We are made up of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and other trace minerals. When we die we go back to the same elements. In between we are an amazing enigma called the human mind seen as a human body which, for all intents and purposes, looks solid having a perfect shape

“Maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive”— John Green
 

Nature is an amazing engineer. Although mankind has been trying to unravel the mysteries of nature under the name of scientific discovery, she gives us only small bits and pieces of her secrets, through our keyhole view. Hurray, the man who gets that view gets the Nobel, which rightfully belongs to nature as nature alone could do that job!
 

We are made up of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and other trace minerals. When we die we go back to the same elements. In between we are an amazing enigma called the human mind seen as a human body which, for all intents and purposes, looks solid having a perfect shape. In short, human body is immaterial—mental and spiritual.
Matter being another name for energy, human body is a bundle of energy vibrations, made up of nearly seven octillion atoms. In the physiological sense we are a colony of 50-100 trillion individual human beings (human cells) which lived as individuals for millions of years before coming together to form this human body. During our evolution we have also inherited trillions of germs as our integral part resulting in the human body being made up of nine germ cells to every human cell in us. Human meta-genome, therefore, is made up of only about 25,000 human genes and trillions of germ genes.
 

Our world view is not real and so our reductionist scientific view also must be distorted. Electrons exist not as distinct entities but as only probabilities which are called as happenings or Haps. Atoms that make up matter do not touch each other as they are repulsed when they come very close. The force of this repulsion is so great that when you lie down on your mattress you really do not touch the mattress. There is a very thin gap between your body and the mattress! Your eyes give you only a distorted version of this universe. Our brain makes a model of the world by getting inputs of light, shade, edges, curvature, etc. This also makes up for the fine jerky movements of the eyes called saccades, resulting in a false picture of steady vision. Imagine the TV screen, the picture you see is very artificial as there are hundreds of movements of each action of the pictures there, like someone talking in the TV. Our brain also creates a bigger than normal size of the objects, at times, like that of the moon.
 

Although we think we only have five senses, there are many more senses that we get help from. When you stand on one leg with eyes closed you are being assisted by the sixth sense of proprioception which tells you where you are without the eyesight. You can walk in complete darkness. Telepathy and intuition are other senses that help us at times. Our schooling teaches us to neglect our intuition to develop our intellect. Epi-genetics teaches us that our genes are not the be all and end all of our existence. They play a tiny 3% part in our existence. The germ genes have a bigger say in the remaining 97%. In addition, our environment plays a major role. No gene can work outwith the environment. Lamarck was more right than Darwin, although the conventional scientific world wants to hang on to Darwin’s coat tails since there is big money in genetic engineering and (in medicine) stem cell therapy, the new money spinner.
 

This brings us to a new area of body parameters we measure and treat in sick human beings, totally unaware of the wholisitc nature of the human body. 29^th February 2010 was a great leap in knowledge for mankind when the Institute of Medicine in the US, which audits medical research in that country, agreed to accept the term Whole Person Healing (WPH) as the future of medicine. The term was coined by Late Professor Rustum Roy, a great scientist of world repute. Our reductionist, organ based, specialties have come to grief. For the purposes of this article I shall confine myself to only a few of the parameters like sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium which are routinely checked and corrected by us in any sickness scenario. How scientific are we in doing so? What are the outcome measures of these reductionist methods?
 

These are areas not much talked about and researched. Even if one applied an ointment on the dorsum of one’s palm, a bio-photon camera today can show changes in the brain cells in response to the ointment! Imagine the damage that our powerful reductionist chemicals can do in that background.
 

We see doctors prescribing calcium tablets to most women that see them to build the latter’s bone strength! Now let us see what happens in the whole organism? While calcium intake, as a reductionist molecule, sets in calcium induced calcium loss in the kidneys resulting in negative calcium balance in the whole system! Oral calcium gets deposited in the vessel walls encouraging more atherosclerotic blocks, especially in the coronary vessels. In addition extra calcium intake pushes out magnesium, a vital element that stabilises cell wall electric polarity, making the cell walls electrically unstable. Recent reports of sudden death syndrome in oral calcium taking women has been ascribed to magnesium deficiency giving rise to cardiac electrical instability! Oral calcium also gets deposited at all unwanted places inside like scars in the lungs, etc. If one wants to increase the calcium levels in any patient one should ask the patient to do three things—reduce intake of salt (sodium chloride), exercise daily by walking for an hour and sit in the sun for at least an hour with as little cloth cover on the body as is possible under the given circumstances. The last one gives her the best D3 to build bones and calcium levels without the need for extra oral calcium. One scientist looked at calcium levels in patients given lots of cow’s milk to boost the calcium levels in 25,000 humans over several years only to get surprising result that calcium levels went down inversely proportionate to the milk intake.
 

I have been encountering a new disease these days which I had not seen frequently in the olden days, which is low sodium syndrome. Every other elderly person inside the ICU these days seems to be suffering from this new syndrome. S/he gets sodium infusion in the ICU to get the right laboratory report of sodium. If s/he survives s/he will have to come back again after a week or two for the same complaint. Professor Harlan Krumholz, in the department of cardiology at Yale, studied this new recurrent admission syndrome with reference to heart failure where diuretics are the mainstay of treatment. He came up with a new syndrome—Post Hospitalisation Syndrome (PHS)—where the patients once admitted to ICUs come back again and again (a good business). The multitude of drugs that we give to patients inside and outside the ICU these days plays a major role in these PH Syndromes. Many of these drug combinations with diuretics deplete the body of vital sodium. Potassium is another headache for doctors. While we fill the potassium deficit or excess by drugs in the hospital little do we realise that while the body’s total store of potassium is almost twenty five times that of the measure that we see in our report of extra cellular potassium, God only knows what the body does with our intervention of extra cellular levels. This enigma is another cause of sudden deaths. In this whole drama we have forgotten what the body can do without outside intervention. The body is capable of converting sodium to potassium or vice versa if there is dire need—so called biological transmutations!
 

Magnesium is another story. It is the most vital element which we were getting in abundance in our olden days’ sea salt which we have done away with, thanks to modernity now that we eat white refined salt with added iodine! This pure and deadly salt does not have any trace of the life-saving magnesium. Few doctors measure magnesium levels routinely in disease set-ups. Even when they measure, the story is the same as potassium. We are still groping in the dark about our elements. Trace elements are rarely tracked in disease states to the patients’ detriment. All in all iatrogenic diseases are on the rise, thanks to advances in modern medical claptrap. Do we have to remind doctors what Hippocrates said: “Primum Non Nocere.” (First do no harm) What we do not yet know is if Hippocrates ever said that since he never knew Latin!! Hippocrates never wrote anything in Latin. We only have a keyhole view of everything in medicine. We have to take our elements more seriously.
 

 “When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves”—Anthony J D'Angelo
 

More from Dr BM Hegde.
 

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, Chairman of the State Health Society's Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former Vice Chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for Cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London.)