Sweet is this human life...

As the new millennium approached, there was optimistic talk of the ‘Dawn of the Age of Aquarius’, a golden era when everything was going to get better. Now, less than five short years later, floods, air crashes, fuel protests, earthquakes, foot and mouth, September 11th, bitter bloody war, heightened global tension, recession, are turning this into yet another frustrated pipe-dream. Yet it need not be so.

The secret we must understand is that this New Age will not happen of itself: we must want for it, believe in it, make it happen. It shall not be, unless we make it so.

Look what we have to celebrate from the recent past. The last 150 years or so have brought us remarkable benefits, and we can use these to take full advantage of the myriad opportunities this new century offers. Basically, water management, quality education, and better nutrition have accounted for a vastly improved quality of life. Average life expectancy from birth across the UK is now 75years for men and 80years for women, whereas in 1850, either sex would have been pleased to survive 40years.

True, we had several horrible, bloody wars in that time too, but look at the scientific advances the necessities of those times invented. Look especially at communication, for this is the mother of the information age in which we find ourselves today. Armed with information and education, there should be no stopping the advancement of the human race to unlimited goals.

Yet, there is one dark cloud on the horizon, a very dark cloud, a cloud growing bigger day by day, fed by fear, greed, vested interest, and exploitation of the subservience bred into the general public since mediaeval days. This is the spectre of disease, poor health, and even poorer health-care. We must vaporize this dark threat and let in the sunshine to illuminate our future.

No-one would deny the unstinting dedication, long day after long day day, year upon year, of the vast majority of nurses, doctors, and auxiliary staff delivering loving service to the sick, the needy, the disabled, the disadvantaged, the impaired, the tired, the wounded of our society in this country and many others. These ‘good Samaritans’ constantly give of themselves with open hand, usually to total strangers: may we all be eternally grateful to them. They are the shining light striving to dispel the darkness of others’ bigotry, self-seeking, and arrogance. Alas, they can only work with the tools they are given.

In spite of a £65billion budget, we in the UK have a Health Service constantly in crisis, publishing massaged and meaningless statistics about everything but getting people better; waiting lists to see your GP so long, you forget what you wanted to see him about; trillions of pounds spent annually on research. Yet we have not significantly cut the incidence of one major disease in fifty years. And perhaps we’ve invented a few more.

Despite remarkable achievements in some aspects of orthodox medicine, we are no nearer overcoming many of our major afflictions than we were at the turn of last century. Cancer will affect at least one in three of us in our lifetime, and already is responsible for 26% of all deaths in Scotland annually. Someone in Britain has a heart attack every two minutes, and coronary heart disease accounts for 22% of all Scottish deaths, with strokes responsible for another 12%. Diabetes, autism, neuro-degenerative diseases like Alzheimers, MS, Parkinson’s are on the increase. Other ailments, like rheumatics, arthritis, may not grab the headlines but cause years of suffering.

Then there are the ‘accident’ figures. The Journal of the American Medical Association (July, 2000) reported statistics showing that Western healthcare is now the third leading cause of death in the US, inflicting some 225,000 deaths per annum.; some 200,000 deaths are recorded per annum in China through the use of inappropriate medicine and one in four Australians who enter hospital come out worse than they went in – if they come out at all. At least 40,000 per year are dying from these causes in the UK. Indeed, the mortality figures above are most likely under-stated, since many more die from ‘allopathy’ (medical treatment by drugs) -the ‘side effects’ of  ‘treatment’ by drugs, radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, - and are classified as pneumonia, natural causes, even, I suppose, AIDS.

Many doctors themselves are acutely aware of the gravity of the situation and recognise that the treatment of diseases such as cancer, heart disease, AIDS and diabetes by conventional, drug-based medical theory is woefully unsuccessful. Moreover, we, the general public are experiencing this disaster on a very personal level, as friends and family members become ill and die from diseases and health conditions that are increasingly becoming recognised as entirely preventable.

So, what is a body to do? There is no doubt that the best way to avoid being run over by a train, is to keep off the railway track. So it is with health. Don’t get ill in the first place.  Prevention will always be better than cure.

There is well documented evidence of societies even today living long, active lives virtually disease free; we should learn from these. Not that I’m suggesting we should all rush off to live with them in their mountain fastnesses – God forbid! Look what we did to the Eskimo – but, contrasting their way of life and robust health, with our own sorry state ought to tell us something.

The human body is a wondrous and delicate mechanism and despite what they would have us believe, the medical ‘experts’ have very little idea of how it works in practice. Almost without exception, each new medical ‘discovery’ quickly degenerates into theory of ‘what we believe happens…’. Truth is, the body mechanism is so complex, but our scientists only track one tiny step of an intricate movement, and seize on this to base their theories – and unfortunately so often their treatments – with no appreciation of the whole beautiful, flowing, meaningful dance.  

The Hunza in Northern Pakistan, the Georgians and Azerbaijanis of the Caucasus Mountains, the Vilcabamba of Ecuador, the people of the Altiplano above Lake Titicaca, Peru, should be our models. These peoples regularly live well beyond a hundred years, not frail or shut away in dribbling misery as many of our septuagenarians are, but working in the fields, creating and rearing children, enjoying a full and active life. They are living medical evidence. They are the results of the very best medical science we could observe.

So does it not make sense to bring into our lives as many of the positive elements of their lifestyle as our ‘first world’ environment will allow? And the other side of the coin is to discard those elements which do us no good.

Whilst this is serious and important work, it is not too difficult. We said earlier that we had education and information to help us, all we need to add is awareness and a change of attitude. In our 21st century society we face attack on all sides from pollutants, and these we must discard or avoid as much as possible. Our scientists and ‘expert’ advisers will assure us that these things are all safe and ‘within tolerance’: how often have they been proved in error before? Do the mountain peoples we envy process their food as we do? Do they smother their skins with petrochemical waste?

We must become more aware of potentially harmful additives and treatments to our water, our food, our cosmetics, our cleaning materials. Long term, as a race the pressure we exert will get these practices stopped, and on a day by day basis as individuals, we should begin right now by choosing to avoid them.

This series of articles will help identify some of the dangers we dice with in our daily lives, and point the way to simple steps we can take towards a full, rewarding living. We shall begin by gaining a working understanding of this wondrous vehicle leased to us for our journey here on earth.

           
Life is a magical journey.

All life is about growth and development. Our purpose in life is to enhance, and contribute to universal growth. For our journey we have been given a wondrous vehicle, bristling with the latest technology. To fulfil our purpose, we must maintain our vehicle, our body, in best condition: it must not fail when we’ve barely started out, nor should its ills preoccupy us so much we cannot appreciate the scenery.

Even without a manual, most of us could climb into any brand new vehicle and make it go. But if we knew a little more about it, could we make it ‘go’ a little better, a little longer? Let’s take a deeper look.

Without air, we could not live. Our lungs inhale over two million litres of air every day, without a conscious thought on our part. They are large enough to cover a tennis court. They force oxygen into the blood.

Your blood is a liquid organ on a 60,000 mile journey, driven by the heart which beats about    3 billion times in an average lifetime. In one hour, your heart produces enough energy to raise almost one ton of weight one yard from the ground. Every day your heart pumps a total of 8,000 gallons of blood 12,000 miles through your body. In that time, you will lose - and replace - 200 billion red blood cells. Kidneys clean your blood. Each minute, about a quart of blood passes through your kidneys and comes out clean. In a lifetime, your kidneys will wash more than 1 million gallons of blood. The liver is often called the body's chemical factory. Scientists have counted over 500 functions which the liver performs.

Your skin is the largest organ of your body. In one square inch of skin there are four yards of nerve fibres, 1300 nerve cells, 100 sweat glands, 3 million cells, and 3 yards of blood vessels. The average adult is made up of 100 trillion cells, and 50 million of these will have died and been replaced with others, all while you have been reading this sentence. The tiniest cell in the human body is actually the male sperm, while the female egg is the largest. Is that wondrous, or what?

Although your bones seem hard, inside they are in fact light and spongy; they are about three quarters water.  There are over 600 muscles in the body, and we exercise at least 30 of them when we smile. We do not know – yet – the purpose of the muscles in the outer ear, and the external muscles that move the eyes are the strongest muscles in the human body for the job that they have to do. They seem to be 100 times more powerful than they need to be.

Your eyes are the most complex organs you possess apart from your brain. They are composed of more than two million working parts and can process 36,000 bits of information every hour. Our eyes can distinguish up to one million colour surfaces and take in more information than the largest telescope known to man. Under the right conditions, they can discern the light of a candle at a distance of 14 miles. In a normal life-span, your eyes will bring you almost 24 million images of the world around you; they can instantaneously set in motion hundreds of muscles and organs in your body.

We literally see the world “with fresh eyes” every morning.  The first time we open our eyes, the top layer of our vision sense receptors is simply scorched away. Your eyes contribute towards 85% of your total knowledge, and utilise 65% of all the pathways to the brain. The eye is the only part of the human body that can function at 100% ability at any moment, day or night, without rest. Your eyelids need rest, the external muscles of your eyes need rest, the lubrication of your eyes requires replenishment, but your eyes themselves never need rest.

The human brain is by far the largest user of energy in the body.  Although a mere 2% of body weight, it consumes a whopping one-fifth of the energy produced by all we eat and drink. Our brain is more complex than the most powerful computer: currently the world's most sophisticated computer is only as complicated as a rat's brain. There are more connections in your brain than there are stars in universe. In the brain there are a million million individual neurons or nerve cells. If each neuron can interact with up to 100,000 other neurons, then the brain's potential for pattern forming (the number of possible permutations) is a massive number which, written in normal text, would stretch for 10.5 million kilometres! In other words, your brain has an almost infinite capacity for storing information.

It works at quite an accelerated pace too, firing electrical impulses at 250 miles-per-hour along 45 miles of nerves. Yet, it cannot process a negative command or statement: when a child is told, “Don’t spill your drink" shehe has to actually think of spilling it, before shehe can take the necessary action not to do it.

Now, we’ve skated through some of the specifications, highlighted a few of the features of this amazing and versatile range of vehicles. We should examine how to get the best out of them. How you look after your vehicle, what journeys you undertake is entirely up to you. But lack of at least simple care and maintenance, will make the journey more difficult, and may frustrate it altogether. You do not need to be a skilled motor mechanic to select the right type and quality of fuel, lubricants, coolant and hydraulic liquids, tyres, or to avoid hazards when driving, storing and cleaning your car.

Your brain is involved in every single thing your body does, and it is totally under your control. What you do with it, how you treat your body is your choice, no-one else’s. Of course we need to consider the advice of learned men and women who have spent years studying and researching. But more and more even the popular media advises us that there is conflict, varied opinions, confusion among these ‘experts’. Moreover, peeping between the ever-widening cracks, we begin to catch glimpses of hidden agendas, sinister vested interest, perhaps motivating – and financing - these ‘expert’ pronouncements.  Hold on! This is your body they are experimenting on! This is your future they’re mortgaging to fund their increased profits!

To regain control will involve subjecting your long-held beliefs about your body, fostered by a century of precocious scientific assumption, to scrutiny from a new vantage point. Instead of some (inferior) organism to be dispassionately dissected in the biology lab, your body is the most remarkable neuro-electro-chemical device, created by a far higher intelligence, with a myriad hidden and not understood processes, but which at all times is subject to the mental powers of its inhabitant – you.

To start with, there is one simple action which above all others is key to our bodies’ performance. This most important of all habits is essential to well-being and long life, is easy to adopt, and the material required is abundantly provided by Nature, in most cases for free.

The Water of Life.




© Neil Haddon 2005