Jonathan Toews opens up about his healing trip to India and whether he’ll ever play hockey again

This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter where our editors recommend a must-see story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

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 picking up a pair of Olympic gold medals and a number of individual awards along the way. However, in December 2020, Toews announced that he would be out indefinitely with an undisclosed illness. It would later be revealed as chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS), which caused persistent fatigue and inflammation, and caused him to miss the entire NHL’s pandemic-shortened season.

The now 36-year-old returned to the Hawks for two more seasons, but in August 2023, posted on Instagram that he would step away from the game as he tried to get his health challenges — which also included lingering COVID — under control. He hasn’t played since, and the endless frustration of trying to feel like himself again led him to explore some unconventional means. The most recent was a five-week stint in India where he practiced Ayurveda, a traditional form of alternative medicine that involves herbal medicine, yoga, meditation and enemas.

In a long, in-depth interview, the future Hall of Famer spoke candidly about all the health issues he’s dealt with — dating back to 2009, his second year in the NHL — as well as his decision to go to India and his recovery experienced through a potent mixture 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 it start? When did you first realize something was wrong?

toes: I mean, I don’t know. If I look back on my career, I’ve always had problems with digestion, with the immune system – nothing serious chronic or diagnosed when I was young – but certainly in my teenage years I was always struggling with something.

Early in my career, 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, “Okay.” I always thought, in my mind, that everyone else just felt like that and it was just normal, but then it got so bad that I barely made it through the playoffs that year.

Oh, dammit.

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

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

So what happened?

My understanding of it all is that people are 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 amazing doctors, some very knowledgeable people, and learned a lot of interesting tools and practices and medications and supplements and made changes to my diet—all the things, really! But nothing got me to the place where I’m like, “Okay, well, this thing is in the rearview mirror and we’re back to firing on all cylinders.”