WATER

Water must be very important to this world, for the earth is about three-quarters water.  Even though most is salt water, the sun has a great effect on all this salt water and has the ability to change salt water to fresh water.  Just to basically explain - The heat from the sun picks up small drops of salt water, takes them up in warm air currents and forms clouds.  As the clouds gather more and more moisture, the droplets get heavier and heavier until they become heavier than air and fall as rain water on the surface of our earth.

Also springs of fresh water break forth in the depths of the oceans as well as over the land.  Often headwaters of mighty rivers stem from a small spring hidden away in the top of a mountain and as the spring overflows and trickles slowly down to the lower levels, water from the falling rains, storms and thawing snow join the stream from the small springs and together they tumble downward.  As small and large creeks join the onrushing flow, they become rivers and soon the rivers flow into the mighty oceans - to repeat the ongoing, never-ending cycle.

With so much water about us in this world, is it important for us for good health?  Water is a very important part of our lives, both inside and outside the body.  We need to drink 6 to 8 good sized glasses of clean water each day.  A good health habit to develop, is to drink 2 to 3 glasses of warm water upon getting out of bed, at least 20 minutes before eating breakfast.  This helps to flush out the stomach and digestive tract and by drinking 20 minutes before eating, does not dilute the acid juices needed to break down the food when it comes into the stomach at meal time.  For this reason it is not good to drink with any meal, as the food stays longer than needed in the stomach and starts to ferment and builds up bad gases and can cause discomfort which does not need to happen.

The blood needs a good supply of clean water as well to go around our body's blood system to keep it running well.  If we could follow our blood into all the hidden places of our bodies, we would find that it picks up poisons from the body and water is very much needed as the blood goes through the kidneys and filters out all those poisons and washes it out through the urinary system.  Their work is made much easier if we drink plenty of clean water and the body will keep healthier as well.  Also if we have trouble with passing solid wastes (constipation), this can often be relieved by drinking a good supply of warm water.

On the outside, We must not forget that our skin is another very important organ that eliminates body wastes.  A bath or shower every day cleans the skin of germs and impurities, helping all the organs inside the body do their work.  All our clothes and bedding should be kept fresh and clean as well, washed in clean water.

In times of illness, a good intake of water is very good and helps the way for a quicker recovery.  People suffering from colds, fever, infections and viruses will be greatly helped by increasing the water intake.  Water on the inside and the outside also assists nature to keep out disease.

Anatomy of Water

by DR. CHARLES THOMAS, PhD

Water is odorless, colorless and tasteless.  Yet it plays an unusual role in the affairs of the world.  As a chemical it is unique.  It is a compound of great stability, a remarkable solvent and a powerful source of chemical energy.

"If water, the most common substance on earth, suddenly began to behave as its molecular makeup suggests, life would be overwhelmed by a series of unparalled disasters.  Blood would boil in the body, plants and trees would wither and die, and the world would be transformed into an arid waste.  But water molecules are bound together in ways unlike those of any other compound,- for this reason they possess properties that are unique and paradoxical" (Life Science Library, Water, P.16).

Water's bag of tricks bulges with surprises.  One of these is its ability to creep uphill under certain conditions.  Without this characteristic, known as capillary action, the flow of water containing necessary nutrients to plants and trees would stall in the soil.  In the human body, blood, which is largely water, would never complete its circuit around the body.

The explanation for this phenomenon lies in the very nature of water molecules which are bound to each other in almost every direction.  For this reason, they also bind to a variety of other substances, such as glass, clay or soil.  In fact, almost any solid that has oxygen in it will bond with the hydrogen in water.  Thus, when water is placed in a glass tube, the molecules on the edge reach for and adhere to the molecules of glass just above them hauling the rest of the chain along with them.  The surface tension, in turn, pulls the entire body of water to a new level. The molecules at the edge then repeat the process, and the water smoothly continues its ascent.  It ends only when the pull of gravity is too great to overcome.

Water, which often appears to follow a set of natural laws all its own, behaves most outlandishly when it forms ice.  For one thing, unlike most other compounds, it is lighter in the solid form than it is as a liquid.  Even as it changes from a liquid to a solid, water acts contrary to expectations.  At first it follows the universal pattern of cooling: it contracts, and grows heavier and more dense.  But when cooled below 39 degrees Fahrenheit, it suddenly begins to expand and grow lighter and less dense.  The reason for this lies, again, in the hydrogen bonds that exist between water molecules.  As they cool, the molecules slow up and begin crowding together.  At 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the bonds halt the molecules and fix them at "arm's length" from one another in light-weight crystals of ice.  As a result, it floats when it freezes.  If this did not happen in nature and ice were heavier than water, it would continuously sink to the bottom, where the sun's rays could not melt it. Slowly an ice pack would build upward until the world's oceans, rivers and lakes would become frozen solid.

An adequate water supply is literally a matter of life or death, not only for human beings but for every form of animal and plant life, from the lowliest amoeba to the tallest redwood tree.  A man would soon die if he lost as little as 12 per cent of his body's water.  Almost every organism is heavily dependent on water for better than 50 per cent of its body weight.  Water dissolves and distributes such necessities of life as carbon dioxide, oxygen and salts.  In the human body water is essential for blood circulation, waste removal and even muscle movements.

Water defies barriers to penetrate the living cells through a process known as osmosis.  This allows water molecules to cross living membranes which apparently will not admit water in the form of drops of liquid.  This can be demonstrated with cellophane which is a synthetic membrane quite similar to natural ones. Cellophane is watertight in the sense that a drop of water placed on its surface will not drip through.  Yet water molecules do diffuse through cellophane despite its apparently smooth and continuous structure.  Like all substances, a membrane is composed of molecules.  And molecules, no matter how tightly they are packed together, have spaces between them.  The spaces are large enough to offer easy passage to water molecules but are far too small to let water penetrate in packages as large as a drop.  Thus a drop may pass through the barrier, a few molecules at a time.

This property of water is essential in different parts of the human body; one of these being the nucleus pulposus, the jellylike substance found in the center of the intervertebral disc.  This part of the disc does not have its own blood supply.  In fact, in adult discs the cells of the nucleus may be as much as five to eight millimeters from any blood vessel.  It receives its nutrition through the permeable part of vertebrae adjacent to the disc, and capillaries and tissue fluid surrounding the outer covering of the disc.  The nucleus pulposus contains a very high percentage of water, from between 70 to more than 80 per cent.  With the pressure exerted by daily activity, e.g. standing, and bending, moving-water droplets can be squeezed out which are absorbed into the blood stream.  As the discs lose water they of course become thinner, and sufficient dehydration can occur during a day's activities to result in a loss of height of 3/4 inch in an adult male.  During rest in bed and sleep, when the pressure on the discs is the least, water is reabsorbed from the blood stream and the original height is gained.

There is no stagnant water in the body.  All the water molecules present in any part of the body at any given moment are somewhere else seconds later, and have been replaced by new molecules.  Much of  this water is recirculated and used over and over again, but close to two and a half quarts [litres] a day - an amount equal to the daily intake - is permanently removed, or excreted, in various ways.  There is a small but steady outflow through the tear glands, which produce a salty secretion that lubricates and cleans the eyes.  The sweat glands use up about a pint of water each day in cooling the skin's surface by evaporation. The normal breathing process draws off another pint or so as exhaled air carries moisture out of the lungs.  But nowhere does the body's water perform a more vital function than in the kidneys where it serves as the medium which purges waste from the bloodstream.  Fifteen times an hour, all the blood in the body passes through the two kidneys.  A man cannot live more than three weeks ith uncleansed blood.

"In health and in sickness, pure water is one of heaven's choicest bkssings.  Its proper use promotes health.  It is the beverage which God provided to quench the thirst of animals and man.  Drunk freely, it helps to supply the necessities of the system and assists nature to resist disease (Ministry of Healing p. 237.)

Maybe because of its availability or its seeming innocuous characteristics, water is rarely used by humans to its fullest capacity. The varying properties of its different forms (steam, liquid and ice) can be aids to body healing.  Very few places avail themselves of this simple, natural agent.  At Desert Springs Therapy Center, water plays a large role in the therapy offered to patients.  Steam is used for fever therapy and inhalations for upper respiratory infection.  Fomentations heated by steam play an important role in many conditions. Liquid water is used extensively in the form of the hot mineral pool and the larger cold/cool pool, and in conjunction with other treatments.  Ice massage, salt glow and cold mitten friction are modalities used very frequently to stimulate or tone muscle fibers.

Water can be used by all to promote self healing and cleansing of the body. We need to become knowledgeable of its many surprising qualities so we can best use them to our benefit.

Desert Springs Therapy Center
66705 East Sixth Street
Desert Hot Springs.  CA 92240 USA

References
1. Gosh, P., The Biology of the Intervertebral Disc. CRC Press, Boca Raton, 1988.
2. Hollinshead, W., Jenkins, D.B., Functional Anatomy of Limbs and Back, WB Saunders Co. Philadelphia, 1981.
3. White, E.G., Ministry of Healing, Pacific Press Publishing Association, California, 1974
4. Life Science Library, Water, Time Inc., New York.






The following is an fascinating article about how a doctor discovered the miraculous healing properties of water.

It is written by Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D. the author of the book "Your Body's Many Cries for Water" (Global Health Solutions Inc., P.O. Box 3189, Falls Church, VA 22043 USA).

"Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, I was unjustly arrested with other members of my family and put in a political prison.  While in solitary confinement, I abstained from food and drank only water. Gradually, I began to notice that besides diminishing my hunger, the water seemed to ease my anxiety.

Then late one night, I was asked to examine a fellow prisoner suffering from a peptic ulcer.  His condition had deteriorated to such a degree that he needed assistance in walking.  No conventional medications were available to me.  The patient, doubled in pain, agreed to drink two glasses of water.  Within minutes, he was pain free.  I instructed him to drink two glasses every three hours.  He was absolutely painfree during the four months he was in my block; his ulcer was gone.

Many people were being executed in the prison, and I figured that sooner or later, I would be too.  Before time ran out, I wanted to bring this medical finding - the pain relieving properties of water - into better focus and document it.  Because my captors gradually recognized my usefulness, I eventually became a prison doctor, which bought me time to conduct my research.

During the two years and seven months of my imprisonment, I continued to ponder water's ability to relieve pain.  I used it successfully to treat stress, which I also discovered contributes to thirst in the human body.  The relationship between dehydration, stress, and disease conditions had no precedence in modem and science-based medical teaching, so I attempted to develop a scientific explanation.

Even though my captors offered to release me four months early, I stayed at the prison until my research was completed.  I eventually crossed the border into Turkey; then came to the United States, where I arrived in time to edit an article I had earlier managed to have smuggled out of Iran.  It became the main editorial of the June, 1983, issue of the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology and was also published by the New York Times. My discovery and its documentation became public information to be further investigated by medical researchers.

In 1987 I presented my findings of water's pain-relieving properties as a guest lecturer at an  international conference of cancer researchers in Greece.  The article on pain was published in the Journal of Anticancer Research in 1987.  In 1989, I was asked to participate in the Third Interscience World Conference on Inflammation.  At this conference I exposed the primary water regulatory function of the neurotransmitter histamine in the human body, The more detailed aspects of my findings on the functions of water and the various damages caused by chronic dehydrating were published in a series of articles in Science in Medicine Simplified and distributed among university researchers.  In just a few years I had defined water's medicinal value and presented my findings to a cross-section of scientists in different parts of the world.

My research has led me to believe that chronic dehydration is the root cause of many diseases.  Water has medicinal value in helping relieve such ailments as peptic ulcer and its dyspeptic pain, rheumatoid joint pain, back pain, anginal pain, hypertension, asthma, allergy, raised cholesterol, and chronic fatigue, which I believe are often the result of dehydration.  If we learn to drink water on a. regular basis and do not rely on a thirst sensation, we can reduce our reliance on pharmaceutical products and the need for invasive medical procedures.  First we must understand that thirst alone is not an accurate-indicator, and that because of their diuretic effects tea, coffee, soda, and alcoholic beverages are not suitable substitutes for water.

Once the public recognizes the emergency thirst signals of the body and begins to understand the health problems caused by chronic dehydration, the results will be better health for all and a drastic reduction in health care costs."