Health - Who`s Afraid Sars?

by Anuradha Vashisht

The adversary is elusive, invisible and deadly, and until a few months ago it was an alien form never before seen on earth… the only way to defeat it is through a steady stream of intelligence.” These words are not scripted for a newest Hollywood spine-chiller. This is the intro of a recent cover story in a major US daily. And the protagonist here is SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

SARS did a coup d’état on the Iraq war, and media the world over bent over backwards in reporting on the vicious virus and unleashing another virus called scare in the process.

Gloom and doom, cold killer, mystery disease, highly virulent, capricious—reporters, health authorities, medicos and researchers fell short of appropriate words which could describe the full range of emotions associated with this tiny virus called SARS.

The obsession, the scare associated with SARS and the helplessness of the world scientific community in understanding its nature or their ability to protect citizens seemed to be transposing humanity to medieval times.

Triumph of Viruses
So the mysterious world of tiny viruses has triumphed once again over man and its technologie just as it has always triumphed down the ages.

But why have we allowed it to happen? Could we, as individuals or collectively, help in avoiding such a scenario, prevent it from happening today, and ever again? Are viruses and bacteria really as much the culprits in unleashing horrible diseases on mankind as they are made out to be? Is there no escape from their scourge? After all, virologists, microbiologists and bacteriologists the world over, as well as the WHO, have admitted failure and defeat in finding a cure or an effective prevention against seemingly deadly diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis, leprosy, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and, more recently, HIV/AIDS.

Moreover, for over two decades, no radical solution to AIDS has been found. An answer to the common cold too remains as elusive. There are many other diseases, which play havoc with human life and health, all of which the medical science cannot look squarely in the face.

Has Mother Nature abjured and abandoned her children and left them at the mercy of viruses and infections?

Well, she has not. A definite prevention and cure for all so-called deadly diseases exists. But humanity has been so deafened and blinded by the false information and propaganda down the ages that even when Mother Nature gives clear indications of how to restore our health and protect us from pestilence we pay no heed, and continue to suffer.

Thus to reach the verdure and healthy pastures beyond, it is necessary to cross over all the filth and the muck, which has accumulated on the way for more than two hundred years.

Lift the Veil of Ignorance
It is not necessary that even if the whole world is going in one direction it is the right direction. The veil of ignorance can impair the vision of one and all alike. This cover story tries to lift that veil and let a bit of the light of awareness filter in. The purpose is to lift the dread, the fear of so-called infectious diseases like SARS from the minds of the people and restore faith in the self-healing system and abjure dependence on drugs.

There have been scientists and individuals earlier, and still exist today, who have scientifically validated their research findings and concluded that facts are absolutely different from what the world at large believes. And they have helped people to recover their health and save lives from tumours, cancer and AIDS, and without dependence on drugs or any kind of conventional medical system prevalent today.

Defeat of Medical Science
The WHO Infectious Diseases Report 1999 throws some light on what modern medical science has achieved even in the last 100 years of its practice:

“An infectious disease crisis of global proportions is today threatening hard-won gains in health and life expectancy. Infectious diseases are now the world’s biggest killer of children and young adults. They account for more than 13 million deaths a year.”

The report is merciless in its inadequacy to lend any hope or succour to the world against infectious diseases: “Increased drug resistance and the unforeseen emergence of new microbes could close the current window of opportunity for controlling infectious diseases. As the battle to control known infectious diseases continues, other new threats have emerged.”

‘‘Old scourges such as tuberculosis and diphtheria have occurred in explosive epidemics in Europe and other industrialised countries. (Including a 1996 outbreak of polio in Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia.) This is happening at a time when the arsenal of drugs available to treat infectious diseases is being progressively depleted due to increasing resistance of microbes to anti-microbial drugs.”

“Diseases once thought to be retreating have made a deadly comeback. Even worse, new killer diseases have emerged—many of them neither preventable nor treatable. The situation is getting worse. Over the past two decades over 30 emerging diseases have been identified in humans for the first time. During the past 10 years, outbreaks of old foes such as plague, diphtheria, yellow fever, dengue, meningitis, influenza and cholera have claimed many lives.”

There is a degree of helplessness as the WHO Report affirms: “All too often, the key determinants of health—as well as the solutions—lie outside the direct control of the health sector. They are rooted in areas such as sanitation and water supply, environmental and climate change, education, agriculture, trade, tourism, transport, industrial development and housing. Unless these issues are addressed, it can be difficult to prevent or even control some infectious diseases.”

If this were true, authorities, scientists and economists can go on and on in circles, but will fail to provide solutions or protection,

Germs or viruses are no more the cause of disease as flies are of garbage.

since they would always be chasing the viruses—in sewages and water pipes, on seas and in air, in schools and in market places, at homes and in factories, in waste bins and in junk yards.

But if they look a little closely, and with an open mind, they would notice that viruses are nothing less than Nature’s own scavengers. So important is their role in the whole creation, that if they did not exist, the planet Earth would resemble nothing more than a gargantuan, grotesque, stinking garbage dump.

Nature’s Scavengers
Germs or viruses are nature’s tools to cleanse and clean up. They do not cause disease; they only come to feed on the disease-causing toxins or filth that has been accumulated either inside or outside the organism. They are no more the cause of disease as flies are of garbage. Just as the garbage attracts flies, disease attracts viruses. Wherever there is disease, viruses will come to feed on it, since they are nothing but the cleansing agents of nature!

This fact was firmly established by Professor Pierre Jacques Antoine Bechamp, one of France’s greatest scientists, in the later half of the 19th century. A contemporary of Louis Pasteur, he taught in universities and medical schools, and published widely on cell biology, disease, botany and related subjects.

Bechamp was the first to prove that the moulds accompanying fermentation were, or contained, living organisms, and could not be spontaneously generated but must be an outgrowth of some living organism carried in the air. This was in 1858, six years before Pasteur came to similar conclusion. Bechamp was also the first to determine their true nature and function, and their origins.

‘Little Bodies’
Bechamp called his discovery ‘little bodies’ or microzymas. He found them everywhere, in all organic matter, in both healthy tissues and diseased, where he also found them associated with various kinds of bacteria.

Assisted by Prof. A. Estor, and after painstaking study, Bechamp decided that the microzymas rather than the cell were the elementary units of life, and were in fact the builders of cell tissues.

He also concluded that bacteria are an outgrowth or an evolutionary form of microzymas that occur when a quantity of diseased tissues must be broken up into its constituent elements. He also proved that on the death of an organ its cells disappear, but the microzymas remain, imperishable!

Through extensive experiments Bechamp established that bacteria can and do develop from microzymas, and are in fact a scavenging form of the microzymas, developed when death, decay, or disease cause an extraordinary amount of cell life either to need repair or be broken up.

R.B. Pearson, who has docu mented Bechamp’s life and work, says that he himself thoroughly understands germs or bacteria with only one exception—the bacteria found in man and animals do not cause disease. They have the same function as those found in the soil, or in sewage, or elsewhere in nature; they are there to rebuild dead or diseased tissues, or rework body wastes, and they will not or cannot attack healthy tissues. They are as important and necessary to human life as those found elsewhere in nature, and are in reality just as harmless if we live correctly, as Bechamp so clearly showed.

Pearson also, very tellingly, relates what Florence Nightingale, the best known nurse in history, after life-long experience with infection, contagion and epidemics, had to say about the germ theory, 17 years before Pasteur put it forward:

“Diseases are not individuals arranged in classes, like cats and dogs, but conditions growing out of one another. Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases as we do now, as separate entities, instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition and just as much under our control; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves?

“I have seen with my own eyes and smelled with my own nose smallpox growing up in first specimens, either in closed rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been ‘caught’, but must have begun. I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and pass into one another. I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever; and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut.

“True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent it. Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient, are the only defence a true nurse either asks or needs."

“The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.”

Can we still say that humanity is doomed? It is, if it fails to understand the actual cause of disease and continues to keep its faith solely in western science of medicine, and doctors, who as medical students were brainwashed of the true nature of disease.

Yet, in one of the most unfortunate episodes of human history, a very vital and important fact about the cause of disease (especially infectious) has been distorted and wrongly explained to the masses. And this falsehood has continued over decades and is still persisting with a degree of obstinacy that is difficult to obliterate.

Cause of Disease
Once the focus shifts from viruses as the cause of disease, one automatically thinks about how and from where infection or disease comes. Disease does not exist external to the human body nor does it come from outside to attack us. When we fail to live by the laws of nature and aggressively violate the principles of life force, unsanitary conditions develop within the system. A failure to maintain internal hygiene accumulates filth inside the body and slowly depletes our natural immunity.

Acharya Lakshmana Sarma, acclaimed as the father of nature cure in India, says in his magnum opus, Practical Nature-Cure: “Health alone is real as such, and not disease, which is only a symptom of a fall in one’s health level. Disease is not a foreign entity invading the body from without but a vital process initiated by Nature herself. Through the disease process, life is making an effort to re-establish lost health. …Diseases are not many. There is only one disease all through life from birth to death. But this one disease appears again and again out of an inward abnormal condition, each time having a new form; and each time doctors give it a new name.”

Dr Henry Lindlahr, MD, in his fascinating book, Nature Cure: Philosophy & Practice Based on the Unity of Disease & Cure (1922) attributes disease and premature death of the physical body to three primary causes:

• Lowered vitality due to overwork, night work, excesses, over stimulation, poisonous drugs and ill-advised surgical operations.

• Abnormal composition of blood and lymph due to improper selection and combination of food, especially the lack of organic mineral salts and other essential nutritional elements.

• Accumulation of waste matter, morbid matter and poisons due to the first two causes, as well as to faulty diet, overeating, the use of alcoholic and narcotic stimulants, drugs, vaccines, accidental poisoning and to the suppression of acute diseases (Nature’s cleansing and healing efforts) by poisonous drugs and surgical operations.

Follow Natural Laws
According to Dr Lindlahr, disease and everything else that we designate as evil are the result of transgressions of natural laws in thinking, breathing, eating, dressing, working, and resting, as well as in moral, sexual and social conduct. A view endorsed by Acharya Sarma, who independently reached a similar conclusion.

While Dr Lindlahr was based in the US, Acharya Sarma did his pioneering studies in India in a small town of Padukkottai in Tamil Nadu. For over 50 years, till his end in 1964, he helped thousands of people get rid of dreaded disease conditions after they started living by basic laws of nature as propounded by him.

Dr Lindlahr further states in his book: “Germs cannot be the cause of disease, because disease germs are also found in healthy bodies.… The fear instilled by the bacterial theory of disease is frequently more destructive than the micro-organisms themselves.”

Because of so much violence to human health over the years, there is much poison flowing along with blood in the veins of the human body today. Hence mothers give birth to babies who are born bereft of natural immunity or what Acharya Sarma calls Life Force. Thus the body organs of these hapless infants fail to work efficiently or eliminate the toxins in their delicate systems. No wonder they are born with noxious diseases like AIDS.

AIDS is acquired through persistent violence to the system and not from any virus, and it is the total breakdown of the natural immune system. A sincere attempt to build up the natural immunity would defeat AIDS, or any other deadly disease for that matter. This has been amply proved and successfully achieved by determined and sincere individuals, including doctors, who lived by natural laws and rid their own or their patients’ bodies of toxins.

One of the many living examples oday is Dr Lorraine Day, a physician from the US, who once suffered from breast cancer: “I refused mutilating surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, the treatment methods all physicians are taught, and got well by using God’s natural remedies instead,” she says. She insists that physicians are more afraid of cancer than patients are “because doctors know that chemotherapy, radiation and surgery are NOT the answer to cancer”. Today she hosts a website and is helping many others to recover from cancer without any dependence on drugs or any other medical treatments.

Others in India and abroad have recovered from diseases like AIDS or cancer, by following Nature’s laws alone. Allopathy does not boast of a single case of cancer or AIDS, which has fully recovered and is living a healthy life thereafter.

Food as Medicine
Delhi-based Acharya S. Swaminathan, who has helped thousands of people in the last over half a century to reach a level of health where they could defeat deadly diseases, asserts: “Food is the medicine of the healthy; medicine is the food of the sick.”

According to him, food alone is capable of creating defences against diseases—food which is fresh, natural, wholesome and hygienic. He insists that to maintain a high level of health at all times, and to be free from any kind of disease, 80 per cent of our food should include fresh, seasonal and raw vegetables, lightly cooked vegetables and fresh, seasonal fruit.

In fact, so much is the importance laid on food and the manner in which we take it, that he has helped people to recover from diabetes, hypertension, blood pressure, TB, arthritis, etc, merely by effecting changes in their food habits. There are examples where people recommended heart surgeries by specialists are now living normal lives and without any medication whatsoever. They are confident they will never require the surgeon’s scalpel now.

According to Swaminathan, disease is in reality a diminution in health level and cure lies in restoring that level back to normalcy. He says: “Those who live by the eternal, immutable and inviolable laws of Nature governing physical and mental health will remain free from disease. Any violation will result in lowering of the health level. Everyone knows and agrees that there is an innate capacity in the human organism to resist the onset of this or that type of disease.

“This power of immunity is there in its fullest extent possible in a person enjoying high levels of health. The immunity is steadily lost as man indulges in unhygienic ways of living. Hygienic implies both external and internal hygiene.”

Though Swaminathan uses the word immunity, he does not seem comfortable with it. He explains that the key lies in the digestive system.

Fresh natural foods eaten with proper care alone can maintain and sustain the internal sanitation

“All disease springs from faulty digestive processes, which weakens important body organs over a period of time. If the organs of assimilation and the organs of elimination in an organism are not working to its optimum efficiency, there will be an accumulation of residual waste matter inside the body. Over the years this waste matter putrefies and clogs body tissue. In reality every type of disease implies that there is tissue uncleanliness inside the organism. It may be skin tissue, nerve tissue, muscle tissue or any other tissue. When it becomes unclean then alone a symptom-complex can develop, and one or other organ can falter in its function.”

He says that while wrong choice of food and wrong way of eating it causes indigestion and accumulation of waste in the body tissue, intake of refined, processed and packed foods builds toxins in the system. These cannot be eliminated from the system since the organs of elimination are already overtaxed. This becomes a fertile ground for any disease to breed.

Nature’s Healing Power
Interestingly, once the waste is accumulated in the body to an extent that a cancer-like condition erupts, nature’s healing power alone can help to rid the system of poisonous substances. No medical system in the world can scrape clean the clogged tissues and body cells.

“Nature ‘care’ and not nature ‘cure’ alone can help in such a situation,” says the Acharya. Thus help from the five vital elements-ether, air, fire, water, earth-is taken to nourish the body back to health. Here, ether, which implies fasting, is the tool most effectively used in acute, chronic as well as destructive diseases.

Wincing at the thought of immunisation to confer immunity on people, he replies: “It is common sense that those who live hygienically already have a natural immunity, and those living unhygienically cannot have immunity bestowed on them. If so many in the modern world become victims of infectious diseases it is not the ‘ability’ of the infecting agents but the internal susceptibility of the victims. Diseased mothers bear children with weak constitutions and the vicious cycle goes on.”

Lately, sufficient research and incriminating scientific evidence has emerged to prove that vaccines are deadly and health destroying. They are increasingly being considered to have played a vital role in later upsurge of fatal diseases like cancer and AIDS. Continuous studies have linked vaccines to autism, cancer, heart failures and other killer diseases. Far from providing immunity to any living organism, they are alleged to drastically weaken and ultimately destroy natural immunity.

Ironically, a cross-section of doctors, microbiologists, homoeopaths or even ayurveda practitioners and so- called holistic healers firmly believe that disease is caused by external factors and we need protection through vaccines. And while all of them agree that natural immunity does protect from disease they fail to commit how one can enhance this immunity.

Says, Dr Namita Jaggi, a microbiologist: “Diet has a small role to play in immunity. You either have natural immunity, or have to acquire immunity. And vaccines is the only way you can get it.” However, she asserts that she does not have full confidence on drugs and agrees that medical science has failed to provide definite answers to diseases today .

Dr Ravinder Tuli and wife Dr Poonum Tuli gave up their conventional medical practice almost 15 years ago to embrace acupuncture and other natural healing systems. Both insist that allopathy does not have answer to all the diseases.

Dr Vivek Bagga, paediatrician, too is wary of prescribing drugs. He is open to ideas, and, given a choice, would explore other options to prescribing harmful medications for little children.

However, medical fraternity across the board continues to believe that diseases is something external to human body, caused by viruses, which need to be killed by toxic drugs. According to Dr B.S. Johri, homoeopath, the understanding of disease in homoeopathy is almost same as in allopathy, but the methodology of treatment and cure differs.

Life Force at Work
Swaminathan elaborates that the universal and basic cause of all disease is the toxaemia in the organism brought about by defective elimination resulting from enervating living habits. When the toxaemia within is at a comparatively low level, and the life force within is fairly abundant, the organism develops acute diseases like diarrhoea, dysentery, common cold, cough, boils and minor types of fever. The life power within, which is responsible for all actions in the body, eliminates toxins vigorously or acutely. Hence the acute disease, which normally lasts 2-3 days. Once the offending matter is eliminated health level goes up.

He explains that measles, an acute disease, is merely an eruptive fever. Life power is helping the individual to clear foul matter and there is nothing to fear. If treated hygienically, applying the principles of natural hygiene without medication, measles clears fast. It cannot kill, nor can dysentery or diarrhoea in their original form.

In his book, Diseases Brought on from Toxin Poisoning-Impaired Health: Its
Food is the medicine of the
healthy; medicine is the
food of the sick
Cause and Cure, Dr John H. Tilden emphasises: “Measles is the manner in which a child’s body throws off toxaemia. When children are cared for improperly, they become toxaemic, and their skin eliminates toxin to a greater degree than does the skin of grown people. … Frequent feeding will often kill nursing children of a year or two of age. Mothers will nurse them until the rotting process set up in the intestine brings on a state of congestion of the lungs that ends fatally. These cases are given food when they really want nothing but water.”

Elaborates Swaminathan: “It is only when these minor acute diseases like measles, diarrhoea or dysentery in their simplest forms are treated with medication, and in addition the individual commits the twin mistake of wrong choice of food and wrong mode of eating, that they take the form of dreaded diseases like cholera, typhoid.”

Hygiene is the K ey
“Fevers like pneumonia, malaria and typhoid are preventable through natural hygiene,” he says. “It is only when an individual keeps on subjecting himself to unhygienic habits that he can develop asthma, bronchitis, sinusitis, angina, etc. When any of these diseases is suppressed through medication, health level goes further down and the possibility of developing TB, AIDS, tumours, cancer, SARS, etc, becomes pronounced.”

“Fresh natural foods eaten with proper care alone are the answer. They alone can sustain that internal sanitation,” maintains Swaminathan. “All kinds of refined, processed, pasteurised, packed, tinned or bottled foods are highly unhygienic and toxic for the system. They are difficult to digest, which directly affects the proper functioning of body organs, resulting in a low level of health.” He shows the ray of hope as he reminds that natural hygienists the world over have radically cured many chronic and destructive diseases through correcting habits of the patients without resorting to medication. “But first, and foremost, it is important to remove fear of disease, because fear will enervate. Nerves and glands function better if there is no fear. There is absolutely no cause to fear from any disease, since all disease can be treated, provided the patient agrees to return to natural hygiene.”

Thus we see that a very simple and common sense solution to all the world’s diseases, especially infectious, exists. All one needs to do is to listen intently and sensitively to what the body says, and help Nature’s healing power to recuperate us and not interfere with its work by further injecting poisons into our bodies when it is relieving us of the accumulated toxins.