweats. Doesn't solve the heat problem so much, but the actual sweating. But many women say, many women say that it's not so much that they're hot, it's just that they wake up drenched in a pool of their own sweat, and that's what makes them so miserable.
So Shizandra, same situation, that could be used in capsules.
It's made used in tea in Chinese medicine, but it's pretty intense tasting.
So capsules work well. Take one capsule the first night, two tap capsules the next night, and work up gradually until the night sweats come under control. That combination is often, just miraculous.
Wow. You know, there's another person here as who has a history of endocrine disorder, Cushing's disease, and, was going through menopause. Pause. And she had, she isn't hasn't had much trouble with night sweats, but she became an insomniac.
She tried a lot of herbs and found that a combination of maca, m a c a, and ashwagandha has eliminated the problem, but she's read that these herbs are supposed to be used to help your sex life. Can you enlighten us about those herbs? Are they adaptogenic or may she just wants to know, like, is this okay? Is this dangerous or is this okay what she's doing?
Sure. Oh, I'm really glad to hear that. And that's, exactly where we go with Cushing's disease. Cushing's disease is a serious condition, and it needs to be treated by a professional. It's really, it will be something that would be challenging to treat for a layperson to treat.
Ashwagandha in particular is known for helping sleep. The scientific name is Withania somnifera, which tells you about its history. So Ashwagandha enhances and balances sleep rhythms. It doesn't make you sleepy when you take it. So you can take it during the day, and over time it helps you be a better sleeper. So over a matter of a few weeks of taking it in monostosis, you find that your sleep is just better, more consistent, more refreshing.
And maca is not particularly known to be associated with sleep per se, but it's another hormone balancer that is very similar to Ashwagandha, ginseng and some of these other ones we talked about.
The ultimate answer to that, the Cushing's situation is to support and balance the endocrine system, which is what these adaptogenic tonics do. And ultimately, things your body knows how to heal itself, you give it what it needs. So that's why they're known to be herbs that are good for your sex life, because they just make your hormones healthy and then you do what you do and people are sexy and that's where we go with it.
Wow. Okay. So that's good. It's probably relieved her.
So, Joanne here has a question. And gosh, we're we're, it's amazing. We've we've, amazing answers, and we've been or near wrap it up. We'll ask a couple questions here.
But, it's amazing. We've kind of gone right right right through.
So so she's a type type two diabetic and she's taken insulin and, was on oral hypoglycemics along with the insulin until the pancreas and liver got compromised.
Pancreatic enzymes got extremely high and liver enzymes high. The doctor said to stop taking the pills until the symptoms went away.
I want to take, herbs instead of synthetic pills. I did some research and I'm experimenting with fenugreek, bitter melon, gym gymnema silvestri. I don't I don't know that. And goats and goats root.
I don't know if I pronounce her. So she's taken the the this in the in capsules, enzyme count is decreasing and the blood sugars are staying below the one forty mark. Even so, I just don't know if she's what she's doing is okay with the errors, you know. It's she I guess, she's feeling a little uneasy about, like, is this the right thing? You know, kinda.
Well, she hit my top three, bing, bing, bing right out of the gate.
I I have no experience with Go through. It's on everyone's list for diabetes. I just don't I haven't used it clinically. But fenugreek stupendous for diabetes, it helps to trap carbohydrates, in the gut so that they don't get, ingested and can't be turned into blood sugar, and it has an amino acid that helps to lower blood sugar in the body.
Bitter melon, is a great choice. That's bitter herbs in general tend to be good for blood sugar and blood fats. So that's a very standard remedy from Asia that I use a lot. Bitter melon can be used in a culinary way.
It's quite bitter for most people's taste. But if you enjoy the taste, you can cook it into food using it like, let's say, like zucchini, or you can juice it. So for people who have difficulty with the bitterness, juicing works quite well. You can run it right through your champion juicer.
And most people find that a range of, let's say, two to four ounces a day, is appropriate. And of course, diabetics are managing their blood sugar. So ideally, we would like to bump the fenugreek dose up and the pheromone dose up while adjusting the insulin, and we should see the insulin need, go down. Gymnema is, not a healing herb.
It's a let's call it an insulin substitute. Mhmm. It basically makes the pancreas put out more insulin. So whatever pancreas function she has left is basically being directed to sort of work harder, which is a good temporary solution, and it's I definitely use it.
But it's not a it's not going to help rebalance her body and support the rest of her body to help out her pancreas as much as possible. Even these very serious cases, it's usually possible in type two diabetes to help unwind this whole situation and get a person going with a program of of diet, exercise, and, natural medicine that will allow them to, if not completely remove the insulin, at least bring it, bring it down substantially.
So so she's she's on the right track.
Oh, yeah. Those are wonderful herbs to think about.
Great.
I think I'll ask ask you one more question here before wrapping some things up because I got a couple of questions myself.
Tara, was wondering, there's a mom that's breastfeeding an eight month old and has postpartum depression.
How about that?
Well, it that's a challenging situation because breastfeeding is a very contentious area. It's easier to deal with in pregnancy, but, of course, the baby has the potential to get every remedy that, that goes into the mom. And we often sort of don't know which ones of these go through the milk. So you have to be very careful with what, you know, what's used. One herb that might be considered is the, Asian herb champushpi.
Shankopooshpi is in the morning glory family. It's a very mild mood elevator, and many people find out that it just really makes the difference.
Now I don't know, you live in a sunny climate. I live in a rainy climate, so I don't know where the that the, questioner is from.
Oh, the she's from, I don't live in a sunny I live in Seattle, Larry.
Oh, I thought you were on the other side of the mountain.
Oh, no. No. No. Rosalie lives on the other side of the mountains, but I'm on, I'm on I'm on, that's a good point. I should have said that. I'm, like, about an hour from Seattle, Lincoln or near Redmond.
Tessie, this person is from Michigan. So sometimes sunny, but mostly cold.
Right. So I was just gonna point out that where I live in this, cold, dark, rainy place, Chapushti works very, very well for seasonal affective disorder and something that when I add it to my repertoire, I found that it just really gave me another tool that often works very well. It's a pretty mild herb. It's a cooling herb with some benefits for the liver.
And, you could just use it according to the needs of the of the body. And it it should be safe for breastfeeding. I want to say that with a big caveat because there are lots of different opinions about how herbs should be used during breastfeeding. We tend to be conservative here because we, because of all the obstacles to success with those things.
Well, could could could, some, herbal infusions with something like, raspberry leaf and and if something like that help, with that.
Yeah. I mean, I think honestly just using some very simple kinds of things that would be health supporting in general would likely to be of benefit. I mean, you mentioned nettle earlier, but just getting nutrients in. Pregnancy is is tough on the body. It's hard to imagine how our ancestors had, you know, twenty children and then went out and worked in the field the next day.
But, it somehow, you know, it's it just really takes a lot out of a woman's body. So just rejuvenating by eating very power packed foods, superfoods, wheatgrass, those powdered wheatgrass juice, bee pollen, those kinds of things. And using nutritive herbal infusions as beverages, cooking food in those things. Instead of cooking your spaghetti in straight water, cook it in a stragglers broth.
That's that's that yes. You know, it's as simple as that. You know, KP, like, this has been awesome because, you know, we've taken us on quite a journey here in this. Just just, you know, thinking about things a lot differently and also introducing us to a lot of herbal remedies and and plants that, on on our mentor that we don't we don't really talk about too much because they've been kind of unfamiliar.
And, I just wanna make sure that I'm correct in saying that a lot of these, you know, herbs that you've talked about, like ashwagandha, turmeric. Since you're mister turmeric, I mean, I I was honored a couple months ago to interview doctor Dandelion, and now I've got mister turmeric on the phone.
It's great.
And, so, your book, Way of Ayurvedic Herbs, will do do you cover most of these herbs that we've been or all of them that we've talked about in this, call?
Not all of them in that book because that's a book specifically about Ayurvedic herbs. So the ones that we talked about from, South Asia like Gotu Kola and Ashwagandha are extensively covered. The other two more two recent books that include more of those herbs would be my book, Body Balance, which is the book about body chemistry, but very oriented toward herbal medicine that's easily available on Amazon.
And Herbal Defense, which, is a very general book about herbal medicine and using it to stay healthy. And again, many of those are covered in that book.
And I like to ask, herbalists that I interview, what do you have a specific place that you like folks to purchase your books from? Because sometimes people have a site or they have a bookseller they like to support.
Good question. No. Not in particular. Amazon would be fine wherever people can find it. The, Herbal Defense and Body Balance are out of print, so you'll go to the youth section. I saw body balance on sale, a copy for twenty five cents the other day. So you did a good buyout.
Oh, I think the I think I think the prices are gonna go up. There's gonna be a whole market now. After this call, everybody's gonna be buying up all the twenty five cent copies or or a b e dot com. There's another one.
That's great. So I I'm looking forward to, to to to ordering a copy of your of your book of our way of our beta gerps because I myself, would you know, I was wanna learn more about that.
Gosh, you know, I I just feel like we just covered the tip of the iceberg. We got we gotta have you back sometime, KP, and especially since you're so local to me.
Oh, it's not great.
We gotta hang out sometime. It'd be fun. And your website was, under development as when I went to kp calls it dot com. And and that'd be coming, out with some stuff on there soon?
We have, Yeah.
It's just, the, offline for repairs.
For repairs. Okay.
So Yeah.
So it'll be backups.
And we'll have that link on the page where this, podcast is. But if you don't see that link and you're like, you hear this on iTunes later on or something, kpkalsa dot com.
So KP A better choice a better choice would be my school's, website, which would be packed with more information.
The whole suite of websites is down for, a big improvement, big bunch of improvements right now. But my the name of my school is the International Integrated Educational Institute. So if you just Google that, you'll you'll get to the website when it's, a backup center.
Okay. I'll I'll I'll do that too. Oh, and I should, wonder too.
Do you when do you have a, when P if people want to, for consulting, do you just do that live and in person? Do you see clients in the Eugene area? Or do you do phone consultations?
Or I have a very limited practice in Eugene.
I, see people in I'm in Seattle about once a month, and I see people there. Mhmm. So they should just call my phone number or email me if they're interested in connecting that way. And then I do a lot of work on the phone, so it'd be perfectly fine to, to do that.
That works out quite well, actually.
And the contact information for that would just then be off your main website or your school website?
Don, I can just send that to you and you could post it there.
Okay.
I will do that. Alright. So, I'll post it on the site there for you all folks. So, K.P. Khalsa, thank you so much for joining. It's been really an honor to have you here, and we and we'd love to have you back sometime. So thanks so much for taking your time and and spent, you know, just giving these awesome answers to all these people's questions. We really, really, really appreciate it.
Thank you very much, John.
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