Body
Articles
Immune Rehabilitation
Today, we face many health challenges; among these the predominant ones are:
- Unhealthy eating habits
- Hereditary disorders
- Changed lifestyles
- Sedentary living/work life,
- Stress
- Antibiotic overuse - Anti-microbial resistance, - occupational hazards & pressures
- Pollution
- Electromagnetic Radiation
- Return of old germs
- New & Emerging diseases, etc..
All these lead to the following factors,
1. Not enough or no intake of certain nutrients or micronutrients & other vitamins & minerals.
2. No or little circulation of these nutrients to our organs by our body.
3. Improper excretion of toxins & waste from our body.
4. Threats – internal and external in the form of infections, inflammation makes us sick.
Now let us look at these factors in detail and understand how they lead us to diseases and ailments.
1. Lack of nutrition: These days we mainly eat packaged food, outside food, which is high in carbohydrates, fats, sugar & salt such as chips, sweets, pizza, white bread, fries! For people eating vegetables, if you cook them too much, all their vitamins get destroyed. We should eat as much as possible raw vegetables, half-cooked, or lightly stir-fried that way nutrition is not destroyed completely.
Eating too much carbohydrates & fats such as cakes, pastries, noodles, etc. can put a lot of load on our liver, intestines & reduces their strength & functioning, causing all diseases. The liver is the starting point for most of the diseases!
These days most of the vegetables & fruits are grown with very strong chemicals & pesticides & these pesticides not only kill the nutrition of these vegetables, but they also create diseases in your body & reduce immunity.
Lack of nutrition will affect all organs & can create problems like bone pains, diabetes, high or low blood pressure, liver problems, kidney problems, heart problems, etc.
Millennia ago Hippocrates stated, "Let thy medicines be thy foods and thy foods be thy medicines." Using this broader definition of nutrients we can construct the following “nutrient vs time” chart that shows us how deficiency or non-availability of certain important nutrients/micronutrients can impact our body’s health condition.
2. Poor absorption & blood Circulation: Eating nutrition is just not sufficient; you need to circulate that nutrition in your body to all organs. This will happen only if your blood circulation is good. It is also possible that your blood has too much fats dissolved in it or glued to the wall of arteries, blocking blood circulation, so you may need to address that problem as well! Poor absorption will cause issues like weight gain, fatigue & less energy, lack of concentration, all the above diseases mentioned in lack of nutrition.
3. Poor absorption due to toxin build-up: Now assuming, your blood circulation is working properly, but it is possible that there are toxins in your body. Toxins enter into our body via air, water, skin or that are produced after food digestion in your body are not getting expelled from your body via perspiration, digestive tract via urine & stool, via nose as mucus. These toxins build up at all organs blocking their nutrient absorption, so even after eating good nutrition & even after some mild exercise; your cells still are not getting the nutrition they should get! Toxin build-up will cause the following problems: skin problems, hair fall, weight gain, weakening of organs in the body as they are not getting nutrition, all diseases mentioned in lack of nutrition.
4. Threats – internal and external in the form of infections, inflammation that destabilizes our immune system and makes it weak: Our body has a built-in defense mechanism, immune system. It’s a system that works n its own to fend off or neutralize disease toxins and set up a healing environment for the body. It is this quality of being a part of us, yet not under our conscious control, that is the great power of immune response. It is also the dilemma of medical scientists as they struggle to get control of a system that is all-pervasive and yet, in the end, impossible to completely understand. Maintaining strong immune defenses in today’s world is not easy
People who have a weak immune system do not have enough supply of white blood cells, killer cells, T cells to fight with infections and they get sick. With the help of anti-biotic, those infections can be resolved. But the use of anti-biotic makes your immune system even weaker, as it becomes lazy & kills all healthy bacteria in your intestines which are responsible for food absorption & vitamin production hence slowly creating a deficiency of important vitamins in your body causing serious diseases in future. Even if you eat a lot of fruits & vegetables they will not get converted into vitamins & minerals as a delicate balance of your body has been disturbed!
This is reinforced with an enlightening presentation of the proper roles and functions of nutrients and drugs that are graphically represented by Drs. Oganava and McCausland in their, Hierarchy of Health Chart,
In the Hierarchy of Health, the distance between health and disease is divided into three stages: Adaptation, Disadaptation, and Predisease.
• Adaptation is the condition when the body successfully adjusts to the physical, emotional, and microbial stresses of life.
• Disadaptation occurs when the stress is excessive or when our ability to adapt is diminished. Some examples of Disadaptation would include the deposition of plaque in the arteries as an adaptation to chronic inflammatory stress. This type of adaptation can be likened to buying on credit. It gets us through today but results in a bigger bill with interest in the future.
• Predisease is when we are not sick, but we are very susceptible to illness.
This chart shows us how we slide down from health state to disease state due to various challenges that we are about to see.
Diseases can be Infectious, Non – infectious in the form of lifestyle disorders, metabolic disorders, Degenerative diseases, overactive/underactive /autoimmune diseases, common, acute or chronic diseases
A disease only means that some part of our body is unwell and required immediate attention as some of its functions are impaired.
The body doesn’t know the difference between this disease or that disease, name, and disease type is only for our understanding and not for the body.
As we have seen diseases never appear overnight, it gives enough indications in the form of pain, swelling, irritation, etc. as a result we may experience difficulty in carrying out our day to day activities.
Having got afflicted with diseases, disorders, we deal with them in the following ways,
Conventional medicines only treat the symptoms of disease rather than addressing the root cause of the disease itself.
Elimination of the Symptom is NOT the same as Elimination of the Disease If there is a fever, lower it, if inflammation is present provide steroids to remove it and of course if Western Medicine thinks a bacteria or virus is present or doesn’t know what is wrong, a dose of antibiotics is provided. This way of doing things can be effective in the immediate term, and important in life-threatening situations, but potentially devastating in the long term especially when over-used. This is called trading ACUTE disease for long-term CHRONIC disease, and it is one reason why so many of us are chronically ill today.
As a result, drugs allow you to feel better, at least temporarily, but your disease is actually getting worse! Drugs don’t help your body become healthy.
Conventional medicines may restore us to a pre-disease state but not to a health state
Being at Pre-disease state, the body struggles to maintain the balance between our physical activities/work and the internal functions to heal the bodily problems (disease/complications), as a result, we become vulnerable to issues like
- Relapse of illness
- Body weakness
- Short & long term effects of the medicines and the disease.
- Other issues
Being in the pre-disease state we manage/control the diseases with the help of medications, lifestyle changes, diet, exercise, etc. advantages of this is
we keep the disease under control, but the disadvantages are that we are vulnerable to two problems
1 - Side effects of the medications
2 - Long term complications of the disease progression, meaning this disease/disorder leading to other complications, for example in the case of diabetes,
chances of getting,
• Blindness - 25 times more
• Kidney failure - 17 times more
• Amputation of lower limb - 30 - 40 times more
• Heart attack - 2 - 4 times more
• Stroke [Paralysis] - 2 times more
Consequences of (Managing disease) staying in the Pre-disease state,
As we all know our happiness, prosperity, family, and relationships depend upon our health and well-being. Only when we are healthy we will be able to achieve our goals be it personal or professional, but are we healthy in the real sense?
The answer is a big NO, modern medical science, which has developed tremendously has given ‘years’ to life but not ‘health’ to life and that’s exactly the reason why we find the death rate decreased over the last century as we are able to manage diseases and postpone death with medicines. It is not that modern medicine has helped us to win over the diseases; it has only helped us to co-exist with diseases, with the imminent danger of the diseases and their short and long term effects acting on us at their will.
Here is the proof from the World Health Organization,
Lifestyle-related diseases are now killing more Indians than infectious ones. India's disease pattern has undergone a major shift over the past decade, says the World Health Organisation (WHO). Cardiovascular diseases will be the largest cause of death and disability in India by 2020, WHO says. It is estimated that the overall prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, ischemic heart diseases (IHD) and stroke is 62.47, 159.46, 37.00, and 1.54 respectively per 1,000 population of India.
Additionally, there are around 25 lakh cancer cases in India.
Calling it "an impending disaster for many countries - a disaster for health, for society and national economies," WHO director-general Dr.Margaret Chan said: "Chronic NCDs deliver a two-punch blow to development. They cause billions of dollars in losses of national income, and push millions of people below the poverty line, each and every year."
Based on what we have seen, conventional medicines helps us only to be in the pre-disease state (manage or control the diseases) where we learn to live with pain, fear of disease and its complications with the help of medicines and change ourselves to accommodate disease in our lives and forget what healthy living is all about.
In this setting, we are forced to rethink our overall approach to disease management and health & well-being. And this is possible only when we are able to restore our body back to the health state where we will be able to live healthily and be without the fear of disease or its complications as we will be able to prevent and protect ourselves from diseases or reverse diseases and stay healthy.
To achieve this we must learn how to stop doing the things that have caused the disease, and start doing the things that will rebuild our immune system, our first and last line of defense, so our immunity can get us well and keep us well as God designed it to do.
And this is what immune rehabilitation is all about.
Electromagnetic Radiation - The Reality