NHL Star Jonathan Toews Disappeared Over Health Issues, but What Happened to Him?

The list of players with more success in the NHL than Jonathan Toews is pretty short. He's won the Stanley Cup three times and was serving as a captain for the Chicago Blackhawks until he disappeared from the league altogether.

Following that disappearance, though, many wanted to better understand what happened to Jonathan, and where he's been in the almost two years since his last game in the NHL. Here's what we know.

Jonathan has been struggling with health issues since the pandemic, per an interview with GQ. He had to sit out the 2020-2021 season with chronic immune response syndrome and had to sit out part of the 2023 season because of the effects of long COVID.

In a post on Instagram from November of this year, though, Jonathan said that he'd been on a "healing journey" in an attempt to get to the root of his various ailments.

Jonathan said that he had spent five weeks in India undergoing a detox and that things were trending in the right direction.

"As some of you may know, I’ve been on a bit of a healing journey. I’ve had many ups and downs, brief moments of hope working with a whole bunch of different doctors and modalities, followed by doubting if things would ever improve. But I recently spent five weeks in India undergoing an Ayurvedic detox called a Panchakarma, and I’m happy to say things are trending," he wrote.

“It’s too long of a story to share all the details here, but it’s been almost (five) years of searching for a way to heal the inflammatory and immune system issues that took me out of hockey,” he explained in the post. “The wisdom of Ayurveda has taught me that everything I experience, I am responsible for. Not only did it teach me better diet choices specific to my body type, it has deepened my intuitive relationship with myself and the world around me.

Jonathan explained that Ayurveda has been the "healing science of India for over 5,000 years. This system views our bodies as delicate ecosystems, influenced by everything we consume as far as energy, information, thoughts, feelings, and food. In short, it teaches that our health can thrive when we learn to simplify our lives, create space for stillness, and better align ourselves with nature’s rhythms."

Jonathan is technically still an unrestricted free agent in the NHL after playing his final game with the Blackhawks in April of 2023. At the time, the team had chosen not to resign him, in large part because of his difficult medical history. He was named a captain by the team in 2008 and helped lead them to Stanley Cup championships in 2010, 2012, and 2015.

“There [are] absolutely no hard feelings," he said after his last game with the team. "I have nothing but love and gratitude for the Blackhawks and Rocky Wirtz and the Blackhawks family, everyone over the years who's been a part of that. Like I said, you can't ask for more than that."