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Jonathan Toews had about as close to a dream career in hockey as you can get. He was named captain of the Chicago Blackhawks at just 20 years old and led the Original Six franchise to three Stanley Cups, all while racking up a pair of Olympic gold medals and a bevy of individual awards along the way. But in December 2020, Toews announced he’d be sitting out indefinitely with an undisclosed illness. That would later be revealed as chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS), which was causing persistent fatigue and inflammation, and it caused him to miss the NHL’s entire pandemic-shortened season.

The now 36-year-old did return to the Hawks for a further two seasons, but in August 2023, he posted on Instagram that he’d be stepping away from the game as he tried to get his health challenges—which also included long COVID—under control. He has not played since, and the endless frustration of trying to feel like himself again led him to explore some unconventional remedies. The latest was a five-week stint in India where he practiced Ayurveda, a traditional form of alternative medicine that involves herbal medicines, yoga, meditation, and enemas.

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In a long, in-depth conversation, the future Hall of Famer spoke candidly about all of the health issues he’s dealt with—dating back as far as 2009, his second year in the NHL—as well as his decision to go to India and the healing he’s experienced through a potent mix of ghee butter, painful massages, and induced vomiting.

GQ: In your Instagram post, you mentioned that you had spent almost five years searching for a way to heal. I guess the basic question to start with here is, how did that start? When did you first realize that something was wrong?

Toews: I mean, I don’t know. If I do look back on my career, I always kind of had digestive issues, immune system issues—nothing seriously chronic or diagnosed when I was young—but definitely in my teenage years I was always battling something.

Early in my career, it was probably my second season in the NHL, I kept getting sick, I couldn’t sleep at night, all these things where it just finally got to the point where I was like, “All right.” I always thought, in my mind, that everyone else just felt that way and that was just normal, but then it got so bad that I barely made it through the playoffs that year.

Oh, dang.

I was 21 years old or something. That was my first moment where I realized that things were not normal and I needed to look into it. That’s when I started learning about health and nutrition and what I put in my body. I really saw a huge, major difference at that age. So, it’s kind of a lot of ups and downs throughout the years, because let’s face it, the NHL season is such a marathon with the travel and the time changes and the games and all that stuff.

But I think it was probably right when COVID shut the world down, March of 2020, that I had just got to that point where a lot of things added up and kind of boiled over at the same time. I had been burning the candle at both ends, so to speak, for quite a while. I did get sick with COVID in February before anyone ever realized it was a thing. I played that whole last month with a really, really bad cough. I wasn’t sleeping at night, I couldn’t really get any rest because I was just coughing and playing through it somehow. I guess from there just one thing led to another and it just kind of snowballed on me. A lot of things added up and the wheels came off.

So, what happened?

My understanding of it all is that people get really affected by COVID—metabolic issues and how your cells and your organs and tissues make energy—and everything fell apart at once. So, that’s the simple gist of it. I worked with some really great doctors, some very knowledgeable people, and learned a lot of interesting tools and practices and medicines and supplements and made changes to my diet—all the things, really! But nothing got me to that place where I’m like, “Okay, yeah, this thing is in the rearview mirror and we’re back to firing on all cylinders.”