Water - Your Best Medicine
By Michael Sellar
According to medical orthodoxy it is not important if we drink any water so long as we drink fluids. Tea, coffee, soft drinks, beer, it really doesn’t matter. In fact some say that since the food we eat is mostly water, there’s no need in theory to drink anything at all. Food can supply us with all our needs. The important thing, they say, is to drink when you are thirsty. If you do this then there’s nothing more to think about. Our thirst mechanism tells us when to drink. It will make sure we drink enough to meet our needs and not to drink too much.
Those who work in the field of complementary health insist that water is important for its cleansing and detoxifying properties and that we need to drink 8 glasses a day. The late Dr Batmanghelidj, author of Your Body’s Many Cries For Water, identified 42 reasons why we should drink water.
So who is right? I am not going to answer this question directly but instead I will relate my own experience and let you be the judge.
I’d studied nutrition for many years and thought myself to be quite knowledgeable. I never ever drank water though, firstly because I didn’t like it, and secondly because alternatives to water such as tea and beer were far more interesting to me.
Although my liquid intake was minimal, I never gave much consideration to it since I was never thirsty.
I had a number of minor health problems that plagued me over fifteen years. These were: visual disturbances, dizziness, headaches and migraine, acute anxiety attacks with vomiting and diarrhoea (eventually the anxiety became chronic), overproduction of saliva after meals, strange ‘feelings’ over parts of my body, burning and discomfort on ejaculation and, perhaps the most worrying symptom, a pain on breathing in, like a fine needle being pressed into my chest.
One day, about a week after my anxiety became chronic and I was in despair, I was watching a video on public speaking. The presenter suggested topics of interest to give as talks and mentioned the great health benefits he’d derived after taking up Dr Batamanghelidj’s advice on drinking water. I bought his book the next day at a health exhibition and I started drinking 8 glasses of water a day as advised. After about a month all symptoms vanished. I continued to drink 4 – 6 glasses a day thereafter. A year later I gave up drinking water to see if it made any difference; perhaps it was all in my mind. After 2 weeks the symptoms returned. I went back to drinking the water. That was in 1997 and I have never had a return of any of the above symptoms.
For some reason the thirst mechanism can fail in some people. I suspect and I believe it to be true that while this may be unusual in young people, it is quite common in older people. Certainly anyone with annoying symptoms would do well to try drinking water and see what happens. At worst, nothing will happen. On the other hand, something that seems like a miracle could occur.
Michael Sellar is editor of Enzyme Digest, a newsletter on nutrition and complementary medicine for health professionals. He also runs a website to promote the work of complementary therapists in the Stoke Newington area of north London. This website http://www.n16health.com also contains many articles on nutrition and complementary health.
This article was posted by Michael Sellar
