‘Most diseases begin in the gut, for 90% of the human immune system lives in the gut’
Dr. Sitesh Roy
‘Most diseases begin in the gut, for 90% of the human immune system lives in the gut’
Dr. Sitesh Roy, voted one of the best doctors in the USA for four years and who has featured in the guide to America’s top physicians every year from 2005 to 2010, is back in Bombay after 14 years in the US and is not averse to confessing that he has been disillusioned right from the beginning of his career about the efficacy of modern medical practice.
He was the guest speaker at the last meeting of the Club when he addressed the subject, “Curing incurable diseases naturally” and was introduced by Aliakbar Merchant. Stating that he had stepped into the world of medicine 25 years ago with a desire to help people, to cure them and to make them feel better, he was disenchanted to note that doctors were spending very little time with patients and were more interested in getting the symptoms under control.
He had chosen to study allopathy and to become a super-specialist. He obtained an M.D. in Paediatrics with super-specialisation in adult and paediatric allergy-immunology; he became a Diplomate of the American Board of Allergy and Immunology; a Fellow of the American Academy of Paediatrics (FAAP); the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (FAAAAI); and the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (FACAAI).
After many years of intensive training, said Dr. Roy, when he commenced his practice, he started wondering whether he was really doing a service to his patients or whether there was more that he could do for them.
“Many of them came to me wanting to get totally rid of their disease. And what was I doing for them? I was giving them control for their disease. It was almost like I was giving them a wheelchair. They came to me in a handicapped state and instead of figuring out which nerve, bone, muscle or structure of their body was not working right because of which they were handicapped, and I was trying to find the best wheelchair for them.
“I would give them a wheelchair and they would go away happy. But they weren’t really independent, they weren’t free, they weren’t able to live the life that they had envisioned for themselves. When I started to think about it, I realised that I was looking at a very superficial aspect of medicine, the physical disease.” What was disease, Dr. Roy asked. Disease meant the loss of ease in the body and the loss of equilibrium. A disease, before it manifested at the physical level, gave the body many signals or red-flags which the individual did not appreciate or, by the time he got to the physician, it was probably too late, or a lot had already happened.
The way modern medicine looked at it, every single disease appeared to be tied to genetics and to the environment. In fact, the environment contributed several kinds of “stressors” to the body. However, most people only looked at mental stress when there were many other types of stress, such as physical, chemical, emotional, mental,
psychological and spiritual.
After these stresses came into the picture and created imbalances (the loss of equilibrium), there were several chemical derangements that occurred in the body. Subsequently, after many years, the disease usually manifested at the physical level.
I was only offering a ‘wheelchair’ to my patients, not curing them of their diseases, confesses
Dr. Sitesh Roy at the last meeting Turning to his field of allergy and asthma, Dr. Roy said that India used to be very low in the list of these diseases in terms of incidence and prevalence. But in the last 20 years he had noted that the rising trend in allergies and asthmas in India had started mirroring what was seen in the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and other countries 20 to 25 years ago.
It was following the same track – younger and younger children with problems, people without previous history suddenly coming down with the disease – and all because of immune
imbalance, immune dis-regulation and loss of equilibrium. If one looked at the disease, there were reasons for it, but if one looked at the underlying principles, modern medicine had still not understood why the immune dis-regulation took place. While some blamed it on diet; others mentioned the “westernisation” of lifestyles and diet; while still others blamed it on stress. Several studies all over the world had suggested that these were indeed connected. But no one had come up with a holistic reason for why such a thing was happening.
“When we look at a disease, we realise that it is not just a physical thing, there is a mental, an emotional, a psychological, an astral, an ethereal and a spiritual component to disease; I don’t always have the time to delve into much of this as a busy practitioner, as a physician, whether in the US or here. And when I can’t delve into that, I can’t get to the root cause of the problem, therefore I am left with controlling the symptoms.
“But as a physician I wasn’t satisfied. I felt that I was short-changing both myself and my patients. At that point, when I was probably a few years out of my medical training, I decided that what really needed to be done was to consider a more customised and individualised approach to medicine.
“Now, modern medicine is finally realising that even if there is a drug which has gone through all the FDA-controlled trials and has been released in the market, we can learn more about it after it has been used by a few million people. We realise that we have problems, that not everyone responds to the drug the same way. And that’s where the entire field of pharmacogenomics and proteomics comes into play.”
Therefore, Dr. Roy said, modern medicine was realising that there had to be individualisation of medical therapies. That each individual was unique and that the same aspirin would not do the same thing in every person’s body. This was “an art and a science” that he found had served him well when he started applying it to his patients.
He realised that when a patient came to him, he, as a doctor, could grasp their problem within the first three to four minutes and in the fifth minute he would write them a prescription and send them on their way. In the field of allergy and immunology, where results were rather fast, his patients would think that he was close to God. But he knew that if they stopped the medicines after a few months, or a few years, they would be back to square one.
In his field there was a particular therapy in which patients could be desensitised to the things that they were allergic to; for example, a person who could not have a tiny piece of a peanut without going into full-blown anaphylaxis and could be dying. That person could now be desensitised to a stage where he could have a whole cup of peanuts without falling ill. Yet, the doctor still had no clue as to why that person’s body had become so hyperreactive
to a food that it should have learnt to ignore and tolerate.
What was it that was imbalanced in their mind, in their spirit, in their system, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, that their body, their immune system, chose to react to it so violently? That was when he sat down and started counselling patients because he had learnt that this was an art that had existed in India thousands of years ago. A person went to a vaidya, or to his family physician, who would make him sit and listened to him long enough for him to pour out his heart; many a time, without any medication, by the time he left, he was already feeling better – this was the art of counselling.
When he started practising this invaluable art, Dr. Roy said, it helped him to get to the root of many problems that even modern medicine struggled to solve. And this held true for all diseases. Referring to the previous week’s issue of The Gateway, which reported the warning of cancer specialist Dr. Rajendra Badwe of the Tata Memorial Centre to “be afraid, very afraid”, of diabetes, hypertension and high blood pressure, Dr. Roy pointed out that there were no medical tests for fear, stress, anxiety, frustration and depression. But these were wrecking havoc in the immune system of the people – and the immune system was the final mediator for any disease, from a heart attack to a damaged joint, to allergy, asthma and gastrointestinal diseases.
Some doctors even went down to the receptors to find out what was wrong so that they could attempt to fix those receptors. But nobody asked why that receptor had become dysfunctional. All that they did was to blame it on genetics, saying that a person was born with it, or that a mutation had caused it. But on looking at it more closely and carefully, it would be observed that there were certain aspects in that person’s diet, in his lifestyle and in his thinking pattern, behaviour, actions… If one went even further back, then karma, past lives and so on had brought him to a situation where he had to face it (the disease or problem) in order to come out of it. “And what do we do as doctors? You come in with a headache, we give you a painkiller. You come with an infection, here is an antibiotic. Depression?
Here is an anti-depressant which makes you feel that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. But the moment you stop the anti-depressant, you know that there is something seriously wrong with you.
“I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with this (approach), because not everyone that I meet has an inclination to go to the root of the disease and try to figure it out. Some of them are happy with symptomatic control – and that’s about 85 to 90% of my practice. “But the remaining 10 to 15% are willing to wake up, come into that awareness, recognise that the disease or the symptoms that they are experiencing is a red-flag, something that tells them that something is not right and want to find the root before it becomes a permanent disease.”
Dr. Roy said that he and his team chose an approach that had been generated
after accessing several healing modalities from around the world and combining them in a way that worked best. His team included counsellors, healers, dieticians and nutritionists, most of who had gone deep and mined ancient and modern knowledge.
As a result, when people came to them with existing diseases, they were made to sit and describe their habits, right from their eating and drinking patterns to what they did throughout the day, what drove them, what pulled them down, the problems they faced and so on.
If, as a result of such counselling and guidance, they went away with options
and solutions so that they did not remain dependent on medication for the rest of their lives and could not only feel that they were okay but also identified the root causes of their disease
and eliminated them, “that is what I mean by curing incurable diseases”.
Under ideal circumstances, the cure began before the onset of the disease; rather, the problem and the solution went together. And if people were aware about what was going on in their physical self, in their mental self, their emotional and psychological self, and were able to act upon these soon enough with someone in whom they had faith and whom they could trust, it was possible sometimes to eliminate big diseases before they occurred. This was preventive medicine and could be done with some tests.
But no one could do a test for someone who was feeling sad. However, it had now been shown that if a person remained sad for long enough, his immune system was going to become dysfunctional. He would end up with allergies or with rheumatoid arthritis or some other disease. “Just imagine, the beginning is sadness, depression and being low!”
And so, said Dr. Roy, when it came to curing incurable diseases, it was important
to pick up the signals before they occurred and if they had already occurred, then to recognise that a pill was not the answer. The answer lay in finding out the root or the origin of the problem. His search had led him to some amazing healing sciences, many of them originating in India but which had been lost over time or been mis-practised to the point that they had got a bad name. But with some effort over the last 15 years, he had been able to find people who still understood them, did them in the right way and applied them in such a manner that major diseases, whether diabetes, hypertension, blocked arteries or renal dysfunction, could be taken care of. Sometimes, it was as simple as changing diet and lifestyle.
But it was not always as simple as that, because it required discipline. Most of the 85% of people who only wanted to get better were different from the more disciplined 15% who were willing to do what was required to get back to what they were before, so they could live completely happy, satisfied, independent lives with no dependence on medications and pills.
If a person was willing to awaken at whatever stage in his life and with whatever diseases, there was a way and it was possible to come out of these problems, or at least to have a better understanding of what exactly was going
on.
Once that understanding dawned, the healing happened right after that. Knowing the problem was the first step to healing the problem; but many a times people didn’t want to know the problem, they just wanted to cover it up, to make it go away.
“When it comes to curing an incurable disease, no single pathy (medical system) has all the answers, whether it’s homoeopathy, allopathy, ayurveda…because our lives have become very complicated. We have 50 to 100 times the stress we had when these sciences were first founded. To understand this and to make modifications and changes is possible. All that is required is someone who has the knowledge, understanding and patience to delve into this, to find the root cause and eliminate it so that we can come out of a disease.
“In the steps that we follow for our patients, there is generally a stage where we have a very detailed intake on all aspects of the person’s life, followed by certain specific investigative techniques that may combine modern medicine and ancient medicine, following which there are multiple counselling sessions in which the disease is broken down, it is teased out literally, as if a surgery is being done, but only at a mental, psychological, emotional, spiritual and astral level.
“When that is done and the person is willing to open and transform, disease often disappears, sometimes even without medication. I have been amazed at the ability of the human body to regenerate, recuperate and renovate itself. It is simply fascinating; there is no other thing on the face of the earth that can do that, more than the human body and mind.”
Answering questions, Dr. Roy told PP Arun Sanghi that 85% of patients who were in a hurry, took up 25 to 30% of his time. The remaining 75% of his time was devoted to healing medicine and treating those 10 to 15% of patients who were totally dedicated and committed to winning over their ailment even if it required long counselling. While most doctors studied allergy because they were fascinated by allergic diseases and felt that these could be treated rapidly and the results were fast and good, he had gone into the field because of the immunological aspect.
He was fascinated by the connection of the immune system with every aspect of the body.
He had trained in and prepared himself to deal with all diseases; and when he went into holistic medicine, he utilised that knowledge. He handled all diseases with the help of his team and continued to read every day to upgrade himself because modern medicine was moving at rocket speed.
When asked about gluten allergy (caused by consumption of wheat), Dr. Roy said gluten sensitivity was a totally different form of hypersensitivity compared to gluten allergy. Wheat or gluten allergy was an immune mechanism mediated by a protein called IGE; gluten hypersensitivity was mediated by different antibodies.
But both of them were treatable. He had desensitised wheat-allergic patients who now tolerated wheat. It was a time-consuming process, but he had treated them exclusively with allopathic medicines. As for gluten-sensitive patients who had a non-allergic hypersensitivity to gluten, they could also be treated because at the root of it was an imbalan-ced digestive
system.
After the years he had spent in medicine researching different areas and working with guides in different fields, he had come to the conclusion that most diseases began in the gut, because 90% of the human immune system lived in the gut.
Dilnavaz Variava pointed out that genetically-modified foods had subjected human bodies to high levels of toxicity. Some American doctors now advised patients to go on a GM-free diet because four major crops in the US, corn, cotton, soya and canola, had been genetically modified to the extent of 80 to 90%. Gut-related illnesses in the US had increased sharply after the introduction of GM foods. Besides, research was now linking GM foods with immune systems, allergy, autism, Alzheimer’s, cancer and so on. Had he (Dr. Roy) gone into this aspect?
Dr. Roy agreed with her, saying that this was a significant part of the problem. He always told his patients when he first met them, “You are what you eat”. Clearly, food was the first medicine and when food had been messed with (a reference to geneticallymodified foods) then one was messing with the immune system.
The immune system, over evolution, had been trained to respond to certain proteins in certain ways. When the structure of the proteins was suddenly changed because of the need for the crop to grow faster, so that it wasn’t affected by diseases and pests and other things, then the food was indeed modified.
For ten years he had been going to remote parts of India, Nepal and other regions with some of his team members to identify places where non-modified food was available. It was also a fact that everything that was refuted or rejected in Europe and the US was dumped in India. The regulations here were very weak, whether for drugs or for other things.
Even in the case of organic food in the US, the rule was that it had to be 40% organic, the remaining 60% could be anything else – and a label calling it organic food would be issued.
But that was not organic food so far as he was concerned, even if it was FDA-approved.
Next, Dr. Nayna Dastur engaged the guest speaker in a spirited discussion.
She quoted a book, “The Wheat Belly” by Dr. Michael Davis of Milwaukee, which stated that about 65 years ago there was no gluten allergy. Several genetic and immune problems had arisen because of genetically-modified wheat. But food was just one aspect, albeit a very important one, what was equally important was psycho-neuro-endocrinology, the science established in 1985. As a gynaecologist, she was aware of things thanks to interaction with patients because of the ante-natal period of nine months.
What were the results he was able to achieve with the 10 to 15% of patients who were willing to go through his holistic approach? Did he adopt a multi-focal approach? Did he have any specialists on his team?
Dr. Roy revealed that one of the first articles on the subject which appeared in a textbook had been written by him along with his research mentor about six years ago. The topic of the article was “Stress and allergic diseases”. It focused on psychoneuroimmunology and on stress and allergic diseases. It had tied in everything, because maternal stress had been tied with childhood asthma, childhood obesity and so on.
Dr. Nayna chipped in to say that this was also referred to as the foetal origin of adult diseases.
Agreeing with her, Dr. Roy said when those 10 to 15% patients who wanted to rid themselves of the ailment came to him, he approached them with an all-encompassing view, the physical disease, its likely treatment, the mental and psychological aspect and so on. He had also been lucky to have had some excellent counsellors. He didn’t always look for people who had degrees but at the results that they produced. Were they able to connect with the person before them and were they able to produce the results that he was looking for?
When he said that not everyone on his team was necessarily a doctor, Dr. Nayna said he was fortunate that he was in India. He would not be able to do this in the US. Yes, said Dr. Roy. But he added that his team looked at diet, lifestyle, social, emotional, psychological, spiritual and other aspects of counselling and all aspects of treatment, up to prayer and meditation if required for healing. Suresh Jagtiani bowled a googly when he asked the speaker for three pointers each that would indicate the likely onset of cancer, stroke and heart disease.
“It’s like trying to tell the entire Ramayana and the Mahabharata in three lines! I don’t think I can give you the answer that you are looking for, because I know that if I did I would not be doing full justice to the topic. But I’ll give you some pointers,” said Dr. Roy.
In the case of cancer, modern medicine suggested the right screening at the right time. He, too, believed in screening and regretted that not enough of it was being done in many cases. However, it was also a fact that despite screening, new cancers were being seen at ages and in areas where they were not expected. Therefore, one could never do enough screening.
What it boiled down to was this, if one looked at cancer as a dysfunction in a cell which the immune system had missed, it meant that the immune system was not working well. Further, the digestive system was also not working right. By extension, it also meant that the neuro-endocrine system was not working properly. Therefore, it all came down to diet, lifestyle and avoiding stress. “Rather than telling you three pointers to screen for these diseases before they occur, I will say that you should look at these three aspects of your life: Diet, lifestyle and giving enough time to yourself to unwind and release (the stresses of the day). When this accumulates, that’s when the neuro-endocrine system goes out of sync, the immune system goes out of sync and then it will target your genetic make-up and risk probability. If you have a strong family history of heart disease, it will end up in heart disease and the same with stroke and cancer.”
As far as diet was concerned, Dr. Roy said, this was a very wide spectrum.
Therefore, it was necessary to be aware of what one was putting in one’s mouth. This was the simplest and most important aspect. Anything offered in a nice packaging, branding and a good label was taken as clean and good. But this was not always true.
Man was consuming many chemicals, adulterants and toxins every single day. If one were to list all the chemicals consumed from the time one woke up to the time one went to sleep, one was exposed to about 150 to 200 chemicals every day.
Even babies’ plastic drinking bottles had recently been found to contain a chemical tied with cancer. The whole industry had had to be revamped and the way in which the bottles were produced changed. Even non-stick pans were not as safe as believed.
“We have to wake up and understand what we are doing. This is only a process of awareness. Disease is a process where non-aware actions have occurred that have led to an end-result. And so the one message is this – diet, diet, diet. Then lifestyle and whatever you like for de-stressing, whether meditation, prayers, yoga or pranayama,” Dr. Roy added.