Your Body’s Many Cries
for Water
by Feyedoon Batmanghelidj
M.D.
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 Body’s 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 wore 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. Batmanghelidj’s
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. Batmanghelidj’s 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 America’s 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 body’s 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 Alzheimer’s
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
body’s many cries for water, from which Dr. Batmanghelidj’s 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. Batmanghelidj’s
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.
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