An Indian and a Chinese treament for narcolepsy.

This morning I remembered an Indian syrup which was recommended to me one time by a guru in Varanasi I was visiting in 2000. He told me to try using a popular Indian syrup called shankpushpi. It is often used by students in India to help them concentrate and calm the nerves. You can buy it from the shelf in any decent pharmacy in India. In the west it is called colvolvulus avensis, otherwise known as bindweed, a noxious weed found on farms around the world. If you google those terms you can find various studies done using bindweed to treat cancer and other things.

I found that it worked quite well at the time and I think would be an acceptable addition to my otherwise pharmaceutical free approach to narcolepsy. 
I would like to get my hands on the Indian product if I could, and if not, find a herbalist who can make me up something using bindweed. We'll see how that goes.

The link between treatments for narcolepsy and medicines which calm the nerves and help focus is an interesting one. The obvious western version would be the way amphetamines and Ritalin are used to help ADD people concentrate and calm down. At the same time it works as a stimulant for narcoleptics. Shankpushpi seems to be similar.

In addition to this I remember one time I visited a Chinese doctor. I explained to him the symptoms of narcolepsy and he did the usual examination. Part of his diagnosis was that my shen was too active. Shen means spirit, and I well understood his meaning, never having had a moment of complete unconsiousness for the last twenty or so years. He included in his list of herbs ingredients to "calm the shen." Talking to a friend of mine who studies Chinese medicine, these are usually heavy ingredients such as seashells. He gave me my prescription, scrawled in Chinese characters on a little pad and directed me to the herb dispensary. As is normal in such places this consisted of a whole wall of small drawers, each one containing a different herb. As I watched, the doctor's assistant carefully measured and shovelled the different herbs in the prescription onto large white pieces of paper which were then folded up into individual parcels. Each parcel needed to be boiled in a pot for about an hour, the left over liquid being the medicine. It smelled and tasted like shit, but that is the way it should be according to Chinese medicine.

I went through a while of taking this herbal concoction and noticed a big change in the way I felt. It felt like finally I could feel calm. I never realised how nervy I was until this time. Chinese medicine is expensive and at that time I had little money, so couldn't continue the treatment.

There seems to be a commonality to these two treatments, both working as a nerve tonic of sorts, as well as being a stimulant. Interesting.