“Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice.”

Amarthya Sen, Nobel Laureate.





Illness and wellness are two sides of the same coin. Man is born with all the necessary in-built repair mechanisms to correct most, if not all, deviations in health and go on as long as he/she lives. “Do not try to live here for ever, you will certainly not succeed” said Bernard Shaw. He couldn’t be more accurate scientifically. All our efforts to remain healthy should not aim at the impossible state of immortality. This repair mechanism, referred to earlier, is the basis of our immune system. However, a holistic look at man’s existence on this planet gives us an idea of the role played by man’s genes and environment, both of which are supervised by man’s consciousness. In short, most illnesses start in our minds only to grow in the body, aided and abetted by the fertilizers like tobacco, alcohol, wrong food habits, and pollution in our environment; of course, modulated by our genes which, in turn, depend on the environment and the mind for their penetrance, as shown in the diagram below.



(figure 1).









MIND













ENVIRONMENT BODY GENES.











ILLNESSES









Consequently, a holistic approach to healthy life style will have to look into all these aspects of human life. Reductionistic ideas of life style management where one or two of the above mentioned aspects are targeted will not bear fruit in the long run, although it might look fashionable in the beginning depending on how it is sold in these days of heavy advertisement. Correcting the body defects, like bypassing blocked vessels alone, does not change the overall outlook. Minor changes in the initial state of an organism might not hold good as time evolves in a dynamic human organism. It might even be counter productive as there could be the famous “butterfly effect” of physicist Edward Lorenz of weather predictions fame! Extremist views about drastic changes in diet also would meet the same fate for the same scientific reasons. The bija mantra should be moderation in all aspects to have a salutary effect in the end.



Reductionism is the curse that medical science has inherited from the natural sciences of the 12th Century European Universities. Medicine has not kept pace with physics which changed direction in the early part of the last Century to follow the path of quantum mechanics. The latter with its understanding of the human consciousness, would be ideally suited to understand human physiology. The mind-body divide of the Cartesian res congitans and res extensa has already done enough damage to the progress of medical science. Holistic science of fractals, chaos, and non-linear mathematics would give respectability and credibility to medical research in the future. This would necessitate us to look at human physiology, in health and disease, through the holistic glass.



Human Mind:



Since all ills originate in the mind, time has come to think of keeping the mind healthy to have good bodily health. How to keep the mind clean? Modern medical research has already thrown enough light on the role of the mind in major killer diseases like heart attacks and cancer et cetera. Depression seems to be the major risk factor for cancer, depression and, most importantly, hostility has come out as the leading risk factors for myocardial infarction: anger is leading others in the race to get the credit for brining on haemorrhagic stroke. Be that as it may, how do we alter this mental state? There have been attempts to alter the mental states of depression etc using drugs with questionable change in the risk status.



Indian Ayurveda, the science of life, which has existed for “times out of mind” has understood the mind at various levels of development (evolution) and has the right advice to change the mental states for better. The right science of Yoga is said to be the right solution. Mind has five levels e.g.: manus, budhi, chitta, purusha, and ishwara. Man could evolve to higher levels of the mind by his/her effort. Up until the level of chitta man’s ego does not alter the mental state of universal compassion. It is the ego at the level of the chitta that makes man unhappy and brings sorrow in its wake.

It is at this level Yoga (chitta vritti nirodhaha yogaha) is said to be very effective. In short, true Yoga makes the mind to go back to the universal compassion stage of mind of a child, where even the immune system is now known to get a shot in its arm.



One can not get to this stage by doing various body contortions, (aasanaas) sold in the west by nearly forty three different schools of “so called” Yoga. Unfortunately none of them profess the true Patanjali Yoga that transforms the devil in man into his true divine self. One has to practice this always and not the half hour of circus. Bhagavad-Gita, the essence of Indian wisdom, proclaims that if one were to become a true Yogi, one automatically changes his breathing rhythm to that of praanaayaama, the be all and end all of a healthy life style. We have been working for the last three decades to scientifically validate the good effects of praanaayaama on the cardiovascular system.



The Heart Rate Variability (HRV), an indicator of heart health, is the yardstick used in these studies. This concept is based on the scientific fact that in the dynamic Universe, as in any dynamic system like the human body, the most dominant rhythm sub serves all other less dominant rhythms. This is called “mode-locking” in physics. Breathing being the most dominant human rhythm, heart and other organs are mode locked to breathing. If one knows how to have healthy breathing pattern his other organs become healthy too. The healthy sinus arrhythmia of a child that disappears with man ageing and becoming selfish is the sign of good health in a child. Our study has gone a long way in proving this. If one could fill the mind with universal altruistic love there will be no place for negative thoughts in the mind at all.



Our Diet:



Most of the advice that we get about our diet from the existing “scientific” literature is unscientific, to say the least. The essence of healthy living is moderation in food intake. There must be a wide choice of foods in the diet. Vegetarian food is healthier since man basically is a vegetarian. Five to six small meals a day would be ideal. The meals must get smaller as the day goes and the supper must be the smallest. Of the six, three could be fruit meals only. Fat is an essential part of our daily intake but must be kept below 20% of the total daily intake. Other than mother’s milk the next best fat in food should be coconut (or other palm) oil. Deep frying anything is not advisable. The western myth of cholesterol is only a business proposition AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HUMAN NUTRITION, in the words of a famous chemist. If one has a disease called familial hyper-cholesteraemia, one might need appropriate treatment for that condition. Barring which diet plays a very insignificant role in cholesterol metabolism. Cholesterol is a vital need of the body for building body cell wall. Very low cholesterol levels predispose to cancer in a big way! The first ever Diet-Heart Study in Framingham showed that the two are not directly connected, way back in 1959, but the study did not see the light of the day in print. Curious are the ways of science in the west. John Bokris, a great chemist, the father of cold fusion method, has called reductionist science as a western religion in his famous book The New Paradigm.



Regular Exercise:



Regular exercise is one of the most important parts of the life style modification. This is very important for today’s white collar professionals and our sedentary house wives. For the hard working labour class exercise could be a curse. Simple daily walks lasting up to one hour would be the best that could happen to our health. This has the power to keep us as healthy as possible and avoid many a fatal illness. Over exertion and heavy physical exercise like jogging are not healthy. The best part of daily exercise is the pleasure that it gives for a person who takes time to enjoy Nature en route. However, it should not be an obsession. Even if done for four to five days in a week it is as good as daily exercise. Swimming is another good exercise for those that have the means. Walking in waist deep water could also be very good.



Tobacco and Alcohol:



These are the two deadly enemies of mankind, thanks to the monetary economy that promotes these two. Let us pay our tribute to Sir Bradford Hill, who, for the first time, connected tobacco smoke with lung cancer and later with heart disease against strong opposition from his own colleagues and seniors at that time that it almost cost him his good job at the Hammersmith Hospital. He died last week in London at a ripe old age due to a short illness. If we, as a profession, could fight to get rid of tobacco habit from the population we will have paid a real tribute to him. His soul would then certainly rest in eternal peace. Much water has flowed under the London Bridge since then in this area of smoking and health both for the smoker and for his companions. (passive smoking)



Alcohol is another story of using science (reductionist) as the cover to sell all kind of false hoods and half truths to the gullible public and propagate the idea that a small amount of alcohol, especially red wine, is good for health and is a heart tonic. The truth however, is very far from that belief. Although we do not have unequivocal evidenced to say that small amounts of alcohol are bad for health, we have not even an iota of evidence to say that a small amount of alcohol in any form is good for health! The evidence brandied around is only statistical evidence and most readers would know how to use statistics to sell what you want to sell. Medical science is not a true science; it is only a statistical science: the latter is called science without sense in a book by the same title by a great American epidemiologist, Steven Milloy. However, large studies today have shown that teetotalers are better off compared to the mild drinkers and heavy drinkers are the worst. Same is the advice given by Ayurveda. Caraka says that people drink all kinds of alcohol and some even enjoy doing that, but if one wants to keep away from diseases, he better keeps away from alcohol of any kind.



Bad Genes:



Many of us are worried about our bad genes from our parents if they had suffered from any serious disease. This is another myth created by the reductionist science of medicine and the vested interests. If the parents have had precocious disease below the age of thirty five or so, then there is a good possibility of the genes creating problems for the progeny. However, gene alone can not bring on any disease in anyone. Absence of a gene is an insurance against that disease, but the presence of the gene only indicates the possibility of that disease coming on. Any gene needs a conducive environment to penetrate and show its power (gene penetrance). If one makes the environment hostile to the gene the gene will not be bale to bring on the disease easily. That is where the diet and the other factors come into to play; in short, one has to have a holistic approach even to the gene’s presence. Left alone the gene is powerless. There are now evidences to show that even the genes could be influenced by the mind as shown by the inventor of then jumping genes hypothesis, Barbara McClintock, the Nobel laureate botanist: primacy of the mind again.



In conclusion, one could easily understand that the human body works as a whole and not in bits and pieces. Human mind is in the driving seat for wellness as well as illnesses. Man has two powerful attractors in phase space, a dynamic attractor called health, and a static attractor called death, as shown in the figure below (figure 2). Since health is a dynamic state where every parameter and organ of the body keep actively changing all the time, health is a more durable state. Even if man gets thrown out of the healthy chaotic state (Point A in the figure), the natural tendency, most of the time, is to get thrown back into the state of health attractor for which all the necessary technology is built into the repair mechanism by Nature, the immune system. Occasionally, if man gets thrown out too far into the phase space (Point B in the figure) is nearer the static attractor called death, he/she might die. It is in this state of illness that man could suffer a lot and need medical help to “cure rarely, comfort mostly, but to console always.” Problem comes only when doctors intervene unnecessarily with drugs and surgery at the time when man is only thrown out of the healthy chaos temporarily into point A with a natural tendency to be attracted back into the healthy attractor. Doctors do play and very important part even in these situations if they use their placebo skills to encourage and empathise to help the patient to get back into the healthy attractor, which is the rule. Too much intervention here might increase death and disability as is shown by the I.O.M report in the US. Wellness therefore should be the motto of the medial profession. Healthy life style would certainly keep one healthy until death.

“Tout passé, tout lasse, tout casse” French Proverb.

[Everything passes, everything wears out, and everything breaks.]

















Figure 2.





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# STATIC ATTRACTOR













A







Healthy Dynamic Attractor (Health)

























B

Static Attractor####################################

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