After eight very sick individuals volunteered to be flown to the Amazonian jungle to try a holistic treatment approach, five of them came back remarkably improved.

A film called The Sacred Science documents their 30 days of encampment during which each serious illness was turned over to the power of plants, herbs, indigenous wisdom, and mental and spiritual exploration.

Though it first debuted in 2012, the film is an enduring resource touting the benefits of going beyond modern medicine. Now, it is available for free to view online, and offers lessons about how ancient medicine can potentially cure modern illnesses–from Parkinson’s and Crohn’s Disease, to a variety of cancers and diabetes–and how something as simple as a plant can have healing powers.

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Filmmaker Nick Polizzi embarked on the project in 2011, putting out a call for applications from seriously ill patients who wanted to immerse themselves in alternative healing concepts on the border between Brazil and Peru. He received over 400 applications within 48 hours.

“I wanted to use real patients, and I wanted them to be more desperate than average patients, willing to journey into the middle of the Amazonian jungle, thousands of miles away from a modern hospital, and put it all on the line to find ‘a cure’,” he told Good News Network.

The combination of different wellness modalities, plants, herbs, diet, and spiritual work that each patient experienced was unique to their respective situation. Beyond just the consumption of the plants themselves, the external environment was also seen as critical to the healing process. So, the patients stayed in jungle huts a mile away from any other patients, spending much of their month in “the solitude of nature.”

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This, Polizzi said, helped foster the crucial, spiritual component of the journey.

“If you ask a shaman or a medicine woman which plant cures cancer, there’s no one answer. You can’t sit in a hotel room and drink herbs,” he said. “If you look into ancient folk medicine from indigenous cultures, all the way to ancient Chinese medicine, they looked at the entire situation, the deeper parts of who you are in your soul.”

5 Patients Reported Remarkable Improvement

After the journey was completed, five of the patients experienced significant improvement in overall health. Two were disappointed with the experience and one person with a terminal disease, who was only expected to live a week before arriving in the jungle, ending up living two pain-free weeks before passing away there.

Though the subject matter may seem controversial and ripe for criticism, the documentary earned the respect of doctors from around the world at multiple film festival screenings.

“They would warn me, ‘Those are some top doctors in the front row,’” Polizzi said. “But nobody really challenged what they saw. I think having doctors involved on our end had something to do with that.”

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While everyone may not be able to fly to South America to cure what ails them, they can come to understand that medicine is not just about treating symptoms.

“Acupuncture and yoga both seem simple enough, but you look at the roots of these practices–more than movement or needles in your body, it’s about your energy that links to that,” he said. “The Sacred Science team is on a mission to bring awareness to the medicinal value of these traditions and help preserve these fragile cultures from extinction.”

The film offers insight about how to use specific native nutritional practices to “turbo-boost” your body’s healing power and how to take a fresh look at the “root cause” of disease—the cause that lies deep within us—and how to find and heal it. Watch the trailer below, and also get a free screening of the full documentary at this link.

Learn more at The Sacred Science website.