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.
To order any of the above books, please refer to our Research Catalog or contact us directly.
