Stay young!
Picture source: InstantRiceDrink.com
The most important step in avoiding sickness is to get your immunity working in tip-top condition. This is so important that the next six steps in avoiding sickness are all somehow related to boosting immune system too! When we fall ill, it is only because our immune system has somehow failed to do its job. The key concept in avoiding sickness is therefore to boost our immunity.
No matter how we look at immunity, one thing that stays consistent are young people getting sick-less frequently than older people. Human at the age of 18 to 25 years old is at the peak of their health because they have the strongest immune system. We know from experience and observation that these young people are not necessarily leading healthy lifestyles and yet their immunity is still envied by most of us who are much older.
As an anti-aging (preventive) doctor, I know now that human youthfulness is very much depending on delicate hormonal balances. We may get old chronologically, but we can maintain youthfulness by mimicking hormone levels to that of a 20 year old human. Fortunately, these hormones are now available in the form of supplements. They are easily available from all doctors who are trained in anti-aging medicines. It is therefore extremely important that we all should stay as ‘young’ as possible, to avoid sickness.
Be Cool!
Try to identify the happiest person around you, who is always genuinely cheerful and smiling. If indeed there is one, the chances are, he or she may be the healthiest one too. Happiness is the key to health! – It is not the other way around. However, it is not the happiness that promotes health, but is the lack of stress that does the trick. Therefore, to avoid being sick, you have to be happy, be stress-less and indeed be cool all the time!
It is a known fact that the more stressful your life is, the more likely you will fall sick. This sickness may not be necessarily just simple cough and cold, but stress can also cause high blood pressure, heart diseases, diabetes and cancers. Considering that all these diseases are major causes of death in our society, we can also safely say that stress is the major killer in our life.
There are thousand methods to reduce your stress. However, one method consistently proven to be very effective is summed up in these few words of wisdom – ‘don’t worry, be happy’- or now I would like to call it as ‘be cool’.
To avoid sickness therefore, one could do it just by being happy. Find happiness at all cost. Create that happiness within you. Bathe in all your cells in euphoric happiness. If you cannot find it, pretend to be happy until you get it right. If you cannot find happiness then sickness is truly belongs to you.
Source: tribune.com.pk
Get enough deep sleep
Everyone knows or should know that sleep has many stages. The most beneficial stage of sleep is called REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. This is the deepest stage of sleep and where dreams usually occur. REM sleep is usually achieved after 30 to 90 minutes of being asleep. This is where your body has its deepest rest and where sleeps actually ‘counts’.
It is well known that during deep sleep our body heals itself. It is during the deepest sleep that our body restores and recharges our immune system so that we can have a protective shield against diseases for the next 24 hours. What you probably do not know is the restoration actually depends a lot on a spurt of a hormone called Human Growth Hormone (HGH) from our brain. Without it, the restoration and healing only happen minimally.
It is also now discovered that HGH is very time-sensitive in its release from human brain. This is something to do with our biological clock (circadian rhythm). Studies have demonstrated that HGH only being produced and release around 1.00 am in the morning and only when we are at REM stage. Folks, that means we got to go to bed around 11.00 pm the latest so we can reach REM by 1.00 am at night to benefit from this. That of course, assuming that you don’t have the problem of ‘Obstructive Sleep Apnoea’ where you think you are asleep but actually not. If you habit all this while is to go to bed well past midnight, then you now understand why that ‘cough and cold’ seems so stubborn to disappear.
Do not be too full
‘Do not be too full’ means do not indulge in food. Some would say, avoid gluttony. This fact has been documented repeatedly in various scientific literatures. To live healthy, one must restrict calorie intake to the point of almost feeling hungry all the time. Of course not many of us can tolerate the sensation of being hungry all the time. However, we still can harvest the benefit of calorie restriction by eating just enough to ease the hunger pangs. Once the hunger gone, stop eating and wait for the next meal time.
Consider the old folklores of some ancient monks in solitary meditation in some caves, rivers, mountains or temples. The tales often narrate how these meditators are usually superior in strength, health and wisdom. Other mortals purportedly long to seek their wisdom or learn their superior and mystical ability. Think about it for a moment, there is always some basis of truth in every myth and legends. The meditation is usually done in almost complete absence of foods except some limited but nutritious ones. They are actually in what we now called as caloric restricted diet. In such state, scientists now have proven that they can become healthy, relatively strong and able to think wisely.
Scientifically, the concept is called ‘Calorie Restriction with Adequate Nutrition’ or ‘CRAN’ for simplicity. This concept has been proven to promote health or even heal diseases better than any other available medicines. There are a lot of observations and other form of evidences suggesting that in a caloric restricted state, the first cells to die are the diseased and cancerous ones. You and I now have a very good reason to restrict our calorie intact!
Studies also have shown that during hunger state, a hormone called IGF-1 is released by the liver. This hormone helps us to synthesise the precise amount of sugar needed just to cope with hunger. At the same time it also involves in restoring and repairing cel ldamage.
For simplicity, think of it in this way, every time we feel the hunger pangs, we are actually in ‘repair mode’. When we start eating, the ‘repair mode’ ends and the ‘storage mode’ starts. When we are too full, we are in ‘damaged mode’, not unlike the overloading of systems in a computer.
So, to avoid sickness, we know which mode our body should be spending more time with – the hunger ‘repair mode’
Do not poison yourself
It is quite surprising that lots of people are very fussy with what goes into their car petrol tanks compare to what goes into their mouth. They will buy all sorts of fuel additives, fuel enhancers and various engine cleaners for their cars and yet could not care the same for their body. They argue that their car is very a fine and expensive machine and therefore deserve the best care their money can provide. However the same people do not think their body deserves equally better ‘fuel’. They forgot that they only have one body and in most cases, no spare parts are available.
The sad story does not stop just there. Some people go even further to destroy their body. Not only they have failed to select the right fuels for their body, they even fill it up with pure poison. I am talking about those people who are constantly poisoning themselves with two of the most easily available poisons to human being – cigarettes and alcohol. The first step to livinga healthy life is to avoid these two poisons. If you cannot get above this first step, obviously the exercise, the supplements, the right foods, the constant medical check-ups and the various others health measures are just for nothing. It is like spending thousands of ringgits on your turbo petrol engines but filling it up with diesel. It is just plain wrong and wasteful!
For most people, avoiding the first two poisons – cigarettes and alcohol – is sufficient enough to ward off significant numbers of illness and diseases.
Unclog your sewer
Your body-sewer system is called the lymphatic system. This is a network of tubes all over your body functioning as drainage of waste products, to be expelled out of your body through your natural orifices. Needless to mention, to avoid being sick, this network of sewer must be regularly emptied, otherwise waste and toxic substances will ‘overflow’ inside your body and will cause diseases.
Unlike your blood vessels which have a heart as a pump, your lymphatic system has none to expel its contents. The system is only equipped with one-way valve to ensure one-way flow. Without a pump, you have to wonder how the contents get emptied. Please remember that some of the flow directions are against the gravity. The answer is surprisingly very easy – physical exercise!
Yes, you read it right. As much as you detest the word, physical exercise is the single most effective way in pumping the content of your sewer system. To be truthful, any muscle movement will pump the sewer in the direction of the valve. However, only during heavy physical activity involving all muscles that the sewer system gets fully drained and cleaned. Just moving your poor legs from a couch to a dinner table unfortunately would not do it. The more sedentary lifestyle you lead, the more pathetic is the pump mechanism and the more horrid is the clogged and overflowed sewer.
All these sewer contents are full of disease laden materials. The longer they stay in your body, the sicker you become. That is why, in breast cancer operation, they remove all the sewer tubes in and around the breast. They are all full of cancerous materials.
Yet, many people do not bother to regularly empty and unclog their sewer system by doing heavy physical exercise. No wonder many of us are always sick. It is due to the clogged and overflowing sewer system. Yuck!
Source: dictionary.reference.com
Feed and arm your soldiers
Our body has its own ‘soldiers’ to protect from bacteria and virus invasion. These ‘soldiers’ are the white blood cells. For these soldiers to be efficient fighting machines, they have to be armed with various chemicals such as antibodies, digestive enzymes, cytokines and various other substances. At the same time, these soldiers need to be fed with various nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants and other substances. To avoid being sick, our soldiers must be constantly fed and armed. When was the last time you feed and arm your soldiers with state-of-the-art rations and ammunitions?
How about vaccination, you may ask? Vaccination is a process where a dead (non-virulent) virus or other disease-causing particles is injected into our body, with the hope that our soldiers will recognise it as an enemy and therefore can act to ‘locate and neutralise’. If and when the actual living virus finally infects our body, the same soldiers hopefully can act in the similar way but much faster to destroy the virus before illness can start. As you can see, vaccination is really a method of ‘training’ our soldiers. At the same time, I hope you can understand that training a bunch of hungry and unarmed soldiers is almost useless. This is why vaccination does not help in some cases. This is true when you are ‘barely’ healthy. In fact, in this scenario, a false sense of security may allow the vaccinated person to be unnecessarily exposed to the virus and consequently fall sick.
So, to avoid falling sick, the most important thing to do is to feed and arm your soldiers to the best you can. If you are ‘always’ snorting with mucous up your nose and phlegm down your throat, you can be assured that your soldiers are not in the best of shape. That also means you are at risk of being invaded by the enemies out there.
This article was written by the Malaysian Medical Gazette’s columnist Dr. Rizin H Kusop who is currently the proprietor and MO in charge of a group practice franchise in Sabah who has a special interest in Anti-aging, Regenerative and Aesthetics medicine. Find out more about him at The Team page.
[This article belongs to The Malaysian Medical Gazette. Any republication (online or offline) without written permission from The Malaysian Medical Gazette is prohibited.]
References:
- Belloc NB. Relationship of health practices and mortality. Preventive Medicine. 1973; 2(1): 67-81.
- Breslow L and Enstrom J. Persistence of health habits and their relationship to mortality. Preventive Medicines. 1980; 9(4): 469-483.
- Wiley JA and Camacho TC. Life-style and future health: evidence form Alameda County study. Preventive Medicines.1980; 9(1): 1-21.
- Goldman R and Klatz R. The new anti-aging revolution. Australasian Edition. Petaling Jaya Malaysia: Advantage Quest Publication; 2007
Dear Drs
Saya ada ketulan kecil di pangkal paha yang baru-baru ini kawasan sekeliling menjadi merah seperti bisul. Saya ke hospital dan doktor memberi antibiotik sapu dan makan. Dia juga menerangkan yang kemungkinan ada cyst. Bolehkah lelaki ada cyst?
Terima kasih