Ian - The Miracle of Aging and Longevity

PANDEMIC OF DISEASES

O ur world appears to be turned upside down. The length of our lifespans has shown steady increases in recent decades, up until Covid-19. Education in fitness and dieting fills many bestseller lists. Medical research has taken strides to categorize the hardest-to-define diseases. Technology can put us into contact with the most hidden corners at lightning speed. But a look at the environments that matter defies these stellar expectations. Diseases in this highly evolved civilization are horrific and devastating, and it is certainly not only covid-19. Coronary heart disease, more than 100 types of cancers, and more than 600 neurologic diseases are just three examples of diseases that have been classified over the past decades. This may be surprising, because these diseases involve malfunction of our blood vessels and mitochondria, the two aspects of our bodies that are directly involved in fitness and diets. Where humanity has taken large steps forward, we also have significantly stepped backward.

Those of us who have worked with patients in hospitals know. People are hooked up to computerized contrivances, tubes sticking into and out of their bodies. Ghastly auras are isolated by the machinery that is meant to prolong their lives. We are no longer torn to pieces by wild animals in the forests. The enemy is the disruption within our bodies that creeps up on us unknown, unexpected until life is withdrawn. We end up behind the thick hospital walls that are meant to protect us, the public, and the medical personnel, from an invisible enemy. And in many instances, also from each other. Covid-19 pulled a small amount of that into the public eye.

We are faced with a massive human energy crisis. The ones who pay the price, if by the price we mean physical and emotional suffering, are those who contract horrific civilization diseases. I do not mean to speak only of the emotional and physical energies that can be observed by us. Or of the spiritual suffering of those interested in preventive care who know they can never know enough. It is one thing to see and feel; it is another to be. We are, in the sense that we exist as cellular organisms, even if we dont see or feel according to the common definitions of the terms. Any of our physiological processes, including those of which we are unaware, require energy, or vitality. Human vitality is an ancient spiritual undertaking with very concrete implications for todays physical human body. Human vitality has been defined in many different forms. The best well-known to us is soul, mind, or spirit, but for this book, we will use the form of Qi.

Qi is the term from Eastern medicine for the vitality or life force that moves our blood by the use of many physiological processes. The vitality of Qi is in its connection to the universal life force of the universe. Contemporary cell biology has broken down this spiritual connection into its very convincing physiological counterparts. Disruption of the cycle creates the many invisible ruptures, obstructions, and distortions that accumulate, break in, and land us within those maximum-security hospital walls. The existence and functions of Qi have been demonstrated in contemporary western science if one looks at this science in its totality. In the end effect, all knowledge to solve the dilemma is at our fingertips.

But wait readers will disagree. Was it not always the same? Wasnt it disruptions in energy cycles that placed us in the paths of hungry wild animals, or of advancing armies of the enemy, for at least thousands of years? Wasnt the universal life force derailed when it attracted us, or the enemy, to places where neither one of us should have been? Arent people not now also attracted by the same mistaken force, even if now to places on an abstract invisible energy grid that may be in the process of collapse? Even if the attraction is to an intangible, it is still the life force that in all instances is irredeemably broken.

But the present is of greater magnitude. It is not the place, or the outside, that would prove to be nefarious. We could have devised the means to vanquish those wild animals and the enemy armies. It is our own Qi that now turns against us. We live in an era in which for whatever reason the elementary vitality which we human beings use to exert any move or expression has instead decided to destroy itself and with that, has turned against us to destroy us as well. Moral, social, and political philosophers will point to any number of factors for this abnormality, which in essence is an imbalance. They can point to pride or excessive humility, to outsized aggression or ill-defined pacifism, to name just two. They can point to the imbalance that exists, of outlandish proportions, between having and not having, between those who have all comforts at the tip of their finger, and those who on this planet still have to die of starvation. But the source is much deeper, and of a nature that cannot be as easily experienced and observed. In a twist of events, we cannot be forced to subject ourselves to unwanted medical treatments, to eat diets we despise, or to follow exercise regimens we deem uncomfortable but as strange as it sounds, we can force ourselves to self-destruct.

Medical experts will refer to autoimmune diseases, in which the bodys immune system attacks itself, to cancer when our bodies defenses fail to do their job, and to cardiovascular diseases when our immune cells cannot support the healing process. And of course, to covid-19 that studies have shown to lead to new onset of autoimmune disease. The purines are the chemical compounds in the human body that provide us with energy and control the cell growth necessary to maintain the equilibrium in our physiological processes that the diseased conditions lack. The purines manner of work in our bodies is not self-evident and can be counterintuitive. Research on the purines has flourished abundantly in these past few years. Purines are omnipresent in our bodies and can be controlled to help in the treatment of many diseases. They are present since day 0 as the stem cells that make the fetus grow. We will now delve into the details that make our bodies tick as well as, on the other side of the coin, self-destruct. To ourselves as the movers of this universe, we have a tremendous responsibility.