After 50 years of clinical practice, a pioneering homeopath noticed a pattern that “no prescription could fully address.” Patients came in with skin conditions, migraines, chronic fatigue, and hair loss. Undoubtedly, medicines helped. But beyond the physical illnesses, there was something buried deep — something they couldn’t get out of their system.
Dr Mukesh Batra, founder and chairman emeritus of Dr Batra’s Healthcare, describes this stubborn, lingering foe as “A toxic relationship, a poisonous thought they couldn’t release, an environment that was slowly corroding them.”
Blending science, real-life stories, practical guidance, and holistic healing, his new book ‘Toxic: Stories, Science and Remedies for a Cleaner Mind, Body, and Spirit’ (Bloomsbury India, Rs 358), co-authored with Swami Shailendra Saraswati, a medical doctor and spiritual teacher, intends to address this invisible monster that lurks around us day and night. It is not a self-help manual, and promises no quick fixes. Instead, it is an accumulation of experiences, warnings, and protections. “Toxic was born from the realisation that the most dangerous toxins of our age are not always the ones we can name in a lab report,” Dr Mukesh says.
The thought is scarier and unsettling than we think. Can we equate the modern world to toxicity? How did we get here? “The modern world is not toxic by design, but it is toxic by default if we leave it unexamined,” Dr Mukesh says. “We have engineered convenience, speed, and connection — yet manufactured anxiety, comparison, and noise alongside it.”
Everything today is engineered to hook us. A scroll for even 15 minutes can leave us doomed. We don’t realise how many lives we’ve noticed and compared. The perpetual downpour of content leaves us drenched in information overload. It sounds unstoppable. But the good news is that internal toxicity is not inevitable. The body and mind can heal once we start noticing them. “Awareness is itself an antidote,” he says.
Life today is fast-paced, and an immediate getaway isn’t the solution, but a deliberate decision is. When asked about an alternative lifestyle, Dr Mukesh says, “An alternative lifestyle does not mean abandoning your work or retreating to a mountaintop. It means deliberate corrections within a busy life: choosing whom you give your energy to, guarding your sleep, pausing before you react.”
He speaks from his personal experience. In five decades he has travelled the world, run an organisation, and pursued four passions. “None of it slowed me down,” he says. What kept him grounded is discipline. “Discipline is not the enemy of a full life; it is what makes a full life sustainable.”
A core theme of the book is how internal toxicity builds through forces converging at once. He lists the factors: “Chronic stress that never switches off, relationships that drain rather than nourish, a culture of constant comparison now amplified by screens, suppressed emotions — anger we don’t voice, grief we don’t process, poor sleep, processed food, and sedentary days.”
Individually, they appear small. “Cumulatively they form a slow poison,” he warns. They are alarmingly dangerous because we don’t see visible symptoms immediately. It’s slow. “There is no sudden symptom — only a gradual dimming of vitality.”
Decades of close interaction with patients have convinced Dr Mukesh that toxicity is beyond medicine. “Medicines can treat the manifestation, but healing requires addressing the source,” he emphasises. While the source may be a toxic job or a corrosive relationship, treating only the surface leaves the core untouched.
He has seen patients improve not when he changed their remedy, but when they left a draining workplace, set a boundary with a family member, or forgave someone they had carried for years. For him, “Health is not just the absence of disease. It is a harmony between body, mind, and environment.”
If there is one change he wants readers to make immediately, it is this: “Audit what you consume.” And he doesn’t mean only food. “Notice what you absorb each day: the conversations, the content, the company,” he says. He adds, “Then remove one source of toxicity, however small. One relationship you set a boundary with. One habit you break. One negative thought you refuse to entertain.”
Sometimes healing demands effort. “Healing rarely begins with adding something. It begins with subtracting what is harming you.” In an age where content on 10-step wellness routines overflows the screen, that advice feels easier and radical. Because the body and mind know how to heal. We just have to stop poisoning them long enough to let them try.
The book is available on Amazon.