We all know how to keep our body clean but many of us do not know how to keep our minds clean and devoid of all the negative and dangerous thoughts

“Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.

                 Be honest and frank anyway.”
                                                                                        -Kent M Keith

Our medical scare system tries to ensare you by frightening you with words like silent killer high blood pressure, silent killer diabetes, etc. The truth is that the most potent silent killer is your own mind. Where is the mind? All over you, indeed!

Consciousness is fundamental and all else is derived from that was the opinion of one of the great brains in physics, Max Planck. The human body is therefore, the extension. "Cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore, I am" for those uninitiated in latin maxims, was the famous proclamation by Rene Descartes back in the eighteenth century, although he used this formulation to divide the human body into two parts - the thinking part (res Cogitans) and the material part (res Extensa ). That is where the curse of reductionism in science first took root. Science started looking at bits and pieces to understand the whole. With all the wonderful advances in modern day physics pointing towards (w) holism, medical science still looks at bits and pieces, often becoming a bane to society.

Charles Sherrington, a Nobel winning physiologist, became the professor of physiology in 1899, he admitted that "positive sciences do not and cannot answer the question 'why?' That was precisely how silent killer hypertension etc. originated. Today with the understanding of (w) holism we are able to ask the pertinent question as to why does the blood pressure go up in the first place? Here

I am not referring to the disease, secondary hypertension, where we know the cause for elevated BP. I am talking of what modern medicine calls primary or essential hypertension. Similarly we now know why the sugar or cholesterol goes up, again excluding primary type I diabetes.

Now the reader will have to understand elementary human physiology. We have a healer inside us which is the most powerful healer and the best doctor in the world called the immune system. This has to be kept in good working order all the time. When we were mere hunger gatherers in the forest, our only cause of premature death was predation. Nature then endowed us with a very intelligent extra system called the autonomic nervous system which would keep us going when we are seriously injured as we did not have intensive care units then. What the intensive care unit does was being done by the autonomic nervous system in a better way. If could close up cut vessels, make the blood clot, get our blood pressure up when it went down and see that the vital organs got enough blood by redistributing blood more efficiently. In case we saw a tiger, the same system would make us capable of running away from danger by elevating our blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol and other sterols as a life saving measure.

Now that we are in a (un) civilized world, involved in our rat race to make money and get positions, we have to deal with human tigers every day. Many a times these tigers live with us as our near and dear ones. We are yet to evolve enough to get rid of the autonomic nervous system, and that might take millions of years of evolution. As of now we get the flight-fight-fright reaction of the forest tiger sighting with the same biochemical reactions and consequent altered blood parameters and BP rise. While in the forest the elevated levels used to be burnt up to give us energy to run. Today, we cannot run away from the metaphorical tigers. On a chronic basis we accumulate these elevated blood parameters and become hypertensive, diabetic, and what have you. So it is not the tail, elevated blood pressure, which wags its dog, the silent killer. It is the abnormal consciousness of fear and fight reactions of our atavistic human mind that does the trick. Unfortunately, in reductionist medicine we do not look at the whole and try to deal with the end result or symptom.

Cancer is another killer. Cancer cells are normal body cells that fail to die on their appointed time by apoptosis (normal programmed cell death) and mutate to become rogue cells. They are a bunch of jobless, aimless, wandering cells that might eventually become clinical cancers- weeks, months or even years after they get formed in the first place. So if we could screen for rogue cells, all of us would show many potential cancers inside us every day. Why do these cells grow to be cancers in some but die away in the majority? Here again the culprit is our mind. Negative thoughts like hatred, jealousy, anger and pride help the cells to grow to be cancers while love, camaraderie, sharing and caring (otherwise called spirituality) would try and destroy those rogue cells. Abnormal over-eating is another trigger for cancer cells to grow. A frugal diet might not encourage them.

Modern medicine also is now recognising hostility as the main culprit in heart attacks and anger as the cause for haemorrhagic strokes. Depression with frustration does bring on cancer and all other killer diseases in their wake. We all know how to keep our body clean but many of us do not know how to keep our minds clean and devoid of all the negative and dangerous thoughts. Every thought gets translated into a powerful chemical in the body which ends up doing all the damage or good depending on the thought being either negative or positive. How then do we do control our thoughts?

That is the job of the true educational system which, unfortunately we had completely destroyed this in India thanks to our colonial masters who wanted to keep us under their thumb. Every new born child is a genius and a Godly person only to be converted into an idiot and a devil in the present schooling system where negative thoughts and competition are taught. From day one in school those innocent compassionate children are graded with ranks and marks and are made to be aware of their individuality. The altruistic "we" concept gets transformed into the dangerous egoistic "I" concept. That I leads to illness in later life while e WE would have encouraged wellness.

Education must make Healthy minds and not just wealthy careers. A Healthy mind is defined as that which has "enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate". Indian Sanatana dharma, which goes back millenia, has had all those beautiful ideas but was all but removed from the educational arena. We still follow the British model in our schools and colleges while Britain is slowly taking ideas from our ancient system. Let us be human and humane in our social intercourse for us to develop a healthy mind which is the best vaccination for all killer diseases and the mercury containing chemical vaccines that we load our children with. Even Adam Smith had defined education as that which trains a man to act "justly, skilfully and magnanimously under all circumstances of war and peace".  This world runs through your consciousness. Matter comes into existence when observed by you. This new concept is called bio centrism, a brain child of that great thinker physician Robert Lanza. It may be time to reconsider our most common beliefs about healthcare.

                “The truth can only offend those who live a lie!”
                                                          Anon

(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.)