A Kerala monsoon routine
The rainy months are the traditional season for therapies. Here is why, and how to plan.
How our oils are made
Copper urulis, slow fires and three days for a single batch.
Behind the treatment rooms at Thanal is a small pharmacy, and on most mornings something is cooking.
A medicated oil starts with a decoction. Roots, bark and leaves are washed, crushed and boiled in water in a large copper uruli until the volume is reduced, often to a quarter. The decoction is strained through cloth.
The base oil, usually sesame or coconut, is then added with a paste of fresh herbs and sometimes milk. The mixture is cooked over a low wood fire and stirred with a long wooden ladle, for hours at a stretch, across two or three days. Our pharmacist, Ramachandran, judges when it is ready by rolling the herb paste between his fingers: it should form a soft wick that does not crackle in a flame.
The finished oil is filtered, cooled, labelled with the batch date and stored in steel. We make only what our clinic uses in a few months.
This is slow, and it is not the only way to make good oil. But it lets our doctors know exactly what goes on a patient’s skin, and where each herb came from.
