Boy, has it been a rough few weeks for Aaron Rodgers: losing in the playoffs again, ending his engagement, and spending a brief stint as the internet’s public enemy No. 1 over his “controversial” anti-vaccination position. So, how has the Green Bay Packers quarterback been recuperating from this rough stretch?
Through therapeutic vomiting, naturally. In an interview last week with Pat McAfee, Rodgers explained how he had just emerged from a 12-day Panchakarma cleanse “where you’re eating a specific diet, and you’re going through these treatments every day.” This all sounds rather anodyne until one gets to the specifics of what a Panchakarma cleanse actually entails.
According to the Ayurvedic Institute, Panchakarma is an ancient practice, originating in India, that attempts to purify mind, body, and soul through the elimination of toxins. “Every human being is a unique phenomenon of cosmic consciousness, manifested through the five basic elements — Ether, Air, Fire, Water and Earth.” And the Panchakarma cleanse seeks to purify each of these five “karmas” (hence the name “Pancha — karma”) through various “shodanas,” or cleansing methods. In plain English, this amounts to a combination of induced vomiting, rectal enemas, laxatives, nasal herb drops, and some good ol’ fashioned blood leeches. Rodgers reportedly also underwent three days of ghee therapy, which, to put it delicately, is when one consumes butter until evacuating on both ends.
Moving right past that butter thing — this is a family magazine, after all — much of Rodgers’s “cleanse” would be right in line with the cutting-edge medical practices of hundreds of years ago. The idea of “humors” was emphasized by philosophers and medical theorists in ancient Greece (and perhaps ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia before them) such as Alcmaeon of Croton, Hippocrates, and Galen. Whereas Alcmaeon’s humors were related to fundamental elements, such as water, air, fire, and earth, Hippocrates, whom we historically revere as the “father of medicine,” posited that the humors were elements of the body, not the earth — specifically bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
From Galen, we learn that (probably) Hippocrates wrote in On the Nature of Man: “Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated in the body and not mixed with others.” Later, Aristotle would expound on Hippocrates’s bodily humors with his own theories on bodily elements, and this ancient Greek conception would last for over a thousand years. For instance, Shakespeare’s cosmology (circa 1600) was organized around these humors, elemental and bodily.
And bloodletting, whether via physician or leeches, was a prominent method of “medical practice” seeking to balance any of these humors. (As my father, a former lawyer, would always tell his best friend, a surgeon, during friendly arguments over the nobility, or lack thereof, of their respective professions: “Never forget that we lawyers were writing the greatest document of freedom ever put to pen by human hand at the same time you doctors were bleeding George Washington to death.”)
Rodgers, for his part, said that coming out of the cleanse, he “felt intense gratitude.” Not having to endure that self-made butter bath anymore would make me feel pretty grateful, too, buddy.
