|
|
|
|
An alert on the Natural News website took us to an extremely long and interesting interview with Dr F Batmanghelidj, an Iranian doctor now practicing in the US who believes that dehydration lies at the root of most chronic and acute 21st century maladies. Dr Batmanghelidj, who trained at Fettes College in Scotland and St Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, was working in Iran when the Iranian Revolution broke out in 1979. He spent two years and seven months in the infamous Evin Prison as a political prisoner, where he discovered the healing powers of water. With no medications at his disposal he treated fellow prisoners with crippling peptic ulcers with two glasses of water every three hours which enabled them to remain pain free. During his time in Evin Dr Batmanghelidj researched the relationship of dehydration and bleeding peptic ulcer disease, the report of his findings being published as the editorial of the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology in June 1983. On his release Dr Batmanghelidj escaped to the US where he has continued to live, research, practise and write books about the healing powers of waters. To find out more about him, his ideas and his books visit his site at www.WaterCure.com. In extremely simplistic terms Dr Batmanghelidj believes that most people are permanently dehydrated, the more so the older they get. If we become dehydrated, our immune system will cease to function properly with serious consequences in terms of autoimmune, allergic, viral etc disease. Moreover, histamine is a water regulator so the pain and other medical symptoms which result from histamine release and for which anti histamine are normally prescribed, is in fact the pain of dehydration and can be relieved by rehydration - or drinking water. If you wish to drink more water and are concerned about the quality of the water you drink you might want to real Sarah Merson's review of water filtration methods.
June 2011 A further piece in Natural News suggests that there may be a direct relation a hip between de-hydration and allergy: "Histamine (which sets off allergic reactions in the body) is an important neurotransmitter that primarily regulates thirst mechanism for increased water intake. It also establishes a system of water rationing for the available water in the drought-stricken body." When the body is dehydrated, histamine production increases significantly. Histamine's primary job is to make sure that the available water in the body is preserved for the most vital functions. Thus, increased histamine is not the problem; it's one of the body's ingenious adaptations for survival." The article goes on to suggest that dehydration also negatively affects antibody production so that a dehydrated body 'lacks the antibodies to adequately neutralise the allergen'. Click here for the full article.
First published in February 2010, updated in June 2011
|
