Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR There was a US Senate hearing, years ago, on alternative medicine practices — most of which were resented by the American Medical Association. Yet, some medical schools in the US began to include study courses on patients’ emotional issues, nutrition, and so on, while acknowledging that there was a certain mind-body

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR We ‘age’ the moment we are born. It is not that we begin to ‘grow old’ soon after we ‘come of age’ on planet earth. The fact is everyone ages slowly, or insidiously, or more quickly than the others, owing to illness — a poignant upshot. It begins at birth; it

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR It’s a commonplace fact: anxious parents who enter a therapist’s office have just one notable query. They often argue that some of us aren’t always lucky — more so, their children, who as students, at all levels, need to face the music, as it were, vis-à-vis a vital keynote that separates

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR The COVID-19 storm brought the good, old turmeric to the fore — as a potent immune-booster and also as a possible preventative and therapeutic remedy. Turmeric [Curcuma longa] has been used for ages in Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine [TCM] as an anti-inflammatory agent and digestive remedy. It has also been

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR We all know what anger is. We have all felt it, more or less, on a regular basis, whether as a definitive, or fleeting, embodiment of annoyance, or as full-fledged rage. Anger is, in précis, a normal phenomenon. It is also a healthy human emotion. It becomes a dilemma, a difficult-to-handle

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR When the Austrian paediatrician, Clemens von Pirquet, MD, first used the term, allergy, in the early 1900s — from the Greek allos, for altered state, and ergon, for reaction — to illustrate excess physiological responses to substances in the environment, the fascinating expression caught the fancy of the world. Today, allergy

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR The homeopathic physician aims to understand every individual patient’s unique features in health and illness. They also focus on their subject’s compass and radar to understanding contrasting, or different, levels of reactions, or responses, in the individual. This is in sharp contrast to a conventional, or allopathic, medicine physician, who invariably

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR It is a fact that we are riddled by the overriding premise that microbes, or microorganisms, are our ecological foes and that they are meant only to be destroyed. This is how the origin of the word, ‘bug,’ first came into vogue for bacteria — illustrating a creepy sense of apprehension

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR Osteoarthritis is a bone-joint disorder. In a purely literal sense, it simply means inflammation of one, or more, joints. Here is everything you wanted to know about the disorder, but did not ask. There are several forms, or types, of arthritis. It is estimated that there are over one hundred, or

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR The greatest faux pas in the treatment of illness, or disease, is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul — although the two cannot be separated. The amazing fact about this reference is it is more than 2,500 years old — an ageless aphorism accredited to