Holistic Health

 

Holistic Health

-                                                                                                                Dr. B.M.Hegde

 

 Has the medicine prolonged Human Life?

It’s been around nine lakh years for Humans to get evolved and now we’ve had 50 thousand generations on this planet. Medicine came into existence 500 years ago. Most of it got into use in the last 100 years. Modern medicine is just 50 years old. How did the previous humans survive?

In the days without medicine, People who survived childhood most commonly lived 68 to 78 years.  More than 10,000 years later , the numbers look eerily similar. The average person can expect to live 71.4 years, says the World Health Organization based on 2016 data. Moreover the centenarians were there even thousand years ago.

 

Money brought diseases.

Before money came into human life there were very few diseases. Medicine is more of business. Medicine is run by industry and Industry wants profit. Money accompanied Greed, hatred, tensions along with it. There is a study called, “Failure of scientific medicine – The Innu community study”.


Innu is a race in Canada. This people had no touch with reality in the present world. They didn’t bother to know what’s happening in the rest part of their world. The Innu community never used “I” or “mine”. Instead they used “We” or “Ours”. In a jovial way Mr. Hegde says the difference between ‘I’ and ‘we’ is “I” is for illness and “We” is for wellness. Innu’s had no disease in their recorded history. No hospital, No Doctor.  They had no complaints at all. In 1732 a company called Williams came into their community and started a barter system. Things changed rapidly and today every Innu is a Canadian citizen and they now have all the diseases from common cold to cancer.

 

Medicine gets us out of trouble but it has added trouble that pops up later in our body system. “Though every illness doesn’t have a pill, but every pill has an illness.”  Every single pain killer has potential to cause heart attack in few years of regular use. A pain killer ‘Diclofenac’ is banned everywhere in the world except India. That’s lethal. So Pain killers are to be taken only after the advice of a doctor.

 

There are two terrible acts associated with the entry of every drug into the market. NNT(Number needed to treat) and ADR(Adverse drug reaction).  One can find the NNT of any drug on internet. A higher NNT indicates that treatment through that drug is less effective. A cholesterol lowering drug has NNT of 300, which means one has to risk the lives of 300 sample people before it enters the market. BP control drugs have NNT as 850. We should search for the NNT of the drugs that we regularly use.

 Medicine taken to the market has deviated the purpose. Medicine is not run by Doctors or science, it is run by industries. Medicine is hijacked. So take medicine when it is desperately needed that too after consulting a good doctor.

 Politics plays with Human lives

Ancel Keys, a researcher was given hefty amount to find out what’s the relation between eating food and heart disease? He did a study of 22 countries and plotted the data on x-y graph, just to find that there was no significant co–relation. But with $1lk taken, how can he say that there is no relation?

Without telling anyone he reduced the data to six countries, viz. Australia, Japan, USA, UK, Germany and one more. The study showed some resemblance of straight line. He came up with a point that Cholesterol causes Heart attack. This ghost of cholesterol has been going around the world for 40 donkey years.

Now American government has taken a ‘U’ turn saying higher cholesterol is better. The irony is that the government knew it in the beginning itself that the research was wrong.

 Only 10% of the cholesterol comes from the food. The remaining is produced by the body. The body produces it whenever it wants. So even if you eat grass, your body will still have 90% cholesterol. If you reduce your cholesterol by drugs your body will produce more and the reason why body produces it is to protect you. Bile acids that helps digestion of food is produced by cholesterol. . The bad cholesterol can be controlled by maintaining proper life style.  A person who is tensed, scared, worried or has hatred most of the times has high chances of generating this bad cholesterol that causes health disorders in the long run.

B.M. Hegde once gave a speech in the Boston University depicting the point that the Heart disease and fats do not have good co-relation. They aren’t well connected. He was threatened by the lobby there and he was asked to run away.

 

Health and Reports:

How was JP Morgan chase bank formed?

Water supply to the New York City wasn’t there in the early ninetieth century. Aaron Burr who was the Mayor of the city and later became the 3rd president of the US was given grant to supply clean drinking water to NY. Aaron drew water from a putrid pond and diverted the million dollars grant to start a bank called JP Morgan chase. Millions of residents in NY died because of cholera by drinking the putrid water that was coming from the toilets of nearby places. Politics is the play of rich people!


 Reports should not scare us

Mr.Hegde says,” Take five blood samples of a person from her/his  five figures at an interval of 1 or 2 minutes. All the five reports will show different Sugar figures. If all the five reports are the same then the patient is highly diabetic or a dead person. There is no big problem in variances in measurements. Let Doctor decide that. The variance in reports is because Health is a natural chaos. Everything goes up and down frequently. It’s called Healthy chaos.

 

Staying happy and confident is the best way of staying internally fit!

A person who has a grim face all the time has a very unhealthy heart. He/ She has higher chances of getting heart attack, than a person who is happy most of the times. That’s one of the reason apart from the other reasons why children have very less chance of heart attack. Kids give a smile to everyone. 

The trillions of cells in our body get confused, whenever we hate someone. As a result the cells start hating one another in our body and initiates a slow disorder that one day creeps up to become a bigger disorder. So if you hate someone, get tensed, get scared you are creating problems for your own health.

“Don’t get and forget, instead give and forgive.” This makes you healthy.

“It is not just what you eat, kills you but it is also what eats you, kills you.”

 

Quantum healing

Quantum healing is a pseudo-scientific mixture of ideas which purportedly draw on quantum mechanics, psychology, philosophy, and neurophysiology.  Quantum healing is what happens when your own volition can make it happen during the oscillation between matter and energy to rebuild the damaged part. This needs that level of concentration when one is very tranquil. This is where the meditation and other such activities have therapeutic value. Mindful meditation can even lengthen the telomeres which otherwise shorten with age.

 

 Placebo and Nocebo:

If Placebo treatment heals you, the Nocebo effects creates problems. Nocebo effect is when negative thinking impacts health.

London University, Cambridge University, Hamburg University and Oxford University did a research on “What role do drugs play?”

Morphia ( or morphine) a painkiller was given to a patient and the patient was not told about it. It was told that it is an ordinary drug. The patient did not find any favorable change after taking Morphia. The same patient was given salt water saline some time later and it was told to him that it is the pain killer Morphia. The patient got cured. 

Mr.Bingle, the prof of medicine in the oxford universities did a brain mapping to find out the mystery. He did FMRI (functional MRI).It tells you what the brain is doing. What was found was interesting. When the patient was told that the drug in the saline isn’t morphia, his brain slept. But when the salt water was given and the patient was made to believe that it was Morphia, he got cured. The reason was that the fore brain produced lot of opioids that were powerful than Morphia.   

Who/What cured the pain? The patient’s own fore brain. The doctor’s role was to make the patient believe him. So a good doctor commands, and does not demand. Why some people say, “I get healed quickly if I get the treatment from XYZ doctor? It is her/his self-belief! 

Mind is the best healer. Off course surgery can’t be done by brain and Quantum healing cannot be a substitution to everything. But it is an absolutely magical way for the recovery and it is a good preventive measure. So good doctors need to play well with the mindsets of the patients. Most of the street side quacks cure the patients by Placebo effects.

Who is good doctor? The one who practices Allopathy? Homeopathy? No! A good doctor practices Sympathy!

 

 The psychology of believing other.

For people to believe others, three things matter, 

who said that? 

How is it said? 

What is said? 

For most people the third part is the least important. 

Rabindranath Tagore didn’t go to school. Actually he quit school after class one. Indians did not appreciate his poem in the beginning. An Irish man, William yeats who had a Noble prize for his poem in 1911 found the poem written by Tagore. He was impressed. Wrote a letter Tagore and with Tagore’s permission the poem was published and then Mr. Tagore got a Nobel Prize for his poem.

 

Two things to for healthy human life

Enthusiasm to work and

Enthusiasm to become compassionate.

Healthy mind is enthusiasm to work.

Like Arthritis there is a disorder that Mr. Hegde calls ‘Grudgeitis.’ Misunderstanding is a big reason for hatred. See an elephant from the front, you see five legs because the trunk looks like a leg, whereas your friend who looks at the same elephant from side view disagrees. He might see three legs.

 

No one is completely healthy

Health is not absence of disease. The moment you go to a doctor, you become a patient. There is no well person as per the alma ata definition of science in our world. Norton Hadley has written a book, “The last well person”.  The medical reports make you abnormal.

There is a difference between Normal and Average. We equate them. In India the average height of a person is 5.4ft with 0.2ft  as the standard deviation. So the range is 5.2ft to 5.6 ft. Do we consider a person with 5.1 ft or a 6 ft person as abnormal just because she/he is outside the range? The same way if your reports show the score outside the average range doesn’t always mean you are abnormal. You are just not in the average range! The BP that is normal for me may not be normal for my friend. Our biggest non science of western medicine is “ we have one size fits all” policy”. On these line there is a book by Steven Milloy - Science without sense (about stats)

In this book there is Stats process fallacy pointed out called ‘Texas sharp shooting’. One ordinary person shoots bullets on a wall. The statistician goes to the wall and finds some bullet holes closely created by the shooter after the aimless shooting.  Somewhere she/he finds closely associated bullet marks and that becomes “Normal” or the Bulls Eye.

 

All Mr. Hedge says in short, is to understand our body. Our mind is the biggest doctor. Our body has lot of natural medicine powers.  If you notice any disorder beyond your understanding or control, go to a Doctor. Doctor is your friend and a doctor with sympathy can be a God!

 

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, Chairman of the State Health Society's Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former Vice Chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for Cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London. Prof Dr Hegde can be contacted at hegdebm@gmail.com.)

 

Disclaimer

The objective of this blog is to preserve the good points that Dr. Hegde has stated. In the process of doing this I have mixed my experience, discretion and thinking to land on a point.

 

Vinay Wagh

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