Ayurveda is a system of medicine that originated in India more than 5,000 years ago. It is based on the concept that disease is caused by imbalances or stress in a person’s consciousness. It encourages lifestyle interventions and natural therapies to regain balance between the body, mind, spirit, and environment.
To learn more about Ayurveda, the Alternative Pain Treatment Directory spoke with Jo Tandberg, owner of ZV Botanicals. She is a National Association of Ayurvedic Medicine (NAMA) Board-Certified Ayurveda Wellness Counselor and a graduate of Kerala Ayurveda Academy. Tandberg is also a certified Cannabis Clinician through The Medical Cannabis Institute. She shared with us the story of how she discovered Ayurveda while on a quest to treat her own chronic pain.
After being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when she was 18 years old, Tandberg was prescribed a host of very strong immune-suppressant drugs. She was also prescribed prednisone which she took off and on over the course of 13 years. For several years, Tandberg also received regular intravenous infusions of Remicade, a chemotherapy drug that is often used to treat Crohn’s disease. When she was in her 30s, surgeons removed 12 cm of her colon and small intestine.
“I navigated through my 20s learning what worked and what didn’t,” she said. “I was also searching for alternative treatments to help me with my pain which was almost always in the lower right quadrant of my abdomen. I also had traveling joint pain and arthritis. It was chronic, and the medication that I was taking contributed to some of the pain I was experiencing in my joints.”
It was after her second child was born with numerous health problems including asthma and severe eczema that Tandberg began looking for alternative treatments for both herself and her son. She began studying different modalities of healing and exploring indigenous and spiritual practices.
“I also began deepening my understanding of Ayurveda and yoga,” she said. “Ayurveda is holistic, natural medicine. It’s teaching and living in an understanding of the relationship between humans and the universe and how intrinsic that is. It emphasizes balance and harmony, and all of the different aspects of our body are looked at when we are treating someone through an Ayurvedic lens. It’s all about finding the root cause—it’s never just physical.”
After her son was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease while in middle school, Tandberg was able to help him manage his flare ups with Ayurveda. In 2011, she became a board-certified Ayurveda wellness counselor and started taking on clients.
Tandberg was living in California at the time, and after cannabis was legalized there, she began educating herself on the therapeutic benefits of cannabis. It was during that time that her father was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic melanoma. The cancer had spread to his lungs, stomach, adrenals, and lymph nodes, and his oncologist at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta said that the disease had progressed to the point that he was not a candidate for chemotherapy or radiation. He was told that his only option was targeted immunotherapy.
Before her father started the immunotherapy, Tandberg convinced him to try Ayurveda and cannabis oil with THC. She also recommended major changes to his diet and lifestyle.
“I had him on a very high dose of THC oil, and he was also taking supplemental CBD oil,”
she said. “At the time, I was making some of the oil and finding people to make it for me. I was really digging in deep to find the best sources that I could find in the United States. I was flying all over to meet with doctors and going to conferences and meeting with farmers and going to expos. I dove in so deep because I couldn’t believe what I was learning and the stories I was hearing about how it was helping people.”
Before beginning immunotherapy, her father had another PET scan. Even though the scan showed that the tumors had gotten smaller, her father began the immunotherapy treatment that his doctors were recommending.
“Long story short, it almost killed him,” said Tandberg. “He needed a blood transfusion after the third or fourth infusion. They wanted him to have 30 of them, so he didn’t even come close to getting through the whole series.”
After he stopped the infusions, she continued to treat him with Ayurvedic herbs, cannabis and CBD oil. That was seven years ago, and her father now shows no signs of cancer. Although doctors won’t declare him cancer free, they have been unable to detect any tumor markers within his body. Tandberg credits his miraculous recovery to Ayurveda, cannabis, and CBD.
“His doctor at Emory said, ‘We should be giving these two modalities (Ayurveda and cannabis/CBD) more research because we can’t take credit for what happened to you,’” she said.
It was after helping her father that Tandberg became more outspoken about the benefits of cannabis. By that time, she was a certified cannabis clinician living in Salmon, Washington, about one hour east of Portland, Oregon.
“I was absolutely terrified because it still wasn’t legal everywhere,” she said. “I was risking a lot by being so vocal, and my son came to me and said he was worried I could end up in an orange jump suit. That’s when I decided to take a step back, and I decided to work mostly with CBD oil because I was learning how effective that was for things like pain, insomnia, and anxiety. That way I could help people no matter what state they lived in.”
It was after making that decision that Tandberg set out to create her own brand of CBD products that incorporate Ayurveda. Her Ayurvedic Blends of organically-grown, full spectrum CBD tinctures are infused in organic, cold-pressed olive oil. Her Magic Ayurvedic CBD Salve was developed specifically to treat her son’s eczema, and it can also be used for wound care, pain, and inflammation.
“I wanted to base my brand on empowering others through education and introducing concepts of Ayurveda,” she said. “In Ayurveda, we suggest different kinds of lifestyles and dietary changes to help individuals balance their doshas.”
According to the Ayurvedic philosophy, the universal life force manifests in three different energies—vata (wind), pitta (heat, sun, or fire), and kapha (earth). Each person is made up of a unique combination of the three doshas.
“We use food and herbs and breath work and movement and routine. Ayurveda is about rejuvenating the body, mind, and soul and balancing it through detoxification and cleansing,” she said.
During the more than 10 years that Tandberg has been practicing as an Ayurveda wellness counselor, she has worked with many clients who suffer from chronic pain, especially pain related to joints and the digestive system.
“My job as counselor is to give clients a toolbelt full of tools that they can easily with discipline incorporate into their life, their home, their kitchen, their routine, their sleep,” she said. “There’s also almost always something we can do supplementally with herbs.”
For those suffering with digestive issues, Tandberg often recommends herbs that support the liver as well as those that cleanse the lining of the GI tract. She also recommends that clients introduce certain types of fats into their diets.
As an example, Tandberg tells the story of a client who suffered from severe stomach pain and diverticulitis. After her doctors recommended that the woman have surgery as soon as possible, she reached out to Tandberg for help. Tandberg recommended aloe, triphala, castor oil packs on the abdomen and back, CBD, and self-massage with medicated herbal body oil. She also advised her client to drink 32 ounces per day of hot tea made with equal parts of fennel, cumin, and coriander seeds. In the world of Ayurveda, this tea is widely referred to as “miracle tea.” It can be helpful for those suffering from abdominal pain, bloating, and reflux.
“That was actually the first thing I had her do while I was pulling together the herbs that she needed,” she said. “She started on the tea right away, and within 24 hours she felt a difference. She incorporated everything I recommended, and she did not end up having the surgery. Within a week, she had moved away from having acute, bent-over, can’t function, ER-visit type pain.”
It’s been two years since that client turned to Tandberg for help, and her results were so miraculous that the woman now works for Tandberg as her head of marketing.
Research Findings on Ayurvedic Treatment of Chronic Pain
Like most forms of alternative medicine, there is little available funding for research on effectiveness of Ayurveda for any clinical conditions. The limited number of clinical studies related to the use of Ayurveda for chronic pain have been promising:
- A 2013 double blind, equivalence drug trial showed that Ayurvedic formulations significantly reduced knee pain and improved knee function in patients suffering from osteoarthritis. Ayurvedic formulations were equivalent to glucosamine and celecoxib.
- The results of a 2011 study found that conventional and Ayurvedic treatments for rheumatoid arthritis were similarly effective.
- A 2016 study found that patients treated with Ayurvedic formulations showed significant reduction in knee joint discomfort when compared to baseline and placebo.
- According to a 2022 review, eleven studies found Ayurveda to be “clinically beneficial” for the treatment of migraines.
- The results of a 2017 study indicated that “Ayurvedic external treatment is effective for pain relief in chronic low back pain in the short term.”
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Visit Tandberg’s website for more information about how to book an Ayurveda consultation.
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Christine Graf is a freelance writer who lives in Ballston Lake, New York. She is a regular contributor to several publications and has written extensively about health, mental health, and entrepreneurship.
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