Prateek Mutha spent five years fighting scleritis, an autoimmune eye inflammation, through steroids and dietary changes with no lasting relief. After discovering the Wim Hof Method, he did daily breathwork, cold showers, and ice plunges. Within weeks his eye inflammation disappeared, his vision returned to normal, and his stress dropped dramatically.
Chapters
I am Prateek Mutha and I come from Chennai, India. 5 years back in 2018, I was told that I am having an autoimmune condition with my eye. It's called scleritis in the sclera, which is the white portion of the eye, with a trigger of stress or less sleep or anything that, that goes wrong with my routine. My eye is going to get inflamed and there's going to be a red dot and it's going to grow and the inflammation gets really intense and painful. The only way that you can push it down is by— if it's mild, then you have the NSAIDs, but most of the times they don't work. So you need to have steroid drops. You start with high dosage and you go down slowly. The moment the doctors told me to stop, it would flare up in the other eye. So it was a, it was a crazy spiral, you know. There was, it's like a circle which I couldn't get out of, and I really have been to the doctors all around the world. In the US, in India, in New Zealand, every place that I traveled to, I probably would get it and I would have to see a doctor there. It really started to affect my personal life, my work life. I was really stressed about it. There was no way out of it. I would wake up in the night and I would cry to my wife saying that I think I'm going to be blind because that's where it ends. I did a lot of things really to, to help my symptoms. I even changed my diet. I went vegan, I went gluten-free, thinking I need to avoid anything that causes inflammation in my body. But that definitely couldn't cure it or couldn't keep it at bay. It just supported me in ways, but yeah, it was still there. One fine day, I was just sitting outside the doctor's clinic, and, and there was one lady It was— and she looked at me, she was like, I think you're too young to be here. What's wrong with you? And I told her about my problem. And she says, I'm suffering from this for the last 25 years. I've been coming to this doctor for 15 years. Do not look for solutions with the doctors because I've lost vision with one of the eyes and the other eye is 50%. I've been taking the same medication, the same steroid drops, the same oral steroids. It is not going to help. It is not going to stop. It's going to, it's going to be a downward spiral. Get out of this place. I don't know where you go, but you really have to go look out for solutions yourself. And that's how really my search started to look for things outside of the medicine, doctors, you know, therapies or clinics. I knew about Wim Hof and he was just talking about autoimmune disorders online on a YouTube video, if I remember correctly. And I just said, I need to try this. I've really done everything. My expectation was it's just gonna help me maybe reduce my symptoms or reduce the intensity of the inflammation. I've been doing the breathwork, I've been doing the cold shower, I've been doing the ice plunge, and it hasn't come. My eye is absolutely fine. It feels like it's back to normal. There is no other way that I can describe this, but it's just magic for me. I mean, I can't put it in words. For me, it was a long travel from India to this place, and people were asking me, "Yo, you've come from India? It's like 20 hours for you to get here." I said, "I wouldn't mind going to Antarctica if Wim Hof was doing a camp there." What this has done, I don't need any more proof. It definitely is healing my body. It's reducing the stress. Yeah, there's a bit of science. You can understand all of this, what's going down. Maybe the cortisol is going down or the epinephrine is going down, but whatever is happening, it's been life-changing for me. I mean, on all fronts, it's crazy.
