Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 22:02:16 -0500
From: Huguette Demers <demersh@interlinx.qc.ca>
Subject: Your Body's Many Cries For Water
Your Body's Many Cries for Water
by Feyedoon Batmanghelidj M.D.
http://www.borderlands.com/main1.htm
A Book Review by TREVOR JAMES CONSTABLE
RARE indeed are those books destined to become all-time classics. Even rarer are
books destined to accomplish a paradigm shift in any major area of modern knowledge.
Of still greater rarity are books destined to benefit significantly the health of
countless millions of human beings, at no cost to them. Such a landmark book is Your Bodys
Many Cries for Water by Dr.
F. Batmanghelidj. He is a London-educated Iranian medical doctor who has made
revolutionary discoveries about the water metabolism of the human body.His astounding
basic breakthrough was made while he was confined to a Teheran prison, this being a unique
circumstance in itself.
Dr. Batmanghelidj is of aristocratic lineage in his native Iran, and when the Shah was
overthrown, the doctor was arrested and jailed with more than 3,000 other well-born
victims of the Khomeini revolution. While these unfortunates were awaiting execution, Dr.
Batmanghelidj was assigned as their medical officer pending his own appearance before a
firing squad. He
had no medical resources other than water, in an environment pervaded by stress and
terror. Indeed, the doctor found himself incarcerated in a gigantic stress laboratory.
This became the milieu in which fundamental discoveries were made regarding the medicinal
and functional value of water. These are discoveries that have eluded giant medical
trusts, vast hospital complexes, battalions of medical professors, universities that boast
about their sophisticated research facilities, and all the vaunted resources of the
pharmaceutical
industry.
None of them, or indeed, all of them combined, were capable: of penetrating to the bedrock
of human health: adequate daily water intake. Without realizing it initially, Dr.
Batmanghelidj was working with clinical controls in place. Prison discipline enabled him
to follow up his patients, who had no possibility of evasion. Forced to use water
medicinally, and water alone, Dr. Batmanghelidj was astonished in following up his
patients, to find that water was effecting full cures of diverse, normally
ineradicable diseases. These cures occurred in a complete fashion not seen in response to
medication, which "treats" or "controls" such recalcitrant and diverse
diseases as asthma, arthritis, high blood pressure and ulcers.
Official medicine has only palliatives for these conditions, not cures. If such diseases
do not bother you personally, just ask anyone so afflicted how frustrating it is to be
perpetually treated but never cured, by doctors who are manifestly flummoxed by such
diseases. This bafflement and medical inability to effect cures is almost universal in
orthodox medicine, and largely accounts for the stupendous and ever-mounting cost of
medical care.
People get treated, not cured. They are not cured because the basic cause of their
diseases is not known to classical medicine. America harbors and husbands a vast army of
people receiving medical "treatment". Dr. Batmanghelidj was blessed by a first
class medical training at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School of London University, one of
the most respected medical schools in the western world. He was one of the last students
of the eminent discoverer of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming. Thus steeped in classical
orthodoxy, Dr. Batmanghelidj was totally embarrassed to find that water was doing in a
dependable way, what medication had never been able to do.
In his classical medical training, like orthodox doctors world-wide, Dr.
Batmanghelidj was taught that it was the solid material in the body (the solute) that was
important. Only an incidental status was assigned to the solvent aspects of the human body
to water. Irrefutable clinical experience in the controlled prison environment, forced the
doctor to conclude that conventional medicine -- of which he was himself a product was
hobbled and handicapped by a false paradigm. The false paradigm undergirded, and
locked in place, the illusion that water was not significant in human metabolism compared
with the solutes, with which medical "science" has been vainly wrestling,
generation after generation.
The truth of basic human functioning, as Dr. Batmanghelidjs research progressively
confirmed, is that the solvent (water) and not the solute, plays the cardinal role in
human health. Orthodox medicine has been ineffective in dealing with a wide spectrum
of diseases, whose etiology is classically listed as "unknown," because it has
this fundamental polarity of solute and solvent back-to-front. The ramified and
fundamental role of water has simply not been comprehended. After three years doing basic
research in the Teheran prison, Dr. Batmanghelidj was released, and came to America. Here
he continued his pathfinding
research on the water metabolism of the human body for a further decade or more. He worked
with established institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, lectured widely to
physicians, and wrote learned papers for professional publications such as the Journal of
Gastroenterology. The fallout from Dr. Batmanghelidjs exertions included a large number of
completely cured
persons who had been chronically afflicted with "incurable" diseases.
Medical doctors were among these people. Slowly but surely, numerous intelligent medical
doctors and researchers who
studied his work, overcame the same embarrassment that had consumed Dr. Batmanghelidj,
when he first began comprehending the cardinal role of water in human health and
functioning. Like Dr. Batmanghelidj, these enlightened physicians came to realize that
medicine was confronting a fundamental paradigm shift. Some of these board-certified
physicians are quoted in the book. More physicians are recognizing this central truth as
the months pass.
Nothing so radical, in the root-meaning of that word, had ever happened to medical
knowledge in the history of the world. Chronic dehydration was being identified as the
fundamental matrix from which most human diseases emerge.
This book will leave you in no doubt that Americas deplorable and desperate health care
crisis is born of dehydration, midwifed by medical inability to deal effectively with
diseases whose etiology in dehydration is not understood. Almost every disease arising out
of dehydration is attacked with medication, or combinations of medications.
Sickness therefore proliferates, while the sick cry out in many different ways for water
cries to which doctors are deaf.
Countless ingrained cultural and social customs of modern America, such as not drinking
sufficient water, and guzzling phenomenal quantities of diuretic soft drinks and diuretic
coffee and tea, reinforce chronic dehydration as the number one health menace in America.
Dr.Batmanghelidj emphasizes that drinking coffee, soft drinks and juices does not counter
dehydration or meet the bodys water needs. The only way out is by drinking water.
Elusive and seemingly unrelated conditions like dyspeptic pain, stress and depression,
high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, excess body weight, chronic fatigue,
arthritis, asthma and allergies, insulin-independent diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, back
problems and a host of lesser complaints that bedevil human beings, have all yielded to
the ingestion of adequate daily water. Dr. Batmanghelidj identifies Alzheimers as due to
dehydration of the brain.
Eight 8-ounce glasses daily is the recommended regimen advocated by Dr. Batmanghelidj, to
keep the human body fully hydrated. For each cup of coffee or other caffeinated drink, an
additional, compensating eight-ounce glass of water is required.
Perhaps the most welcome and convincing finding of Dr. Batmanghelidj is the key role
played by dehydration in creating back ailments in human beings. The spinal discs consist
of about eighty percent water. When these discs atrophy through varying degrees of
dehydration, an afflicted human is off on one of the most miserable medical
merry-go-rounds known to man. The
human spine has to support about 75 percent of body weight. Without fully-hydrated and
resilient spinal discs, the spine cannot perform its function properly.
"Back problems" ensue. Abnormal physical and nervous pressures develop and
vertebrae become misplaced as the spinal discs collapse. In the U.S.A., such back problems
are now on an epidemic scale, largely defy physicians and surgeons, and endlessly
persecute the afflicted. Dr. Batmanghelidj has found that rehydration restores the
integrity and resilience of the spinal discs. Simple exercises he has devised, create a
natural vacuum effect: that draws the needed water back into the discs,
whose proper bearing function is thereby eventually normalized. Contrast this with the
dead-end, mechanistic "back surgery" that now consumes hundreds of millions of
dollars in surgeons fees and hospital costs every year.
Back pains are among the bodys many cries for water, from which Dr. Batmanghelidjs book
has appropriately taken its title. The horrific wheezing of an asthmatic, which is one of
the most embarrassing and distressing things anyone can witness, is similarly the body
crying for water. Dr. Batmanghelidj has demonstrated that asthma is due to the body's
natural histamines constricting the lungs to limit any further loss of water via the
breath. The person so afflicted is desperately dehydrated. In
the prison environment in Iran, adequate water provided a cure for asthma one of the
astonishing clinical results that first started Dr. Batmanghelidj thinking about the
medicinal power of water.
Dr. Batmanghelidj views the way hypertension is classically treated as "scientific
absurdity". The dehydrated body is desperately trying to hang on to its water volume.
Uncomprehending physicians intervene with diuretics and literally force more water out of
an already dehydrated body. The author gives lucid, comprehensible descriptions of the
exquisite hydraulic
design and engineering of the human body, and the diverse functions of the cells,
capillaries and membranes as they operate to compensate for dehydration.
If the body's many cries for water are ignored, as they are in contemporary America,
degenerative diseases are the inevitable consequence. A congress scrabbling to deal
financially with an avalanche of degenerative disease, is verification enough that the
time has come for a new medical paradigm.
Our typical regular readers of Borderlands will have no difficulty in understanding either
Dr. Batmanghelidjs book, or the stony response that he received on placing his findings
before the American Medical Association.
The book includes reproductions of his correspondence with the A.M.A. This reviewer
regards this book as the most important health book of the twentieth century, since its
content can directly benefit everybody at no cost and right now. Borderlanders should not
only secure these benefits for themselves and their families, but also should make them
more widely
known.
Dr. Batmanghelidj is making a Herculean effort to pass the blessings of his work into the
lives of all human beings. He is not permitting his work to be sequestered or
short-circuited by reactionary orthodoxy. He will need all the help that we can give
him.
Your Body's Many Cries for Water is now available from Borderland
Sciences for $14.95. Include $3.00 (US) shipping and handling for the first copy and
$1.00 for each additional copy. California residents please add sales tax of
7.25%.
Complete ordering details at this URL: http://www.borderlands.com/orderz.htm
"Every improvement in the human condition has come from someone pushing against the
tide and speaking out, no matter what the consequences. That person is within all of us.
Rebellion and the desire for positive change is at the heart of the human spirit." David
Icke...