Ancient Remedies Secrets to Healing with Herbs, Essential

Oils, CBD, and the Most Powerful Natural Medicine in History

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This book is intended to supplement, not replace, the advice of a
trained health professional. If you know or suspect that you have a
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Names have been changed in patient stories throughout the book.

Copyright © 2021 by Dr. Josh Axe

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E3-20210109-JV-NF-ORI
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Recognizing the Flaws of Pharmaceutical-Based
Healthcare and Reclaiming Our Health
PART I
THE WISDOM OF ANCIENT HEALING

Chapter 1: Ancient Medicine for a Modern World

Chapter 2: Curing the Root Cause

Chapter 3: Eat Right for Your Ancient Element

Chapter 4: The Ancient Way of Eating

Chapter 5: Meals Are Medicine

PART II
YOUR ANCIENT PHARMACY

Chapter 6: The Healing Value of Herbs, Spices, and Mushrooms

Chapter 7: Cannabis: The Forbidden Herb

Chapter 8: The Power of Essential Oils

Chapter 9: Emotional and Spiritual Secrets for Breakthrough Healing

Chapter 10: Ancient Therapies and Lifestyle Medicine for Modern Health
Woes
 PART III
ANCIENT PRESCRIPTIONS

Chapter 11: Understanding the Five Organ Systems of TCM

Chapter 12: Prescriptions for 70+ Conditions

PART IV
RECIPES FOR ANCIENT NUTRITION

Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Books by Dr. Josh Axe
Notes
This book is dedicated to my beautiful, bold,
and brilliant daughter, Arwyn; to my best
friend, wife, and love of my life, Chelsea;
and to my father God, for giving me the
platform and favor to write this book. I am
beyond blessed!
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

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 INTRODUCTION

Recognizing the Flaws of Pharmaceutical-Based

Healthcare and Reclaiming Our Health

I was raised in a family that believed wholeheartedly in the power of

Western medicine. My grandmother’s conversations often began
with the phrase “My doctor told me I should…” And she followed his
advice to the letter. As a result, by the time she was sixty she was on
fifteen medications and taking forty to sixty pills a day—so many that
she carried her plastic pill container with her everywhere, pulling it
out of her purse frequently to pop yet another small tablet or capsule
into her mouth. In spite of her strict commitment to her doctor’s
advice, she was chronically unwell. Her health stood in sharp
contrast to my grandfather’s. He took zero medications until he was
in his nineties—and he ran a full-time business, golfed, served the
poor, and remained robust until he passed away at the age of ninety-
six.
My mom shared my grandmother’s faith in Western medicine, so
when my siblings and I were growing up, we dutifully took meds for
every sniffle and cough. I was raised in Troy, Ohio, and got sick
pretty much every winter, often coughing through an annoying bout
of bronchitis from early December to late February. Even though we
now know that antibiotics are ineffective for bronchitis, which is
caused by lingering inflammation in your bronchial tubes after an
actual infection clears up, back then I essentially lived on the drugs
for those chilly three months. Our doctor was a good man. He was
only doing what he thought was right. But when I look back at all the
unnecessary, ineffective, and harmful medications I ingested, I see
that they contributed to the gut and liver issues I developed later—
issues that healed only when I began using traditional remedies and
food as medicine.
Although antibiotics can be lifesaving if you have a staph infection
or bacterial pneumonia, for instance, it’s best to reserve them for dire
circumstances. These medications, designed to kill harmful bacteria,
also wipe out the population of healthy, protective bacteria, known as
probiotics, in your gut, putting you at risk for inflammatory bowel
disease, heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, anxiety, and
depression. These medications we’ve all been led to believe are
benign are actually quite dangerous. But you’d never know it by how
frequently doctors prescribe them during outpatient visits—nearly
260 million prescriptions in 2017 alone.1
Our habitual reliance on prescription medications can be hard to
change. In fact, it took a heartbreaking experience for me to finally
begin to question the pill-for-every-ill mentality that pervades
Western medicine. When I was thirteen, my mom was diagnosed
with—and treated for—breast cancer. I’ll never forget the shock of
finding clumps of her sandy blond hair on our bathroom floor—a side
effect of the toxic chemotherapy—or the months and years
afterward, when I realized that while my mom’s cancer was gone,
she was far from well. Before her treatment, she was an energetic,
athletic swim instructor and gym teacher, who juggled her substantial
work and family responsibilities with apparent ease; after, she was
chronically exhausted and depressed, she had hypothyroidism, and
she struggled with bowel issues. I was still a kid, but even at that
age, I found it hard to accept the idea that the only way to cure an
illness was to take medications that left you more debilitated than
you were before.
That’s when the seed was planted: Maybe our kindly doctor didn’t
have all the answers. Maybe there were safer ways to heal disease.
Maybe that array of amber bottles in our medicine cabinet was
actually part of the problem. And maybe I could, one day, find a more
wholesome solution.
Those were radical ideas for me at the time. But looking back, I
see how they began shaping my life—how they led me to question
the medical and health status quo. For instance, I started connecting
the dots between the foods I consumed and the way I felt. As a high
school soccer player, I noticed that milk made me phlegmy, which
was especially unappealing during practices. So I stopped drinking it.
Not long after, I gave up soda—not because it made me feel bad, but
because I read an article about it and learned that the beverages I
guzzled every day contained zero nutritional value. So why was I—
why was everyone—drinking them?
By the time I was in my early twenties, I’d committed myself to
learning everything I could about healing. I was living in Florida,
earning a chiropractic degree, and becoming more and more
immersed in the study of nutrition, as well as Traditional Chinese
Medicine (TCM), Ayurveda, and Biblical medicine.
I was avidly engaged in that mind-expanding mode when I
received a life-changing phone call from my mom. The moment I
heard her tearful voice, I knew it was bad. She told me she’d been
diagnosed with cancer again. I felt sick with worry and fear, but I also
knew there were strategies that might help—ones that wouldn’t leave
her debilitated afterward. I knew about the healing power of nutrition,
and I’d begun learning about alternative healing modalities in TCM
and other forms of ancient medicine. So I vowed to learn as much
about cancer as I could.
The question I faced: Where should I focus my research? Since I
was already painfully familiar with the side effects of the most
commonly prescribed modern cancer treatments, the medical
paradigm of the present seemed unlikely to provide hopeful
solutions. So I looked to the past.
I wasn’t sure what I’d find when I typed in the search term
“ancient remedies for cancer.” But I uncovered a trove of centuries-
old wisdom that has been ignored—and sometimes intentionally
maligned or buried—by the Western medical establishment. I
learned that medicinal mushrooms have been used to treat cancer
by traditional Chinese practitioners for years. I discovered research
on epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), an anti-cancer component in
green tea. I was surprised again and again to read about the cancer-
fighting benefits of herbs like ginseng, turmeric, and astragalus. As I
compiled a list of safe, gentle, effective compounds that had been
used for millennia, I felt like an explorer who had uncovered a map to
buried treasure. Here was the path I’d been looking for. Here were
the healing jewels that just might help my mom get well.
Based on my research on ancient healing, I completely
overhauled my mom’s diet, tossing out all the processed foods,
sugars, and simple carbs that filled her cupboards and fridge, and
replacing them with vegetables, berries, herbs, probiotic-rich foods,
and bone broth. I taught her to eat healthy fats, like avocado,
salmon, and olive oil, as well as a variety of mushrooms, like
shiitake, cordyceps, and reishi, known as the “mushroom of
immortality” in traditional Chinese medicine. We paired her healthy
new diet with other healing modalities, like lymphatic massage,
healing affirmations, prayer, and essential oils like frankincense and
myrrh, ancient treatments that have been shown to relieve stress
and anxiety, support immunity, and fight cancer. Instead of being
crippled by toxic chemotherapy, she was supported by healing
nutrients—and she began to feel better than she had in years.
Four months after we’d begun our regimen, she went for a CT
scan. The images were a stunning affirmation of the path we’d
chosen. Her tumor had shrunk to half its original size. She hadn’t
done any chemo or radiation, and yet her cancer was receding. We
returned from that appointment feeling optimistic, hopeful, and even
more determined to stay the course than we’d been before.
Nine months after that, our faith in ancient remedies received the
best support we could have hoped for. My mom’s lab work and CT
images showed she was in almost complete remission—and she
remains vibrant and healthy to this day. In her sixties, she runs 5K
races, water-skis, and stays incredibly active. She continues to
maintain the healthy diet and lifestyle approaches we devised after
her diagnosis. And she says she feels better than she has in years.
Cancer is a challenging diagnosis. When you’re facing a life-
threatening illness, every choice should be weighed and decided
upon with the help of trusted healthcare practitioners. But watching
my mom get well was the final piece of evidence I needed to be
certain that Western medicine didn’t hold all the answers—and that
looking to the past might be the best way to take care of our health in
the future.
The seed for Ancient Remedies was planted in that pivotal
moment when we learned that my mom’s cancer had receded in the
face of our gentle, holistic approach. In the intervening years, I’ve
continued to learn as much as I can about TCM, as well as other
ancient healing traditions, like the Indian Ayurvedic, ancient Middle
Eastern, and Biblical approaches—and the more I’ve learned, the
more shocked I’ve become. Why have we all been taking dangerous,
costly pharmaceuticals when these safe, gentle, inexpensive
treatments have been here all along? Why has Western medicine
ignored plant-based therapies for so long? And those gnawing
questions led to another pivotal one: What could I do to get this vital,
buried medical information into the hands of the American public,
who need it today more than ever?
The answer to that final question is the book you’re holding in
your hands. It’s high time you understand that you don’t need to take
dangerous drugs for every ailment, that the Western medical
system’s profit-based approach isn’t doing your health any favors,
and that there are wonderfully effective alternative therapeutics that
can heal your health issues and put you safely on the path to lifelong
wellness. I’m thrilled to finally be able to introduce these wholesome,
natural treatments to you so you can make the best health choices
for you and your family.
In Part I, you’ll learn how our medical system was hijacked by
pharmaceutical companies, which put profits over people’s health,
and why the medications designed to make us well often create a
cycle of sickness that’s difficult to break. I also explain why ancient
remedies are a smarter, safer choice, and lay out the basics of the
ancient approach to curing disease, which lies in a single, simple
strategy: Instead of treating symptoms, heal the root cause of the
illness. You’ll also learn how to use the tenets of ancient medicine to
find a diet that’s right for your body and how to combine foods in
ways that make each healthy ingredient exponentially more
beneficial.
 In Part II, I provide insight into the fundamental foods and lifestyle
habits that serve as the foundation for whole-body healing and
health. You’ll learn about the value of ancient spices and herbs—
including CBD, a component of hemp!—essential oils, and healing
mushrooms, as well as potent lifestyle changes like meditation,
digital fasting, and various types of therapeutic movement, which can
offer breakthrough healing.
Ancient healers not only believed in identifying the root cause of
each patient’s illness, but they also did years of meticulous research,
cataloguing and studying which natural remedies, derived from
plants, flowers, mushrooms, herbs, and spices, work best for which
illness. Part III offers an immersive, easy-to-understand guide to this
ancient knowledge. I explain an ancient way of looking at illness
through the lens of TCM’s Five Elements theory, which includes your
organ systems, emotions, and lifestyle; provide eating plans to treat
imbalance and ill health within each organ system; and offer ancient
prescriptions for more than seventy common ailments that afflict far
too many people in our country today, including digestive issues,
hormonal havoc, immune dysfunction, neurological disorders, and
autoimmune disease.
Finally, in Part IV, you’ll find delicious, healthy recipes to help you
put the dietary advice in this book into practice. By giving your
organs, blood, and other tissues the simple, wholesome nutrients
that have sustained humans for centuries, it’s possible to not only
prevent and cure disease, but also to transform your health, so you
can live your best life.
As growing numbers of Americans fall ill after following their
doctors’ orders and taking dangerous pharmaceuticals, and more
people question the wisdom of Western medicine, alternatives are
desperately needed. I wrote Ancient Remedies to respond to that
need. On every page, I offer a new way of thinking about health and
healing—one based on the time-tested knowledge from ancient
medical systems the Western establishment would rather you didn’t
know about. But by embracing these age-old approaches, you can,
just as my mom did nearly twenty years ago, overcome chronic
ailments, heal the root cause of your ill health, and reignite your
inner spark. I’m grateful to you for picking up this book. In its pages
you’ll discover the tools you need to make the goal of lifelong health,
strength, vigor, satisfaction, and joy a reality.
 PART I

The Wisdom of Ancient Healing