Your Body's Many Cries for Water
by Feyedoon Batmanghelidj M.D.
A Book Review by Trevor James Constable
RARE indeed are those books destined to become all-time classics. Even rarer are books destined to accomplish a paradigm shift in any major area of modern knowledge. Of still greater rarity are books destined to benefit significantly the health of countless millions of human beings, at no cost to them. Such a landmark book is Your Body's Many Cries for Water by Dr. F. Batmanghelidj. He is a London-educated Iranian medical doctor who has made revolutionary discoveries about the water metabolism of the human body. His astounding basic breakthrough was made while he was confined to a Tehran prison, this being a unique circumstance in itself.
Dr. Batmanghelidj is of aristocratic lineage in his native Iran, and when the Shah was overthrown, the doctor was arrested and jailed with more than 3,000 other well-born victims of the Khomeini revolution. While these unfortunates wore awaiting execution, Dr. Batmanghelidj was assigned as their medical officer — pending his own appearance before a firing squad. He had no medical resources other than water, in an environment pervaded by stress and terror. Indeed, the doctor found himself incarcerated in a gigantic stress laboratory.
This became the milieu in which fundamental discoveries were made regarding the medicinal and functional value of water. These are discoveries that have eluded giant medical trusts, vast hospital complexes, battalions of medical professors, universities that boast about their sophisticated research facilities, and all the vaunted resources of the pharmaceutical industry. None of them, or indeed, all of them combined, were capable: of penetrating to the bedrock of human health: adequate daily water intake.
Without realizing it initially, Dr. Batmanghelidj was working with clinical controls in place. Prison discipline enabled him to follow up his patients, who had no possibility of evasion. Forced to use water medicinally, and water alone, Dr. Batmanghelidj was astonished in following up his patients, to find that water was effecting full cures of diverse, normally ineradicable diseases. These cures occurred in a complete fashion not seen in response to medication, which "treats" or "controls" such recalcitrant and diverse diseases as asthma, arthritis, high blood pressure and ulcers. Official medicine has only palliatives for these conditions, not cures.
If such diseases do not bother you personally, just ask anyone so afflicted how frustrating it is to be perpetually treated but never cured, by doctors who are manifestly flummoxed by such diseases. This bafflement and medical inability to effect cures is almost universal in orthodox medicine, and largely accounts for the stupendous and ever-mounting cost of medical care. People get treated, not cured. They are not cured because the basic cause of their diseases is not known to classical medicine. America harbors and husbands a vast army of people receiving medical "treatment".
Dr. Batmanghelidj was blessed by a first class medical training at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School of London University, one of the most respected medical schools in the western world. He was one of the last students of the eminent discoverer of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming. Thus steeped in classical orthodoxy, Dr. Batmanghelidj was totally embarrassed to find that water was doing in a dependable way, what medication had never been able to do. In his classical medical training, like orthodox doctors world-wide, Dr. Batmanghelidj was taught that it was the solid material in the body (the solute) that was important. Only an incidental status was assigned to the solvent aspects of the human body — to water.
Irrefutable clinical experience in the controlled prison environment, forced the doctor to conclude that conventional medicine — of which he was himself a product — was hobbled and handicapped by a false paradigm. The false paradigm undergirded, and locked in place, the illusion that water was not significant in human metabolism compared with the solutes, with which medical "science" has been vainly wrestling, generation after generation. The truth of basic human functioning, as Dr. Batmanghelidj's research progressively confirmed, is that the solvent (water) and not the solute, plays the cardinal role in human health.
Orthodox medicine has been ineffective in dealing with a wide spectrum of diseases, whose etiology is classically listed as "unknown," because it has this fundamental polarity of solute and solvent back-to-front. The ramified and fundamental role of water has simply not been comprehended. After three years doing basic research in the Tehran prison, Dr. Batmanghelidj was released, and came to America. Here he continued his pathfinding research on the water metabolism of the human body for a further decade or more. He worked with established institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, lectured widely to physicians, and wrote learned papers for professional publications such as the Journal of Gastroenterology. The fallout from Dr. Batmanghelidj's exertions included a large number of completely cured persons who had been chronically afflicted with "incurable" diseases. Medical doctors were among these people.
Slowly but surely, numerous intelligent medical doctors and researchers who studied his work, overcame the same embarrassment that had consumed Dr. Batmanghelidj, when he first began comprehending the cardinal role of water in human health and functioning. Like Dr. Batmanghelidj, these enlightened physicians came to realize that medicine was confronting a fundamental paradigm shift. Some of these board-certified physicians are quoted [60] in the book. More physicians are recognizing this central truth as the months pass.
Nothing so radical, in the root-meaning of that word, had ever happened to medical knowledge in the history of the world. Chronic dehydration was being identified as the fundamental matrix from which most human diseases emerge. This book will leave you in no doubt that America's deplorable and desperate health care crisis is born of dehydration, midwifed by medical inability to deal effectively with diseases whose etiology in dehydration is not understood. Almost every disease arising out of dehydration is attacked with medication, or combinations of medications. Sickness therefore proliferates, while the sick cry out in many different ways for water — cries to which doctors are deaf.
Countless ingrained cultural and social customs of modern America, such as not drinking sufficient water, and guzzling phenomenal quantities of diuretic soft drinks and diuretic coffee and tea, reinforce chronic dehydration as the number one health menace in America. Dr. Batmanghelidj emphasizes that drinking coffee, soft drinks and juices does not counter dehydration or meet the body's water needs. The only way out is by drinking water.
Elusive and seemingly unrelated conditions like dyspeptic pain, stress and depression, high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, excess body weight, chronic fatigue, arthritis, asthma and allergies, insulin-independent diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, back problems and a host of lesser complaints that bedevil human beings, have all yielded to the ingestion of adequate daily water. Dr. Batmanghelidj identifies Alzheimer's as due to dehydration of the brain.
Eight 8-ounce glasses daily is the recommended regimen advocated by Dr. Batmanghelidj, to keep the human body fully hydrated. For each cup of coffee or other caffeinated drink, an additional, compensating eight-ounce glass of water is required.
Perhaps the most welcome and convincing finding of Dr. Batmanghelidj is the key role played by dehydration in creating back ailments in human beings. The spinal discs consist of about eighty percent water. When these discs atrophy through varying degrees of dehydration, an afflicted human is off on one of the most miserable medical merry-go-rounds known to man. The human spine has to support about 75 percent of body weight. Without fully-hydrated and resilient spinal discs, the spine cannot perform its function properly. "Back problems" ensue. Abnormal physical and nervous pressures develop and vertebrae become misplaced as the spinal discs collapse. In the U.S.A., such back problems are now on an epidemic scale, largely defy physicians and surgeons, and endlessly persecute the afflicted.
Dr. Batmanghelidj has found that rehydration restores the integrity and resilience of the spinal discs. Simple exercises he has devised, create a natural vacuum effect: that draws the needed water back into the discs, whose proper bearing function is thereby eventually normalized. Contrast this with the dead-end, mechanistic "back surgery" that now consumes hundreds of millions of dollars in surgeons' fees and hospital costs every year.
Back pains are among the body's many cries for water, from which Dr. Batmanghelidj's book has appropriately taken its title. The horrific wheezing of an asthmatic, which is one of the most embarrassing and distressing things anyone can witness, is similarly the body crying for water. Dr. Batmanghelidj has demonstrated that asthma is due to the body's natural histamines constricting the lungs to limit any further loss of water via the breath. The person so afflicted is desperately dehydrated. In the prison environment in Iran, adequate water provided a cure for asthma — one of the astonishing clinical results that first started Dr. Batmanghelidj thinking about the medicinal power of water.
Dr. Batmanghelidj views the way hypertension is classically treated as "scientific absurdity". The dehydrated body is desperately trying to hang on to its water volume. Uncomprehending physicians intervene with diuretics and literally force more water out of an already dehydrated body. The author gives lucid, comprehensible descriptions of the exquisite hydraulic design and engineering of the human body, and the diverse functions of the cells, capillaries and membranes as they operate to compensate for dehydration. If the body's many cries for water are ignored, as they are in contemporary America, degenerative diseases are the inevitable consequence. A congress scrabbling to deal financially with an avalanche of degenerative disease, is verification enough that the time has come for a new medical paradigm.
Our typical regular readers of Borderlands will have no difficulty in understanding either Dr. Batmanghelidj's book, or the stony response that he received on placing his findings before the American Medical Association. The book includes reproductions of his correspondence with the A.M.A. This reviewer regards this book as the most important health book of the twentieth century, since its content can directly benefit everybody — at no cost and right now. Borderlanders should not only secure these benefits for themselves and their families, but also should make them more widely known. Dr. Batmanghelidj is making a Herculean effort to pass the blessings of his work into the lives of all human beings. He is not permitting his work to be sequestered or short-circuited by reactionary orthodoxy. He will need all the help that we can give him.
"Your Body's Many Cries for Water" by F. Batmanghelidj, M.D.
"When Dr. Batmanghelidj thinks of a glass of water, he doesn’t think of it as half full or half empty. He thinks of it as brimming over with the essential fluid of life. He thinks of it as the solvent of our ills and the deliverer of ripe old age. He thinks of it as the wave of the future." — Wash. Times
"This book, based on a pioneering physician’s twenty years of clinical and scientific research into the role of water in the body, explains a breakthrough discovery that Unintentional Chronic Dehydration (UCD) produces stress, chronic pains and many painful degenerational diseases. Dry mouth is not the only sign of dehydration; waiting to get thirsty is wrong. You will learn the different signals of thirst when your body is calling for water. Simply adjusting your water intake — yes, water! Natural, pure water!- can help you to live a healthier, pain-free life." — "Your Body’s Many Cries for Water" (amazon.com)