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How our health returns

STOCKTAKING HEALTH

HEALTH IS DECLINING

We constantly read and hear it in the media that our health has been improving for decades and we are therefore living longer and getting older and older.

More and more clever diagnostics discover more and more potential to regain health, but also the tireless work to finally defeat cancer, give us the hope to finally become healthy all over again, until the moment that we have our own cancer and the cycle of chemo, radiation and operations begins.

When a cold makes me bedridden and I have to go to the doctor in the morning because I need a sick note, then I see the reality of medical miracles. It hurts me deeply when I see all the catastrophic clinical pictures in the waiting room and I can be sure that these people will come out just as they went in. ‘Again he has pumped me full of cortisone, I can't stand it any longer,’ said a patient in the waiting room recently. A year before, another tearstained patient said: ‘I don't care if I don’t have an appointment, I'm staying here until I’m seen.’

When I walk through the cemeteries and look at the ‘average’ life expectancy, I just don't see this promised longevity. Dying appears to start at about 45 years of age, hits a peak at about 70 years, only to flatten out again decisively after that. Pension funds nowadays expect an average of 90 years, but in the cemeteries, the average is under 70. It almost looks as if we are paying too much for 20 years. How can that be?

Health has a low priority in our society; there are so many young ill people who are unlikely to recover if there is no fundamental change in the current healing strategy for people. Although many things are so obvious, taking appropriate action and providing relief to those who suffer seems to be a constant problem for our health industry. It’s not just the much-needed healing we are having to wait for, but also the responsibility for this healing is still being passed on to our genes, to our parents, even our grandparents. Not to mention all the many incurable illnesses that exist, from which, by definition, we cannot hope to be rescued.

On closer inspection, healing seems to me to be almost a matter of luck, according to the motto: ‘Unfortunately, I have bad luck, because my mother and grandmother died of intestinal cancer, so I’ll probably also die of it. At least I have a tendency, called a disposition in medicine, to fall ill with this disease and, consequently, to die of it.’

Do we not feel powerless and perhaps a little angry that God has put us into this world in such a vulnerable state?

Who actually has the right to classify a disease as incurable? What are these institutions that are allowed to say things just like that, in order to print it anywhere on paper, so that we humans accept it as a God-given truth and lie down to die?

Again and again, the lack of knowledge in all areas of the health system is striking. Physical discomfort is often diagnosed incorrectly while actual emergency situations are either dismissed as ‘all fine’ or are not recognised at all, which is always the case when we run from Pontius to Pilate and no one can find anything wrong with us, so that at some point we already believe ourselves to be confused.

After realising that many people were healthier and more powerful than me, I was convinced that there must be rules, that my sad state could not be God-given. So, I started to read books on this subject and tried to build my health up with simple therapies. Although these therapies all had a degree of logic to them, it took me a while before I made my breakthrough. Then, from one day to another, I felt a little fresher somehow and even the hair on my head appeared to grow thicker.

In the meantime, my interest in the subject and my wish to have an official healing permit has meant I am now an alternative practitioner. The most loyal and resilient person that I test is myself, as I am always willing to try some absurd therapies in the view of normal mortals.

Until today, my health successes have not ended. I recognise this outwardly in many small details and in my increased strength and endurance during sports.

My somewhat delayed mental activity has increased again, and my younger appearance has given me joy.

Being close to success now, I deal almost exclusively with the regeneration of the body. I consider it to be an area that fills surprisingly little space in the literature, but it promises unbelievable success for all of us personally, because regeneration actually means that we get a little fitter every year and, at some point, we will even begin to look slightly younger.

HOW DO WE RECOGNISE OLD AGE?

We say he or she has grown old, but if we had to describe the small, individual changes in words, we would have to briefly consider what actually motivates us to use the word ‘old’. We would probably soon get the idea ourselves that ageing is actually only a process of the body decaying and so it has less to do with the ageing that exists in our imagination. Weird, isn’t it?

What is still the attraction of old age, to know that we are all degenerating, simply falling apart?

Several people know this, many people assume it and find ageing anything but funny, but unfortunately, they are still too far away conceptually to ask the all-important question of why. So why do we degenerate?

Ageing means that the functions of the body are visibly reduced. Only rarely do these functions disappear completely. Close up we can see it: missing hair, white hair, incorrect posture, a collapsed body, a hunchback, missing teeth, receding gums, too big ears, noses, hands and feet, pale skin, age spots on the hands, arms, face and décolleté. The buttocks become flat and lowered, women's breasts too, and bloated bellies complete the picture of the figure's derailments. Wrinkles all over the body, the white in the eyes has gone, an ‘old’ murmuring voice, a hearing aid, apathy, shortness of breath during light exertion, narrow-mindedness, and missing facial expressions. But above all, I recognise that the joy of life is missing in people. Actually, glasses are also part of it – they should also be a sign of age, but even small children wear glasses. How can we explain that?

Where exactly is the wisdom of age that we can discover here? Hence, we should really avoid ageing, wherever possible. Our body should always be the most important thing to us in our stay here on Earth. No job or any other life pursuit should be allowed to cause us (excessive) degeneration. Youthfulness is the joy of life, everything else is a compromise that costs us our health and later, our life.

Ageing is only a collective term for bodily decay, the excessive degeneration of our body. The word ageing only came into our lives because we no longer believe in our immortality. We no longer believe that we are infinitely more than just repair-intensive robots.

So, it was said in the time of the ‘Golden Age’, before the decisive ‘fall of mankind’ many thousands of years ago, that none of the people suffered from the infirmity of old age, that the day passed quietly and happily, that people lived equally with each other, and then when the time came for them to go, they simply passed over, in a gentle and soft sleep, to the other side.

WOMEN LIVE SEVEN YEARS LONGER

Often, we hear that women live, on average, 7 years longer than men and that this is a privilege of women. And this seems to be the case; women are often the ones who are left in a relationship, even when their male partners are a little older.

I think no one has the official answer as to why this is. Alternative practitioners seem to know more and name menstruation as being the main reason for this phenomenon, because the ejection of 20 to 50 millilitres of blood after a monthly cycle would correspond to a small bloodletting, which allows the body to get rid of all the bad substances and old burdens of about 40 years of its life on Earth.

This downright ingenious idea of menstruation was taken over in the Middle Ages and practised as bloodletting on the rich, as they also struggled with heart and circulation diseases hundreds of years ago. Today, it is out of fashion, only alternative practitioners offer it partially.

But there are other reasons for a longer life too; because the general way of life is also decisive. Unfortunately, many people misjudge this and so we do not use our potential. Only a few decades ago, men tended to live in a rather excessive way, usually at the expense of their health. To take time off from your working life, as it is easy to do today, was seen as a sign of weakness. Furthermore, they rightly feared they wouldn’t be taken back into the workforce after a break and would drift off into long-term unemployment.

Since then, the world has changed rapidly and now the behaviour of men and women has become similar. It almost seems that the classic housewife is only found in rural areas. Career men are rare to find due to a lack of alternatives, so the professional life has been devalued and become a mere source of income, and thus fallen behind our private life. Private life is now becoming more important, which is probably a new experience for men.

In contrast, women today are more exposed to a more stressful life as they balance their work and family, so women’s health has become tense and men’s relaxed, so it is likely that, on average, we will see no significant difference in the life expectancies of men and women over the next few years, unless we approach health completely differently.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

We are now doing a lot for our health. We are working on our nutrition, avoiding stress, going to yoga and we have even started doing some sports again. And when all this becomes too much for us, we tell ourselves that we are not young anymore and tend to give up again because we think it all has little impact anyway.

The issue of health is fuzzy, no matter how we approach the subject. The health freak dies before us, the chain smoker after us. Somehow, we are going around in circles, not understanding the rules. There is much discussion and writing on health – it’s a growing, billion-dollar market, a bastion of the economy. Diseases are exploding, especially cancer, as a lingering warning to us, but there is no turnaround in sight. Why not?

There is much confused reporting about healing, so it took me a while to separate the wheat from the chaff and take the right steps at the right time. Mostly, success arises from our own suffering, in cases where illness almost wiped us off the planet – and it was the same with me. Strangely enough, whenever we are forced to think, to decide on whether to live or die, we develop the right ideas to free ourselves from our decline.

If there is one thing I have learnt in my life, it is there is nothing more important than having a healthy body, and only that makes life fun. Surprisingly, at that point, we don't care about ageing, because we act the same way we did when we were young – we just live our lives full of energy, full of curiosity.

In reality, we are usually far away from a healthy body. We do not even have a concrete idea of what healthy means at all. Are we healthy when the doctor says we are healthy? Or are we simply healthy when we feel healthy? By redefining not-sick as healthy at some point in time, we have clean forgotten what the original meaning of health was.

Thereby it is quite simple: we are healthy when we look 30 but we are actually 60 – and feel the same way. End of story. Health means nothing else other than: to have the power of youth and to still look as fresh. The reason we are so far from this today is simply that we have aged ourselves by mistake. The decline of we humans is therefore not a law of nature, it is purely homemade, made by ourselves.

Restoring this state of youth is anything but easy. Nevertheless, there is an unexpected number of 100-year-olds who already have a good idea of how the game works, as was once shown in a documentary on television. New knowledge and a renewed motivation to maintain health seem to be building and strengthening this trend. Moreover, ageing cannot even be proven scientifically.

Indeed, there are a number of approaches to what our mortality might ultimately be attached to, but these ideas have only short half-lives; so, after a few years, no one wants to hear them. So, it remains as it always has – no serious scientist can define ageing and it seems that our potential for good health is much higher than we generally think.

After achieving remarkable success with my modest activities, I would like to share the good news. I am certainly not interested in eternal life, but ‘only’ in a healthy life until the last day – a life without diseases, a life of health.

The German book, ‘! Stopp Die Umkehrung des Alterungsprozesses’ (STOP! Reversal of the ageing process) by Andreas Campobasso, which I got to read 10 years ago, left me speechless. He already had the knowledge that I was still searching for – man does not age, they die from their diseases. It is a popular scientific book and highly recommended, see the bibliography. For many years, I’d had my doubts about whether I would be able to gain from that. Today, almost by accident, I have found a very similar way for myself and, hopefully, for many others.

PARAGONS OF HEALTH – YOUNG PEOPLE

Purely by chance, I have noticed while travelling by train and seeing many students, mostly aged 18-30, how much loss I have driven into my body over the last few decades. So I recognise obvious points every time, like how much brighter, cleaner, smoother and firmer their skin is. Also, the hands with the mostly perfect smooth fingernails, which lie in flawless nail beds make me look wistfully. With the teeth, it is even more obvious; they are all white, flat and well-formed, standing neatly nicely side by side, embedded in light pink gums, which lie softly on the teeth, leaving no gaps. Their body weight is also remarkable, which is, on average, one-third lower than it is for the 50+ generation. Their hair is shiny, full, without any gaps or grey strands, and is worn in a manner that already pains me to see. Also, they don’t know how short-lived their happiness will be and pay far too little attention to their body. It is so unbelievable and meanwhile embarrassing to me how the condition is 30 years later.

That's exactly where I have to go, I keep thinking of this sight and try and extrapolate the progress of the last few years. Although I’ve achieved a lot for myself, I still realise that I am far from reaching my goal.

But in the meantime, I have understood that we don't have to look as sad as we do, and that encourages me to keep searching and working on my health year after year, so that maybe it will come true once again:

Look 30 when you’re actually 60.