Turmeric, Yoga, Copper and Corona
Nobody can deny that there is perhaps too much ‘Corona Focus’ these days. At a time when modern medicine is still scrambling to find, test and release appropriate drugs into the market to beat the virus, there are lot of alternate theories on what people can do to enhance their personal immunity against the Virus.
Some of the popular suggestions from Yogic and Ayurvedic perspective in India have been use of Tulsi, Turmeric, etc. in diet to enhance people’s immunity.
The ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy or AYUSH, sent out a new advisory to states suggesting “add-on traditional medicine interventions to conventional care”.
The advisory suggests intake of anti-malarial Ayurvedic drug, AYUSH 64, developed by the ministry, use of sesame oil in the nose, and Tulsi, ginger, Guduchi (tinspora cordifolia) and turmeric in diet.
Even during the Ebola outbreak in 2014, an expert group in WHO had recommended that it was ethical to offer unproven interventions with as yet unknown efficacy and adverse effects as potential treatment or prevention, keeping in view no vaccine or anti-virals were available.
One thing to keep in mind is these are only suggestions for enhancing immunity and not treatments for the viral infection.
Sadhguru has also said that immunity cannot be built overnight and it might take 4 to 6 weeks, but people can at least start working on their immunity now. Some tips that he provided are:
- Starting on simple meditation practices like Isha Kriya
- Use a chant / mantra to enhance ‘Samat Prana’ (roughly translated as ‘heat’ in contemporary English) in the body
- Use Namaskar instead of a handshake
- Start on practices like Yoga Namaskar
- Use specifically prepared Ash as a disinfectant
It is suggested that Ash is a strong alkali with Ph ranging from 10–12. Most bacteria cannot survive in such ph. Therefore in places where availability of soap is a challenge, ash could be a good substitute. It has been used in the times of ebola outbreak in some African nations. How effective this is for the novel Corona virus is still being studied.
- Use of gooseberries with honey & green pepper, using neem & turmeric, etc. to enhance general body immunity
Another popular suggestion seems to be use of copper vessels to not let the Virus settle for a long time. In India, people have been drinking out of copper cups for millennia. Rest of the world is just waking up to the possibility of copper vessels in healthcare.
A recent medical paper (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v2.full.pdf) is talking in detail about the research on this front, especially with respect to the HCoV-19 viral strains and how using copper vessels is helping in this fight.
HCoV-19 was most stable on plastic and stainless steel and viable virus could be detected up to 72 hours post application, though the virus titer was greatly reduced (plastic from 103.7 to 100.6 TCID50/mL after 72 hours, stainless steel from 103.7 to 100.6 TCID50/mL after 48 hours). SARS-CoV1 had similar stability kinetics (polypropylene from 103.4 to 100.7 TCID50/mL after 72 hours, stainless steel from 103.6 to 100.6 TCID50/mL after 48 hours). No viable virus could be measured after 4 hours on copper for HCoV-19 and 8 hours for SARS-CoV-1.
Basically, what they are saying is that the virus cannot stay long on Copper and Copper alloy based surfaces, compared to steel or cardboard or plastic surfaces. This seems to be a phenomenal finding in itself!
A finding from the Jeonbuk National University in Korea says that the face masks made out of copper and a special fibre have been very effective against virus infection.
Apparently, after such findings, Copper products including copper films and air filters are becoming more and more popular in Korea.
Though all these are not treatments for a person infected with the Corona Virus itself, hope these can serve as useful information for people looking for ways to avoid getting the infection. Of course, all these cannot be supplementary if one does not maintain physical distancing and common sense advise like frequent hand wash.
