Research & Development by BetterBonds

Since 2016, BetterBonds has worked with over 40 herb parts and natural substances, and developed several products and SKUs (stock-keeping units) to suit various needs. Read more about our work on our partner site, Alam-e-Nau, and find here a list of the products that we developed.

This image from 2017 is from a makeshift office & shop space in a tiny cafe in Hunza, where Ramala sat and wrote the stories and information of the herbs that she worked with at the time.

The prolific product range of BetterBonds reflects the extent of our research and our capacity to take up an idea and execute it by developing, marketing, and selling products. Speed is achieved by staying within the ecosphere and bioregion of the products that we work with, often in an era before the proliferation of the Internet which means knowledge and culture was very native, very local. The inputs come from all sides. (Most of the BetterBonds’ products are a result of Ramala’s own intuition of exploring with and discovering the uses of a herb. Perhaps less than 5% of the in-house portfolio made use of traditional methods; however, the ecosphere gave rise to the chance of encountering the same herbs again. In the case of gemstones though, knowledge has been acquired from traditional sellers and dealers, and also from Western sources. In fact Ramala’s initiation with gemstones comes from a crystal healing workshop she took in South Africa in 2007 in a Sufi healing clinic where she had a potent experience. She shelved that knowledge, and her pouch of gemstones that she got from the shop. The spark was ignited later when she came across gemstones in the Himalayas. Most work with herbs came from intuition; in particular she recalls interacting with Rosehips, Red Clover and Plantain that spontaneously “called” to her, offering exactly the medicyne that she needed at the time. When “pulled” by Red Clover and Plantain during a cough and flu bout, she found that the two made a very gentle cough syrup. With further research and with addition of other herds, she formed cough syrups for children and also, one of her bottles of syrups turned to what was possibly mead–it exploded in car due to heat when accidentally locked up, and that experiment terminated there!)

There are several such fascinating stories to tell!

The BetterBonds Portfolio

At their peak before the pandemic, BetterBonds spawned an impressive array of herb & crystal products. Click here to explore the portfolio.
(BetterBonds is working to revive production, with focus on exports.)

Methods

Our research methods are proprietary, and are a mix of folk wisdom, native practices, intuition, projection, and academic inquiry as well as lab research and validation. We graduate from a scale that starts with intuitive-native and moves on to inquiry and evidence. In this way, we are able to bring various traditions and schools together, and remove conflicts both with our practice, and in the field where users/clients engage with our offerings and medicyne. This conflict resolution in the field of healing and medicyne is vital to usher in a new, pacific era of healing. We assert:

“The truth of the structure of a thing, the situation that presents itself and the conditions that are being observed speak for themselves, and the observer’s (BetterBonds’) job is to study our clients, our medicyne, and the field or stage where healing takes place, better, over and over”.

Out of better seeing are birthed better solutions. At BetterBonds, we have focused on making medicyne and delivering solutions to clients, observing their healing and progress (and note any failures or lacks–which were found to be minimal and often pertained to logistics of delivering the packages, and not to our products themselves), taking in their feedback and creating a loop whereby we constantly improve our offerings, using a kaizan (constant improvement) process.

Our aim is to create a research-driven alternative healthcare, wellness, and self-care world which replaces the current modern habits of reliance on synthetic, dangerous, often addictive, non-nourishing, unfulfilling, toxic, and very expensive substances. These substances often do not solve the problem at the core, and do not heal and rejuvenate the client nor support and encourage their native healing systems, but instead mask the issue and provide artificial and temporary relief that either disables or discourages native healing ability of the body, mind and soul.

Our research and outlook connect the dots between the healer, the healing modality/tools/substances/medicyne, and the client/user. We see this as a trifecta the components of which interact with each other in real time, creating a dynamic healing need & solution space, unique to each case. This is a hyper-personalized approach to healing previously practiced by healers of lineage, connection and repute. Today, this level of attunement has been taken out of the hands of humans, and assigned to AI (artificial intelligence), for better or for worse.


In time, on this page and through the rest of the site, we will share in-depth information about our research, SKUs, and the potential of various products to graduate into formal production, possibly through a licensing agreement. Stay tuned!


This page is under development. We shall soon publish more details about our research. Last update October 29, 2024.