Water: For Health, For Healing, For Life
This book is not intended as a substitute for medical advice of physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in all matters relating to his or her health, and particularly in respect of any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.
Some of the material in this book originally appeared in
Your Body's Many Cries for Water,
which was first published in 1992 and updated in 1995.
Copyright © 2003 Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D.
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc., Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: June 2003
ISBN: 978-0-446-54937-0
The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Cover design by Brigid Pearson
Cover photo by Patrick J. LaCroix/Getty Images
Book design and text composition by L & G McRee
Contents
CHAPTER 1: WHERE DID MODERN MEDICINE GO WRONG?
CHAPTER 2: WATER—THE BIZARRE AND THE SIMPLE
CHAPTER 3: BASICS OF NEW MEDICINE FOR THE NEXT FEW THOUSAND YEARS
CHAPTER 4: WATER REGULATION OF A FETUS AND AN INFANT
CHAPTER 5: WHAT IS CHRONIC DEHYDRATION?
CHAPTER 6: NEWLY RECOGNIZED THIRST PERCEPTIONS
CHAPTER 7: THE PRIMARY DROUGHT-AND RESOURCE-MANAGEMENT PROGRAMS
CHAPTER 8: THE CRISIS CALLS OF THE BODY FOR WATER
CHAPTER 9: DEHYDRATION AND DISEASE
CHAPTER 10: DEHYDRATION AND BRAIN DAMAGE
CHAPTER 11: HORMONES AND DEHYDRATION
CHAPTER 12: THE WATER CURE: HOW MUCH WATER AND HOW OFTEN?
CHAPTER 13: MINERALS ARE VITAL
CHAPTER 14: OTHER ESSENTIALS FOR HEALTH AND HEALING
CONCLUSION: FOUR SIMPLE STEPS TO VIBRANT HEALTH
TURN ON THE TAP … AND REAP THE BENEFITS OF ONE OF THE GREATEST HEALTH DISCOVERIES OF ALL TIME!
Learn the crucial role water plays in these and many other conditions and ailments:
HEART DISEASE AND STROKE
—water is essential to help prevent clogging of arteries in the heart and brain
INFECTION
—water may increase the efficiency of the immune system to combat infections and cancer cells
DEPRESSION
—water helps the body naturally replenish its supply of the neurotransmitter serotonin
SLEEP DISORDERS
—water is needed for the production of nature's sleep regulator, melatonin
LACK OF ENERGY
—water generates electrical and magnetic energy in every body cell, providing a natural power boost
ADDICTION
—water can help eliminate addictive urges for caffeine, alcohol, and some drugs
OSTEOPOROSIS
—water is an aid to strong bone formation
LEUKEMIA AND LYMPHOMA
—water normalizes the blood-manufacturing systems that can aid in the prevention of many forms of cancer
ATTENTION DEFICIT
—a well-hydrated brain is continually energized to imprint new information in its memory banks.
WATER:FOR HEALTH, FOR HEALING, FOR LIFE
To Our Creator with Awe, Humility, Dedication, and Love
Also, dedicated to all who suffered because of our past limitations in medical knowledge.
“The worse sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.”
George Bernard Shaw, 1897
Altruism and selfishness are both characteristics and mechanisms of self-protection. Selfish traits compel us to self-indulge at the expense of others. When a society is made mostly of such people, a vicious circle of chaos will develop. Altruism, on the other hand, is the quality and product of unselfishness, prompting endeavors that benefit society and humankind, the survival and progress of which also serve the altruist.
This book is designed to serve society and all decent people in it who contribute to its integrity, advancement, health, wealth, and prosperity.
To medical maverick Professor Emeritus Howard Spiro, M.D., of Yale University. He was the first medical scientist to realize the merit of my clinical research and introduce it to Western medicine; he published my editorial article, “A New and Natural Method of Treatment of Peptic Ulcer Disease,” in his
Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology
in June 1983. His interest and encouragement gave me incentive to pursue my research to this date, the product of which is the information you have in your hands.
The information and recommendations on water intake presented in this book are based on training, personal experience, very extensive research, and other publications of the author on the topic of water metabolism of the body. The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use or the discontinuance of any medications as a form of treatment without the advice of an attending physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author, based on the most recent knowledge of microanatomy and molecular physiology, is only to offer information on the importance of water to well-being, and to help inform the public of the damaging effects of chronic dehydration to the body—from childhood to old age. This book is not intended as a replacement for sound medical advice from a physician. On the contrary, sharing of the information contained in this book with the attending physician is highly desirable. Application of the information and recommendations described herein are undertaken at the individual's own risk. The adoption of the information should be in strict compliance with the instructions given herein. No reader, and especially those with past history of major diseases and under professional supervision, or those with severe renal disease, should make use of the information contained herein without the supervision of their attending physician.
THE DAWN OF A NEW MEDICAL ERA
Only if you begin to suffer from a health problem that may eventually kill you will you begin to search high and low for an explanation and solution to your predicament. Until then, you cannot appreciate what an emotionally draining impact a doctor's visit and the pronouncement of his or her serious findings has on the life and soul of another person. Let us hope you or anyone you care for never confronts such a situation— which thousands face daily. The reason we have a health-care crisis in America today is because many diseases prematurely devastate and kill millions of people. At the same time, the health-care crisis costs us about $1.2 trillion in 2001, and it is predicted that this cost will increase by 11 percent every year.
It is true that we are scientifically the most advanced nation in the world and spend billions of dollars a year on medical research. If you look at any recently published medical textbooks, however, you will see page upon page of explanation about diseases that kill; yet when the authors of these books reach the point of having to shed light on the cause of the disease, they confess—“etiology unknown.” This means most doctors do not know the cause of the major diseases of the human body, yet society has given them license to prescribe various treatments that often do not benefit their patients, but can slowly and prematurely kill them. The good news is that this license is about to be withdrawn.
What you are about to read is new knowledge, and represents a new perspective within the science of physiology—not a form of science used by drug manufacturers, but the discipline of science that defines the way living tissues and organs within the body work
naturally.
This book deals with some important health problems and the cause and natural correction— cure—of these problems. When the cause and cure of any health problem becomes clear, the use of excessive language and tongue-twisting jargon becomes unnecessary. What you will read here is based on extensive clinical and scientific research. I have researched, studied, and written about the information in this book for more than twenty-two years, in addition to my medical training, which began in 1950, when I entered St. Mary's Hospital Medical School of London University.
The topic I am about to discuss is the physiological ramifications and metabolic complications of chronic unintentional dehydration as the primary cause of many serious diseases. Some say it is the greatest breakthrough in modern medicine.
This simple presentation about some of our modern health problems is an introduction to the eventual science and logic-based transformation of medicine all over the world. It is prepared with the immediate “shot-in-the-arm” needs of society in mind, particularly for the fifteen million asthmatic children whose parents urgently need to understand the cause of this disease and its simple, cost-free prevention and potentially lifesaving treatment.
WHERE DID MODERN MEDICINE GO WRONG?
The greatest tragedy in medical history in my opinion is the assumption that dry mouth is the only sign of the body's water needs. Based on this mistaken assumption, modern medicine has made three other confounding mistakes that have cost society dearly. Let us look at these four mistaken assumptions.
1. The whole structure of modern medicine is built on the pitifully flawed premise that
dry mouth is the only sign of dehydration.
This false premise is responsible for the lack of understanding about various painful health problems that result in premature death to many millions of people. They suffer because they do not know they are seriously thirsty. Modern “science-based” medicine is structured upon the simple dry mouth mistake that became established many years ago. In 1764, Albrecht von Haller, a German, first claimed dry mouth as a sign of thirst. In 1918, Walter Bradford Cannon, an English doctor, supported Haller's views; since he was an influential person, his views became fashionable and are reflected in accepted scientific literature to this day. Frenchman Moritz Schiff, however, had claimed in 1867 that thirst is a general sensation: “It is no more a local sensation than hunger.” We now know that Haller and Cannon were wrong— but since theirs were the views that took root in the infrastructure of medicine, the same mistake has been passed on from one generation of medical students to another until the present day. This traditional flaw in the scientific understanding of the human body's water regulation altered the path of medicine. Schiff understood the human body better.
Actually, dry mouth is not a sign to rely on. The human body uses a different logic: To be able to chew and swallow food, and to facilitate and lubricate this function, ample saliva is produced, even if the rest of the body is short of water. In any case, water is too important to the body to signal its shortage only through the experience of a dry mouth. The human body has many other sophisticated signals to indicate when it is short of water. The body can suffer from deep dehydration without showing a dry mouth. Dehydration produces severe symptoms, even to the point of causing life-threatening crises. Modern medicine has confused these symptoms of internal, localized droughts and has identified them as different diseases. As a result, toxic medications are prescribed to treat “diseases” rather than the dehydration.
Dry mouth is one of the very last indicators of dehydration of the body. By the time dry mouth becomes an indicator of water shortage, many delicate functions of the body have been shut down and prepared for deletion. This is exactly how the aging process is established—through a loss of enzyme functions. A dehydrated body loses sophistication and versatility. One example is juvenile diabetes, in which the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas are sacrificed as a result of persistent dehydration.