There is no ailment that can’t be reversed using herbal medicine – Raymond Toyo

Doctor Raymond Tade Toyo is an alternative and complementary medicine practitioner. He is the owner of T-GOLD, a health and wellness centre at Adeniyi Jones Ikeja. In this interview with YUSUF MOHAMMED, the physician spoke about the importance of herbal medicine and how it is the way forward for people with health challenges.

I will like to know your designation. Are you a doctor?

Yes I am a doctor in the field of complementary and alternative medicine.

As the name implies, is it actually an alternative to orthodox medicine?

Toyo: It is an alternative to orthodox and it is alternative in the sense that everything natural, nothing synthetic. In orthodox medicine, they promote synthetic medication. In complementary and alternative, we use everything natural and nothing artificial. Nothing like chemical compositions and nothing like chemical mixture. Everything is natural.

Is it proven that the drugs work for your patients? How has it been proven?

Toyo: Those that use my drugs know they work because if they don’t work, they will not come back. Most of our patients that visited us and we treated we recorded so many success stories.

Cuts in: How long have you been into this practice?

Toyo: It is close to 10 years.

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Do you know how many success cases you have recorded?

Toyo: Successes are in so many areas. We have recorded success in the area of cancer treatment.

Cuts in: Cancer?

Toyo: Yes. In my practice we can handle cancer that has not gone terminal. Let me simply put cancer cases that are between stages 0 to 3 plus. We can cure. And if it has gone to stage 4 it is difficult to treat

From stage 3 to 4 can be cured?

Toyo: Yes. Total reverse! It will be reversed. Total cure let me put it that way. And in the area of heart disease we have recorded success cases. In the area of prostate enlargement, prostate cancer, we have recorded so many. In the area of diabetes, especially type 2 diabetes. In the area of stroke. Those with stroke are carried to this place but after some time, they are able to walk on their own without support. There are so many other areas that we have recorded success. Alternative medicine is no respecter of any disease. Whether dreaded or minor, once you go back to nature you will be fine. We are natural beings. You cannot treat the body outside nature. You cannot use what is not natural to treat nature. When you use synthetic drugs, you manage the ailment. But when you go alternative, you cure it.

You have not mentioned sexually transmitted diseases

Toyo: Oh it is minor. For instance we have handled so many cases of HIV. Reversed! Many of them.

You mean you have cured HIV carriers?

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Toyo: Yes!

How many of them have you cured?

Toyo: Many. I can’t say unless I check through my files. We have cured so many. We reversed it completely. And the period is between the first and the fourth month. The fifth month I will just manage you. The six month I will ask you to go and do test and it will be negative. I am certain about it.

Earlier, your colleague mentioned that when one has a health challenge, orthodox medicine will only break the cycle and doesn’t allow it to run its cycle. Can you please explain?

There are things we think are ailments in the body but in actual sense, they are not ailments. Like the example she cited. When you have flu, flu is not an ailment but we mistaken it to be an ailment. When you have flu, it means that your body is functioning perfectly well. Your body is trying to throw away the excess air, excess fluid, excess toxins in your brain. It will come in form of flu and when it comes like that, it has a period of time it will stay. In most cases maybe 14 days. If you don’t obstruct the flow, just allow yourself to the work normally. After 14 days, it will stop on its own. But if you think you can help nature and you are taking something to stop it, you are obstructing the flow of nature and that will block it and cause another problem.

The only thing you can do when you have flu that comes periodically like that is to help the body to work better. To enhance the functionalities of the body so that the body can throw everything out. How do you enhance that? You can enhance that by taking lots of vitamin C. Oranges, or anything that has vitamin C. You take lots of warm water. Like if I have to advise you, I will say you should take warm water every 30 minutes in 24 hours. It will help the body to function very well. The flow will be much but don’t worry. It cannot exceed 14 days. It means the body is functioning well. It is not an ailment but a sign that the body is working perfectly well and throwing out toxins on its own.

What is the repercussion for those who break the cycle? For instance you have headache. I am sure you have a solution for headache in the alternative medicine world. What do you say to someone who is in the habit of taking one analgesic or the other whenever he has headache?

Toyo: For headache, so many things could be responsible for headache so before you…..

Cuts in: Sometime people need quick fix, you know quick solutions to their immediate health problems and they feel that moment they need the conventional drug because the alternative takes longer

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Let me tell you how the body works. The body will not accept quick solution. The body is like a big machine. It is not accepting quick solution. If you are doing quick fix with your body, you are destroying it. The example you have given using headache. Many things could cause headache. In some cases you may have what is called dehydration. Dehydration can cause headache. So if your headache is as a result of dehydration, you don’t need any analgesic to stop it. What you need is to hydrate yourself. But so many of us don’t know this. What you need to do is to hydrate yourself. Like when you drink 50mm of water and you take and after about 30 minutes you take two, if your headache is as a result of dehydration, it will subside immediately. But if you take analgesic, it will knock that process. It will knock your sensory organ so your brain will not be able to communicate to your body that your body needs something.

You see headache is part of the language the body speaks. The body speaks to us. The body has its own language that it speaks to us. It communicates to us in the form of pain. Like the example I just gave about dehydration. If you are dehydrated, that is your body telling you that it needs water. It will come in form of a migraine and if you drink water, definitely that headache will go. If your headache is as a result of malaria, you will know that you have malaria because there are some other symptoms that come with it. Then you can say ok, if you don’t know how to treat malaria using alternative, you can take your panadol or whatever medicine you want to use to treat malaria. But in our own case, we have solution naturally without side effects that you can use to fix your problems. And any health –related problem you think you have, there is alternative solution to it.

How did you become knowledgeable about alternative medicine? Let me use the traditional medicine practitioners or native doctors as they are popularly called as example. Some of them would say it is a gift that was passed on to them by their father or mother. Some would say they got a revelation while there were in isolation in one forest or whatever. What is your own story?

It is a long story. I would say that my coming into this practice is a calling. I know that there are things that we inherit from our parents. I remember when we were young there was no hospital, no clinic in my village then. Is it that people did not get sick? They got sick but they treated themselves. When we had fever, the most common disease then was yellow fever. They knew the plant to cut they knew the leaves to get. They know the plants to harvest to tackle yellow fever. I was brought up that way. I was brought up without knowing any synthetic drugs. It was later when we were growing up that hospital came to my village, the general hospital.

As we speak they have no patronage because people from my area believe so much in nature. That is just my basic background of embracing natural remedies. But that said, when we were growing up I would travel everywhere. The background that we had is what we are building up today. Everywhere I go I look at the herbs I look at the leaves around the house that is beneficial to me or anyone around me but along the line I developed serious interest in alternative medicine. There was a time in my life that I got very ill. I had a cardiovascular-related disease. It was very bad and pathetic and I was patronizing cardiologists, going to hospitals. It was so bad that in a day I could pass out three or four times. I never thought I was going to make it. Yet I kept on seeing the cardiologists. They gave me synthetic drugs that they were just using to manage me because it did nothing for me. It was just to manage me. My blood pressure was very high. Over 100. One of my friends advised me to start eating ginger. He asked my wife to go and prepare ginger. I ate it and lo and behold I felt lighter. And then I was unable to walk to my bedroom because I had my bedroom upstairs. So I was subjected to a room downstairs because I could not climb the stairs. But after eating ginger that day, I felt very light and I was able to walk my friend to his car. Something that I was unable to do for months. When he left, I picked my computer and researched ginger to know more about it. I realized that ginger is a natural aspirin. 1000 times better than aspirin without side effects.

When you take fresh ginger, it will take care of your blood. It will stimulate your appetite and your digestive system. And it will allow your heart to pop very well. And this was just the problem that I had and I was taking synthetic drugs. I added ginger to my recipe and I was getting better. The passing out stopped because of that, I needed to explore alternative medicine.

One thing led to the other I went to India to treat myself not with conventional medicine. I went to look for an alternative medicine practitioner. When I went to India, I was treated. And the man that treated me said that I should go back to Nigeria and do all the tests concerning my health. I did everything related to my ailment and they could not find anything. They declared me cardiovascular fit. Since then, I have been propagating complementary and traditional medicine. When I realized that I became well using alternative method, let me add this because of the drugs that I was taking before I discovered alternative medicine, I became almost impotent. I was unable to sleep with my wife for over two years.

You became impotent as a result of conventional drugs?

Yes the conventional drugs. I did not have erection at all. But when I came back from India I started having erection. I went back to India for training. I went to a school called Indian Board of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. There, I studied part of medicine because before you can become a doctor, you need to understand how the body works, the logical framework of the body. So I learnt physiology, pathology, I learnt anatomy. All the basic medical courses, I learnt. In year three you have to choose whether you want to go for alternative medicine or conventional medicine and I chose alternative. I now added acupuncture, acupressure, herbal medicine and reflexology to my practice. Since I got back I have been practicing and it has been wonderful. There is no ailment even the one that is tagged dreaded that cannot be reversed using alternative medicine.

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You spoke about one of the side effects using orthodox medicine that you were almost impotent. To those in the world of conventional medicine, there is this consensus that alternative medicine does not work and has toxic effects on patients. What is your take?

I think the reverse is the case. It is the synthetic drugs that are harmful to the body not herbal medicine. I don’t know which area of alternative they are talking about because complementary and alternative comprises of so many forms of treatment that is natural. Like is said earlier, I learnt acupuncture, acupressure, reflexology, I learnt herbal medicine. If they are talking about toxicity they should be talking about toxins and the adverse effects that orthodox medicine is bringing to the body because there is no medicine you take that is synthetic that does not have side effect. In most cases, your doctor might not discuss that with you except you ask. Somebody came here today for consultation and I asked the person to bring out all the medications they have given her and she brought out so many things and I told her that she has this and that problem. She asked “how did you know? Those are the things brothering me.” I told her that I did not know because I did not test her but those were the side effects of the medications she has been taking. She shouted that “this people are killing me.”

Like I said before, you cannot treat the body outside nature. The body is natural. When you take something with chemical compositions together to treat nature, it is alien to the body. Let me give you an example of high blood pressure. It is not a sickness. It is a symptom of a sickness. But when you go to the hospital and they discover that your BP is high, they are not going to probe further why elevated, the next thing they will do is to see how to bring your BP down. They will not ask why the BP is high. They will give you a drug you may use for the rest of your life. Meaning that the drug cannot heal you. If you stop it, your BP will start going up. And these drugs have their own side effects. When they give you one, they give you another one to take care of one side effect and give you another for another side effect. That is why you see people being on drugs for the rest of their lives. And I am saying that we are not wired that way. This body is a machine. It contains what is called natural force.

There is nothing that has afflicted you that cannot be reversed if you go back to nature. We are nature. Therefore, we can only use nature to heal nature. There is no adverse effect in herbal medicine except what you are taking is poisonous. There is no side effect in acupuncture unless you don’t have a professional taking care of you. Let me give you another example. I know you eat vegetables. When you eat your vegetable, the funniest thing about the body is that when you take anything natural, the body will make use of the amount needed and throw the rest away. That is why when you eat your vegetable in the evening, it will go through the digestive system, the body will make use of the one needed and when you go to the toilet in the morning, you will see vegetable in your faeces. You cannot talk of that in synthetic medicine because when you take overdose of something in synthetic medicine, you may lose your life.

The acupuncture you mention sounds interesting. It has to do with insertion of needles to the body. Are they ordinary needles or laden with drugs?

It is not laden with drugs. They are specialized sterilized needles. Very tiny. You can fold them. They are like rubber. In fact when it enters your body you may not know. Just a little prickle. And you don’t just put it anywhere in the body. Acupuncturists work with what we call meridian line. Like I said, we are natural beings. For instance, you can do without food. You fast don’t you? You can do without water for some days. The only thing you will suffer is dehydration. But can you do without oxygen? It is not possible. The vital force in our body is in the oxygen. We are oxygen being, we are not ordinary being. We cannot survive without oxygen. The oxygen in our body has pathways they flow through. We call those path ways meridian lines or channels that oxygen flow through and we call them meridian lines. And if there is any blockage in any of the meridian lines, it will cause imbalance in the body and that will make the body not to be at ease. It will make the body to be dis-eased. That is how the name disease came about. Not at-ease.

We use acupuncture needles, the sterilized needles to unblock those blockages. When you have those blockages, oxygen will not be able to flow properly. If oxygen is not flowing to a particular side of your body, that side will not survive. That side will be diseased. So you use needles to puncture that side, so that the pathway will open. And when it opens, oxygen will flow to every part of the body and with time, it can reverse any ailment.

A for orthodox medicine, there is measure. There are dosages they give people with ailments. Is it the same with yours?

Yes we have dosages. Sometimes they are being mischievous when they say that alternative or herbal medicines don’t have dosages. It is a lie! Let me tell you why they say that. Herbal medicine or alternative medicine has been before orthodox medicine. It is the oldest form of treatment on earth. It precedes any form of medicine. They now believe that when you take those things as concoction, as your herbs or in whatever form you take it, you don’t have dosages, is a lie. Not true. Even during the days of our forefathers, they had a way of measuring the dosage of whatever they are giving you. They will say take one cup in the morning, one cup in the evening. The herbs that they ask you to take one cup; they will not ask you to take two cups. The one you need to take two cups, they won’t ask you to take three cups. And when you take them, you will get better. So where are they coming from when they say we don’t have dosages?

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We capsulate most of our herbs. And inside each capsule we have measurement and when you capsulate your herbs and we say take two in the morning and two in the evening, is that not dosage? They are just trying to discredit any other form of medication. The only thing about herbal or alternative medicine is that because it is natural, it works slowly and steadily. If you are consistent with it, you will see the power of nature.

Are your drugs affordable. Can the common man afford your treatment?

If you can afford oxygen, if you can afford to breathe in air and breathe out carbon dioxide, free of charge, if you can afford to drink water with just little charges, you can afford our medicine.

From all what you have said, are you implying that alternative medicine is better than the conventional medicine?

Orthodox medicine is not medicine. Alternative medicine is way better. Alternative medicine has been since creation. It is not what they call scientifically proven. It is naturally proven. It is better than any other form of treatment. You don’t go to the lab mixing chemicals. Let me give you this example. Have you heard of a tablet called valium? It is a sleeping sedative drug. Do you know where they go that from? There is a plant called valerian. It is a sedative. It will relax your body and make you fall asleep. So they took valerian to the lab, they extracted all the components in the valerian and they went and made artificial type of it using chemical and called it valium. When you take it, it will work almost the same way valerian works. It is the fake of nature.

Everything God created, Satan too is trying to create artificial. Herbal medicine is the real medicine. It precedes synthetic medication. Synthetic is man made. How can they say what human made is better than what God made? Have you ever heard of fake drug or medication in herbal medicine? There is no fake ginger. There is no fake turmeric. There is no fake bitter leaf. But there are fake drugs everywhere, including panadol. It is because they are man made. Alternative medicine is a million times better than orthodox drugs because herbal medicine will not give you side effects. It is made from nature. It is not something we should be comparing. Not comparable at all. If you did not take poison or any leave that is poisonous, alternative medicine cannot kill you.

How come a lot of people do not seem know about this? Whenever they have health problems, minor or major, they go the conventional way?

A lot of people have been brainwashed. Pharmaceutical industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. In the US they call them the big firm. And they have in connivance with medical experts brainwashed almost everybody. You cannot even say you know anything. Recently I saw our bitter leaf in Nigeria. They are selling it in the US as capsules. They capsulated our own bitter leaf. They tell you it can do this and that. The pharmaceutical industry, they have brainwashed everybody and to the extent that they will tell you if you don’t take those things, you will die because they are making hell of money from it.

Earlier I told you high BP is not a sickness but a symptom. Now no doctor will tell you that BP is a symptom of a sickness. They will write their prescriptions. They will say go and take this and that. Those things are just to manage your BP. They will want you to take it for the rest of your life.

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I think the population of the whole world is about 7 billion going to 10 billion. Imagine one billion people being hypertensive. With the stress people go through, it is possible that up to a billion people are hypertensive. Imagine one billion people taking BP drugs every day. Do you know how much they will be making? It is a multi-billion dollar industry and they need to protect it. They need to guide it. They need to make it lucrative. That is why today, you see them coming up with so many other things. You will have series and thousands of medications for BP alone. Whereas there is a root that you can just take that will suppress your BP. BP is not the cause of an ailment, it is the symptom. So when you remove the root cause, the symptom would fizzle out. That is what we do here. That is what we are propagating. That is why we are trying to tell people that don’t be part of this brainwash. They have been doing this for years. Alternative medicine is the medicine. The solution you are looking for up and down is in nature. Now they have not been able to come up and tell us the real cause of cancer. But we have been able to know and we have been able to tackle cancer like I mentioned earlier. Between stage one and three plus, we can handle and it will be reversed. What they are giving their patients for cancer; they even write poison on it. Their doctors will never touch chemotherapy tablets. They will never touch it because they know it is poisonous and still they are still giving it to people. And people are so gullible that they patronize them. Nature is the solution to all health challenges. Take it or leave it.

Do you engage with the government? Are they supportive? We have government funded hospitals, do we have government funded alternative medicine centres likes this?

Yes we do have alternative medicine centres like this licensed by government. I can talk of Lagos State. In the Ministry of Health in Lagos State, we have a department. Lagos State Board of alternative and traditional medicine is under the ministry of health and before you can practice in Lagos, you have to register with them. They will have to train you. You put all you know on the table and if you are qualified, they will give you more training and then certify you to practice in Lagos. But in terms of government funding, no. It is because the orthodox medicine dominated the game. We are just struggling to come up. Though, there are many doctors these days that are patronizing herbal medicines. Like I have many oncologists that refer their patients to me now. We have so many of them that know that they cannot tell lie till thy kingdom come. In terms of government funding, nothing like that for now. But in Lagos, you cannot have a facility like this except you are certified to do so.

Are your drugs approved by NAFDAC?

If you are doing any drug for commercial purpose, you have to take it to NAFDAC for approval. They will do their laboratory test and if you pass the test, they will approve. There are so many alternative medications out there approved by NAFDAC that are good for consumption.