Ayurveda understood the importance of herbs that could affect the liver function due to its importance in filtering the blood, monitoring sugar, proteins and haemoglobin, and pull out floating cancer cells
The logic of Ayurvedic healing is elegant. The wise physicians of the past saw that certain foods affected the body and proposed themes of functions as specific doshas – vata as movement, pitta as transformation, and kapha as lubrication and stability. The wisemen used doshas and gunas as the crux for diagnosis and medical decisions simply because the theories worked. The theories proposed that transformation occurred in several parts of the body and called them subtypes of pitta.
For example, the liver's actions, with its immense detoxification effects, are known as ranjaka pitta. Colored substances emerge from the liver and create color in the blood, the skin, the bile. Ancient scientists observed that when we eat more mineral-rich foods that reach our liver, these foods give some tools needed by the liver in its immense detox factory, what we now call enzymes and biotransformation complexes. If people were fed with conscious attention to foods that changed the way the body digests, the liver would often self-repair. Better building blocks to the factory of cells that house the DNA of the liver actually changed the way that DNA produced the proteins that were on the liver's DNA blueprints.
These building blocks include trace minerals, metals, and elements of integrated force. Minerals and metals found in healthy plants can be used to shift the DNA in specific organs, not only the liver. Ayurveda understood the importance of herbs that could affect the liver function due to its importance in filtering the blood, monitoring sugar, proteins and haemoglobin, and pull out floating cancer cells. Herbs such as Kutki, Amalaki, Kalmegh, Musta, Kutaja, Haritaki, Bhumyamalaki, and Bhringaraj are found in many liver formulas in Ayurveda today and do help patients to alter their health. In addition, combinations of herbominerals deeply cleanse the liver, such as Arogyavardhini.
Ayurveda whispers, however, that the herbs should be combined specifically for each patient. Knowing which one to use depends on the digestive fire, gastritis or gut symptoms that can be aggravated, bowel movements patterns, and usual diet, as well as the patient's age, climate, and lifestyle.
Just as all western apothecaries would titrate a small amount of chemical specific to the patient and create satchets of chemical combinations just 150 years ago, Ayurvedic physicians designed specific combinations of these herbs, in not only powders, but other forms, to combine with food to get to the liver.
To help patients optimize liver-rejuvenating herbs, the best prescription is to ingest them just after the first bite of food. As food appears at the table, the five senses become aware of its aroma, its color, its texture. The fingers can feel the temperature and the texture as well as the hardness. Finally, the taste of the substance sends messages from the tongue to the brain, telling the body and the guts what the mouth has eaten, and that the food will be arriving soon. The liver with its detoxification enzymes prepares for blood laden with new food, sometimes well digested, sometimes not. It anticipates toxins and poisons and things that the body does not like.
Just as the liver turns its attention to the oncoming food, if the liver-rejuvenating herbs arrive, they will be most efficiently utilized by the liver. This is the best way to prescribe liver herbs, to ask the patient to take them after the first bite of food. Once they have swallowed the medicine and chased it with a small amount of warm water, the meal can resume, and the nutrients can arrive into the gut while the liver is happily processing medicines made specifically for it.
Meanwhile, modern pharmaceuticals defend their medicines even when they have been proven to damage the live. Warning labels are included in the monograph to inform physicians so that they can be mindful. But no solution or remedy is given. The claim is that all drugs have side effects or adverse effects.
Thus, a large movement has started recently by Ayurvedic physician-vaidyas to integrate liver formulas from Ayurveda alongside the pharmaceuticals that mainstream physicians have prescribed to a patient. Vaidyas may also prescribe breath work, foods, and gems to shift the ranjaka pitta. The reality is that patients do not tell their true stories to mainstream physicians because MDs bully patients not to use things that do not conform to their worldview.
The time is coming when patients will understand that an integrated combination of medicines from different medical systems works for severe diseases, when the patient has lost control of their own health. Hopefully, the healthcare system will evolve to acknowledge the need for the patient to find solutions that work to help them truly heal, and not only those that make money for the system.