As a Family Medicine Specialist , I continue to believe that our health and wellness and thus also our dis-eases are very much influenced by our Good Health recipes at Home. Thus, I encourage all families to keep alive these very original family secret recipes. How do we keep them alive? By resorting to them, using them, improving them, and making new recipes each time. One of our tasks as family doctors, is first and foremost, to help the family develop confidence in managing simple illnesses that can be managed at home. And second to help them decide when a visit to a doctor is already necessary. Staying healthy and managing simple illnesses at home will be easier if we have our Family ‘s Secret Recipes for Good Health Manual. This manual reminds you all the time, what usually works in the family. The manual may be an old overused notebook or a member in the family who knows them all or the wise grandmother who still remembers. It helps when what is distinctly effective in the family, is on hand when needed.
During family encounters in our clinic, we exchange secret recipes. I have my own secret recipes that i still rely on and which I also share with my patients and their families. By sharing, my recipes have also stayed alive. For pain, I have very good experience with the old cupping or ventosa. If someone in the family can be taught to do this well and carefully, this is a recipe all families should have .
Before the onset of flu, when one is feeling cold — the wind cold attack as described in Traditional Medicine , the old old way of sweating by steam called “tuub” in Visayan still works. It is a traditional steam bath. If you can be careful not to get scalded, you just go under a thick blanket with a big pot of boiled water with herbs(we use Blumea or sambong leaves) and slowly open the lid, till you sweat. You must be careful not to get scalded. Cover your eyes because it can be very hot. And after you sweat out all the cold inside (as traditional healers explain) , make sure you immediately wipe your sweat away and avoid feeling cold again. You are supposed to sleep after this ritual. But i find that the more urban, the more strange this becomes. Thus, my more urbanized patients have developed their own versions of this. Like doing this in the toilet by turning on the faucet with hot water and sweating it out with the steam.
As I observe, there is a healing force behind this traditional ritual. For me, the tradition brings us back to our grounding with nature (leaves, wind, cold, water, warmth) which we may lose when we become busy with our work and we stay most of the time with our gadgets. Going back to tradition and going back to how my parents, grandmother, or old healers taught it to me — is more healing for me. Perhaps, it is reconnecting, re-grounding that makes the recipe work . It is the power to re-connect that makes the recipe alive. Its good to share — some of our secrets.
