Sun Yourself for Better Eyesight
It is a well-known fact that short-sightedness, or myopia, is becoming increasingly more prevalent among children. The usual culprit that is blamed is their increased computer-screen viewing. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Computer screens do not cause myopia. Researchers now have found that the true culprit is lack of exposure to sun. These days, children, even in India, do not get enough exposure to the sun. They rarely walk to school and don’t play much in the open.
To cap it, there is a global multi-billion dollar sunscreen industry that goads people to keep away from the sun as they say it might cause skin cancer. We have stopped learning science from nature. “Little do we see in nature that is ours,” cried William Wordsworth in his poem, The world is too much with us.
Rampant use of dark glasses also is bad for the eyes. Ultraviolet rays are important not just for stimulating our vitamin D3 receptors, the kingpin of our immune system, but are also vital for the retina to stimulate the pineal gland, the master of our endocrine orchestra. This is important for all our endocrine functions.
Hence, have enough and more sun for good health, both of the body and eyes in particular.
The Superbugs Are Coming!
In 2015, the World Health Organization head, Margaret Chan, warned that we will enter “a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections will once again kill.” According to projections by the British government’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, by 2050 superbugs will be killing 10 million people a year, more than the deaths from cancer and diabetes combined. That is 10 times the number being killed by these infections today. In some countries, such as Nigeria, it is predicted that superbugs will be responsible for a quarter of all deaths by that year.
It is scary. The germ theory of disease and the consequent hype regarding the discovery of Penicillin made it impossible to assess the antibiotic menace. Germs are born to develop resistance against all chemical poisons in their environment, to survive. The reductionist logic of Western medicine has taken us to this bottomless pit. Our only salvation is to develop the human immune mechanism and not depend on chemicals. Antibiotics encourage bacteria to become resistant.
Ending Industry Influence in Science and Medicine
Even if we get everything else right in healthcare reform, none of our efforts will matter, unless we address the true drivers of cost and chronic disease. And among the biggest drivers of all are the complex, industry-driven government policies that promote obesity, disease as well as agricultural and environmental degradation. As reported in The New York Times, there is an insidious presence of the pharma industry in medical education, research and practice—a presence that prevents the best evidence on lifestyle medicine from becoming the standard of care. A recent review of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which examined the basis for clinical practice guidelines for evidence-based medicine (EBM), found that only 11% of guidelines are based on firm clinical evidence; most are based on ‘expert’ opinion. Only 19% are class-I recommendations (general agreement among experts that treatment is useful or effective). These clinical practice guidelines, considered ‘best evidence’, are heavily influenced by what we have done (driven by pharma), not by what we should do (based on evidence for systems medicine). Medical device and pharma industries routinely pay consulting fees and make payments to physicians who promote their products, often without evidence of benefit, or for off-label uses. This is true in every other field where money runs the show, including politics.
