A 2nd Look at Arbularios

Rediscovering the Powers of Mangosteen

Growing up in the semi-slums of Cebu City in the 1950’s, amid the nipa huts and the tartanilla plodded dusty roadways that bordered the Echavez-Sikatuna area, it was seldom that impoverished families could afford the cost of modern medical care. The only remedies available were those dispensed by the local arbulario, usually a beetle-nut chewing old lady who had seen many a limping “patient” in her career.

Have a long festering sore? Use some oregano leaves, slightly crushed and smother it on one’s wounds. Or perhaps use some tender guava leaves. Break a bone, or sprain an ankle? Go over to Manoy Undo’s shack by the dry creek; he’ll rub the ankle area, pull the leg and voila we can go back to the many games and youthful joys that occupied the humid and dusty days of snotty nosed barrio kids.

Living in a lush green tropical island provided our arbularios, herbalists, with all manner of plant life from which to grind out and concoct one type of cure or another. The one remedy that I remember very vividly was the purple colored Mangosteen fruit, specifically its thick skin or rind. After thorough boiling I drank the liquid leftover like a tea and sure enough it alleviated whatever stomach pains I had. Boiling tender guava leaves also had a somewhat similar though not as potent an effect.

Having had to deal with several bouts of cardiovascular diseases over the past several years and therefore needing to take in many pills a day, I have been actively exploring the use of herbal remedies to salve the minor aches and pains that the aging, deteriorating body is often heir to. For gout, for example, I have been drinking several glasses of black cherry juice a day as it is said that this fruit serves as a “binder” for uric (or euric) acid, which, if not adequately expelled from the system crystallizes in the extremities’ causing painful bouts of gout. My primary care physician voiced no objections to this practice (perhaps because he believes that adding more pills to my regimen ultimately harms me).

The Philippines has become a leading supplier of many herbal remedies in the past couple of decades. Not too long ago it was widely understood that the oft hated, bitter ampalaya (bitter melon gourd) was an effective remedy for certain types of diabetes. Although not a diabetic I drink several cups of ampalaya tea a day as I noticed it has a general cleansing effect; it seems really effective in removing whatever fatty residue that we ingest from our diet. There are powdered version of this plant on sale but diabetics, as with any remedy, ought to consider its use only in consultation with their doctors.

Many Filipino stores carry all kinds of herbal teas the most popular of which are the ones made from guava leaves and the highly regarded banaba , which, it is said back home, was in widespread use long before the invention of midol for women.

Anyway, the point of this story and why I started writing it out in the first place. A few weeks ago I had a severe case of acidity in my stomach. It was so severe that it kept me up awake at nights. I went to see my gastroenterologist who prescribed antacids. Over several days I had to pump myself with the stuff just to get some relief but the aftermath was not pleasant either. And it seemed that I could not eat anything at all without triggering a veritable lava flow of acid. In fact for a 3 day period I actually did not eat anything as having food in my stomach seemed like carrying around bricks in my system. And teas did not seem to help either.

On my next “Filipino grocery” shopping stop I saw bundles of Mangosteen displayed in the produce bins. I grabbed what looked like a sack of it, paid an arm and a leg for the stuff which supposedly came out of Thailand and took it home. These fruits were very much smaller than the ones I had seen in my youth. The meat was nice, white and delicious but my main interest was the skin which I immediately boiled and drank the brownish liquid as I would tea. I had several cups of the stuff. Now, I cannot say exactly if it was my Mangosteen concoction at work or whether the dozens of chalky antacid tablets I chewed was the reason but that night I slept a little better and did not have the severe symptoms previously experienced.

Then one day earlier this month I drove down to San Francisco to attend a relative’s 80th birthday party and to look up an old friend from some 35 years ago with whom I had recently reconnected via email. This friend, Carole and her daughter Shannon, as it happens, are deeply involved with Mangosteen as distributors of a product called XanGo. This is a product that had hit the market like over a decade ago but was now packaged more sensibly in a user friendly kind of way. Having recently experienced the pangs of stomach acidity I was anxious to try the product and see if, like in the days of my boyhood, it would have the same magical powers and cure me. Well I have now taken the product every day for the past 7 days and I have had no acidity and have not had to take in any antacids at all. How great is this?

This led me to read up on the product and where this led me to was information (provided by my XanGo distributor friend Shannon) that the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota is currently investigating this fruit, specifically the skin or rind, for its anti-inflammatory agents called Xantones . The Mayo Clinic study now involves 220 patients who currently have atrial fibrillation. Half will drink the juice, half will be given a placebo. Also under investigation is the plant’s antioxidant qualities. This effort was covered in a news program of ABC News recently.

Information on this subject can be obtained by going to the National Library of Medicine website : www.nlm.nih.gov

Needless to say I’m impressed at the medical-scientific attention the
Mangosteen is receiving. My stomach is just happy that the acidity has been severely reduced and hopefully will not have to host any more antacid parties for a while. I’m impressed too that the old beetle-nut chewing arbularia in the Echavez-Sikatuna neighborhood was on to something with her herbal cures 50 years before the Mayo Clinic thought it worthy of a serious look. Who wudda thunk it?
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