A Blue Poppy blog post by Bob Quinn
Tuberculosis is once again rearing its ugly head globally as it did 100 years ago. In those long ago days we did not yet have antibiotics to combat this killer. Surprisingly there were practitioners in Japan in that era reporting success using direct moxa treatments on their TB patients. Wow, what a surprise! I believe patients received in general three treatments a week for six months.
Obviously burning this herb material on the skin does not kill bacteria. That should be clear. In our modern way of thinking of things we’d probably say that moxa seems to strengthen the host immunity, so that the patients can better combat the disease.
Some years ago we started to see cases of TB that were resistant to the antibiotics that are commonly employed. With this development we entered frightening territory. If we end up with a resistant strain of TB spreading globally, we are all in difficult straits. There is so much intercontinental travel now that in no time we could be faced with a truly global epidemic, well beyond anything we have ever seen.
I have a friend who has worked at the CDC his entire career in global TB surveillance. He has been posted in Southeast Asia and Africa. Now he is based in the US but makes frequent trips to India. He explained to me that India is in fact his biggest worry. The massive slums there are prime candidates for a rapidly spreading disease like TB. If it starts there, the Indian government is poorly prepared to handle it. A country needs a well-developed public health system to be able to combat TB, and India is in this respect sadly lacking.
What I am leading to is the question: Can moxa once again play a helpful role in treating TB? To answer that question an organization, Moxafrica, was formed and investigations in Africa were commenced. (Please see www.moxafrica.org) Merlin Young and Jenny Craig, the two co-founders, have done amazing work Now after years of work they have finally published their research in a peer-reviewed journal. The results show the regular moxa treatments clearly benefit TB patients in a few key ways. That is so exciting, because moxa is a democratic medicine, i.e., it is possible for a lot of good to happen outside of professional medicine circles. (See their website for the full report.) In Africa it was NOT professional health-care workers who performed the moxa treatments; instead it was done in the family or by a friend or by the patient himself. It is, after all, fairly simple to get started in moxa. I love this aspect of it, that patients are able to help themselves.
Let’s be clear though about what we are discussing: We are not saying that moxa should replace antibiotics in the treatment of TB. Instead we are saying that the drugs can become more successful, that patients can be spared some of the distressing side- effects of the drug therapies, and their quality of life while on the drug regimens can improve.
This has not yet been tested on patients with drug-resistant TB, but there is every reason to hope that moxa treatment will be as helpful to those patients as it is now proven to be with “regular” TB patients. I urge you all to support Moxafrica as they advance the research behind this fascinating part of our medicine. We recently held a fundraiser here in Portland, OR, and I’m happy to report we raised $1740 for them. (We here refers to Stephen Brown, Tracy Thorne, Daniel Silver, and me.) I hope this idea is copied in other cities. Moxafrica have an important vision that deserves our support.
** Blue Poppy will soon be expanding its offering of moxa products as we team with one of the biggest moxa companies in China. Stay tuned for more information.
Kind regards all around,
Bob Quinn