“Tossing those pills…”

I was most interested in Berjis Desai’s piece "Tossing those pills away?” (Bawa Musings, Parsiana, January 7, 2015) as our family has always believed in alternate remedies and has benefitted from them.
My maternal grandmother was visited by all sorts of people, from ascetics to priests, and she picked up methods of healing from them that were invariably successful. We also use Madhivala’s balm and many years ago had read in a Gujarati newspaper from Bombay about how he had discovered this treatment. The article mentioned that every day Madhivala would send his servant to fetch a leg of mutton from the butcher, with instructions that it should be chopped into pieces. But every day the leg of mutton would arrive in one piece. When the servant was scolded he insisted that it had been chopped before being wrapped in a leaf and handed over to him. It then dawned on Madhivala that there was some power in the leaf which brought the pieces together again, so he did some research and created the healing balm.
From the time of my birth until I turned six we received treatment only from a nature cure doctor, Baleshwar Prasad. He cured us of jaundice, stomach ailments and skin eruptions. When I was three I suffered from the horrible kanth mala sores around the neck. Naturopathy cured this completely with not a mark remaining. Nature cure is neither Ayurvedic nor herbal; it is a science based on pure riverside mud, steam and a very simple diet of vegetables. The nature cure doctor even cured the neighborhood midwife of night blindness.
During our growing up years in Allahabad my sister came down with severe malaria. There was no one to cure her as the naturopath had left and a replacement never arrived. A passing mendicant asked my grandmother why she was so despondent. She told him about my sister’s malaria. He suggested a treatment which not only cured her in three days, but for years after my grandmother and mother cured many others using it, including the wife of an English army officer.
The treatment was simple. Equal quantities of red chilli powder (made from whole chillies) to be mixed with geru (the reddish brown powder used to paint flowerpots) and the paste made with them to be applied on the little finger an hour before the fever rose. The mendicant had specified different fingers for male and female patients, but as we had forgotten which was which, we applied the paste to the small fingers of both hands! My grandmother would make powders and pastes for treating typhoid, fevers and severe coughing. Sadly, the family did not preserve her written recipes in which tulsi and neem were important ingredients.
We also had great faith in the powerful Ardibehest Yasht, and the family recited it for many types of ailments, including nervous breakdown, fevers, stiffness of the limbs, etc. My mother and grandmother did the Ardibehest ni pichhee ritual for everyone, and with God’s help patients of all castes and creeds did recover.
When I turned six, we turned to homoeopathy for treatment and never looked back.
I write this not to decry modern modes of scientific treatment and hospital care, but to state that alternate treatments are really effective. MEHER D. DHONDY
Gurgaon, Haryana