Physicians rarely promote the curative properties of H2O, but Dr. Batmanghelidj, M.D. has studied water's effect on the human body and has found it to be one of the best pain relievers and preventative therapies in existence. I was one of the last people to interview the late Dr. Batmanghelidj, and I listened in awe as he shared his research and stories about "The Healing Power of Water."
In a fascinating one-hour phone conversation, Dr. B. shares:
• Which common ailments and "diseases" are actually caused by dehydration
• Why many doctors use water-regulating antihistamines to alleviate pain
• How Dr. Batmanghelidj unintentionally discovered water's healing properties
• Why most people are chronically dehydrated and suffer from symptoms of dehydration that are labeled "diseases"
• Which ingredients in soft drinks deplete the body's water reserves
• Why thirst is not a reliable indicator of dehydration
• Why the body produces cholesterol and how water keeps it in balance
• Why Dr. Batmanghelidj believes the public is being mislead about AIDS
• How dehydration impairs mental functioning
• Why some organizations want to withhold alternative health information from the public
• How lack of water causes depression
• Why popular beverages are no substitute for water
• How dehydration causes the vascular system to constrict, leading to hypertension
• How to recognize signs that your body is starting to dehydrate
• Why restaurants push you to drink disease-promoting soft drinks
• Why and how water effectively treats pain and inflammation
Discovery of the water cure
Mike: Welcome everyone, this is Mike Adams with Truth Publishing, and today I’m very excited to be welcoming Dr. Batmanghelidj, author of Water For Health, For Healing, For Life. Welcome, Dr. Batmanghelidj.
Dr. B: Thank you very much for inviting me to be on the air with you and giving me the opportunity of sharing my thoughts on the future of medicine in this country.
Mike: I think there are many, many people who have read your books. People are intrigued by the idea that water can be a therapy, a healing substance for the human body. What is it about water? How did you first become aware of these healing properties of water?
Dr. B: Well, it’s very bizarre. As you know, I’m a regular doctor, an M.D. I had the honor and the privilege of being selected as one of the house doctors, and I had the extreme honor of being one of the last students of Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. I mention his name so that you know I was immersed in medical school and research. And some years later, I had to give two glasses of water to a person who was doubled up in abdominal pain from his disease, because I had no other medication to give him at that moment. And he was in excruciating pain, and water performed miraculous relief for him. It gave him relief -- within three minutes his pain diminished, and within eight minutes it disappeared completely, whereas he was doubled up eight minutes before and he couldn’t even walk, he completely recovered from that situation. And he started beaming from ear to ear, very happy, asked me what happens if the pain comes back? I said, “Well, drink more water.” Then I decided to instruct him to drink two glasses of water every three hours. Which he did, and that was the end of his ulcer pains for the rest of the duration that he was with me.
Mike: And from that episode then, what happened next?
Dr. B: That woke me up, because in medical school I’d never heard that water could cure pain, that kind of pain, in fact. And so I had the occasion to test water as a medication in subsequently over 3,000 similar cases. And water proved every time to be an effective medication. I came away from that experience with the understanding that these people were all thirsty, and that thirst in the body can manifest itself in the form of abdominal pain to the level that the person can even become semi-conscious, because that’s the experience I had. And water picks them up every time.
So when I came to America in 1982, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, where I was invited to continue my research, and did research in the pain-relieving properties of water. I asked myself, why does the pharmaceutical industry insist on using antihistamines for this kind of pain medication? So I started researching the role of histamine in the body, and the answer was there -- histamine is a neurotransmitter in charge of water regulation and the drought management programs of the body. When it manifests pain, in fact, it is indicating dehydration.
So, the body does manifest dehydration in the form of pain. Now, depending on where dehydration is settled, you feel pain there. Very simple, and I presented this concept at the international conference as the guest lecturer of a conference on cancer, explaining that the human body manifests dehydration by producing pain, and pain is a sign of water shortage in the body, and water shortage is actually the background to most of the health problems in our society.
Because if you look at what the pharmaceutical industry is doing, they’re producing so many different antihistamines as medication. Antidepressant drugs are antihistamines, pain medication are antihistamines, other medications are directly and indirectly antihistamines. So, that is when my work was published, the scientific secretariat of the 3rd Interscience Board Conference of Inflammation invited me to make this presentation on histamine at their conference in 1989, in Monte Carlo. And I did that, and so it became a regular understanding that histamine is a water regulator in the body. But unfortunately, this information is not reaching the public through the medical community because it’s not a money-maker.
So that’s when I began to consider writing for the public, so that the public could become aware of the problem directly without the interference of a doctor, and that’s how I have generated all my medical information for the public. Of course, I have published extensively for the scientific community, but no one is picking up. In fact, the NIH, the Office of Alternative Medicine, had its first conference when the office was created, and I was asked to make my presentation, but when the proceedings of the conference came out, my presentation was censored after the proceedings. So there is a movement afoot within the NIH group of people to keep a closed lid on my information so that it doesn’t get out, because obviously they are more in favor of the drug industry, because it is now obvious that they are getting paid by them.
Mike: I think it is, first of all, that is an amazing account of what has been happening, and I think it is fair to say, too, that the pharmaceutical industry and organized medicine in general, really doesn’t want to promote anything that is free or near-free to the average patient. Sunlight is available at no charge, water is available at nearly no charge -- would you agree that their thinking is if people can cure their diseases, and achieve a high state of health on their own with these free substances, then that diminishes their profits and their importance?
Dr. B: Absolutely. That’s why I’ve created an organization now called National Association for Honesty in Medicine. Because I think it’s totally dishonest, in fact, criminal, to treat a person who is just thirsty, and give them toxic medication so that he gets sick and dies earlier than normal.
Mike: Can you give out the web address to that organization, by the way?
Dr. B: My website is
http://www.watercure.com -- it gives you the option of going to one site or the other -- either Water Cure.com, or you can go the National Association for Honesty in Medicine. Or you can go to the information side of my website,
http://www.watercure.com, because I have posted all of my scientific articles on dehydration on the website, and lots of other free information that people can have.
AIDS and the Pharmaceutical Industry
Mike: I want to applaud what I call your scientific curiosity. I think this is the kind of curiosity that has been lost in so much of western medicine, where a true scientist observes nature and observes the interaction between humans and nature, and remains curious and open and to all possibilities, and then forms conclusions after rigorous testing, and I think so much of modern science has drawn erroneous conclusions without really remaining open-minded...
Dr B: Yes, one of the worst ones is AIDS. Because everyone assumes that AIDS is actually a viral disease, which is a fraudulent statement by those people who presented it, because the human body is the product of many, many years of having fought various viral diseases, and has survived. Smallpox, polio, measles, and all the other viruses that can kill very easily, and the body has an ability to mount a defense system against these hot viruses, viruses that actually very quickly can kill. But having survived those, how is it possible that the slow virus would kill us in the name of AIDS? I can’t understand it.
I have researched this topic extensively, and I have shown in fact that AIDS is a metabolic problem, when the body begins to cannibalize its own tissue because of certain missing elements in the raw materials that it receives through food or beverages, and the body of a person who gets AIDS, actually, is short of quite a number of building block amino acids. They’re short of tyrosine, they’re short of methionine, cysteine, they’re short of histidine, and they’ve got a whole lot of others in excess. So how can we expect a body that depends on the other amino acids to survive?
Mike: Once again we see AIDS is a huge industry for the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. B: Well, of course it is, and the whole entire existence of the pharmaceutical industry is based on presentation of false science, and advertising this false science and drumming it into the minds of gullible people who have no curiosity to find out why that is so.
Cholesterol
Dr. B: Another false science is the question of cholesterol. Cholesterol is one of the most essential elements in the survival of the human body. When the body begins to make more cholesterol, it has a reason to do that. It is certainly not to block the arteries of the heart, because we measure the level of cholesterol in the body in the blood we take out of the veins of the body, and nowhere in the history of medicine is there recorded one single case of cholesterol ever having blocked the veins of the body.
So, it is not the stickiness of the cholesterol that is the problem, which the drug industry is drumming it into the minds of people -- cholesterol is sticky, reduce it otherwise you will have blockage of your arteries, which is all nonsense. Cholesterol is actually saving the lives of people, because cholesterol is a bandage, a waterproof bandage that the body has designed. When the blood becomes concentrated and acidic, and is being rushed through constricted arteries or capillaries, in dehydration, then abrasions and tears are produced in the arterial system, naturally, in the capillaries of the heart first.
Now if cholesterol wasn’t there to cover up the tear and abrasions, blood would get under the membrane and peel it off and that person would be dead instantly. Cholesterol is actually an interim lifesaver, giving the body time to recover from its problems. We never understood this. We are knee-jerk doctors. We think that something’s up, bring it down, if something’s down, bring it up. We don’t ask questions why is it down or why is it up?
Mike: And the pharmaceutical companies know that treating cholesterol is a huge industry...
Dr. B: It’s a ten-billion dollar industry. Now there is a report that actually these statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs produce amnesia. In other words, the brain totally loses track of what it’s doing, and it is published by a doctor who is an eminent doctor. He was a flight surgeon, he is a researcher at NASA. And he knows what he’s talking about. He had the problem himself.
Mike: I just wanted to comment on the number of side effects that have been recorded as side effects from using statin drugs. Some people have extreme muscular pain, that amnesia you mentioned seems to be very common, and yet a study just came out, I saw it this morning, talking about how blueberries have phytonutrients that are shown to lower so-called fatty cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, more powerfully than statin drugs.
Dr. B: It’s interesting, because you see, the body manufactures cholesterol as an emergency situation, when it raises the level of its production. Its normal rate of production is of course is to create membranes for the cell membranes and brain cells and nerve insulation and of course the hormones of the body, vitamin D for the body. So these are the essential components that cholesterol makes in the body. We should never interfere with cholesterol without knowing why the body has starting raising its level.
No substitute for water
Mike: I have a question for you on water -- a lot of people think that they are hydrating themselves when they consume soft drinks or milk or Gatorade or all these other liquid beverages…
Dr. B: Gatorade is possibly okay, but Gatorade has sugar in it, and it's not particularly good for people who might even get hypoglycemic, or might induce insulin secretion, and that insulin secretion will produce more hunger and they overeat. But as a temporary sport drink, it's okay when you're in the middle of a golf game to drink a Gatorade. It immediately gives you a bit of the minerals that you probably will have lost sweating.
But nothing substitutes for water -- not a thing. No drink -- no coffee, no tea, no alcoholic beverages. Not even fruit juices. Each one of them has its own agenda. Your body is used to a fluid that has no agenda, because the body depends on the freedom of that fluid, water, because there are two kinds of water in the body. There is already occupied and engaged water, which is no good for new function. The body needs new water, or free water, to perform new functions. Now, when you give them sugar containing beverages, or caffeine containing beverages, both sugar and caffeine have their own chemical agenda in the body. They defeat the purpose of the need for water.
Mike: You're also talking about soft drinks here…
Dr. B: I'm talking about soft drinks, I'm talking about sodas, I'm talking about caffeine containing coffee or tea. I'm also talking about alcohol, because alcohol actually stops the emergency water supply systems to the important cells, such as the brain cells. In the reverse osmosis process your body filters and injects water into the cells, and this is what I call reverse osmosis. And it has to raise the blood pressure for that in order to overcome the osmotic pull of water out of the cells, and reinject water into the cells. That's why we develop high-blood pressure in dehydration. And this process of reverse osmosis is stopped by alcohol. It stops the filter system.
Chronic Disease Caused by Lack of Water
Mike: Let me start this next section by asking you about the correlation between water consumption and chronic disease. There are many diseases you mention in your books that are related to dehydration. I wonder if you can give our readers a brief of what the major diseases are and why they are aggravated or promoted by chronic dehydration.
Dr. B: Certainly, Mike. I have written a book called Water Cures and Drugs Kill. It's a book that explains why dehydration is the cause of pain and disease, and how the pharmaceutical industry has camouflaged this information or covered it up and instead of letting people drink water, it advertises the use of their products, which actually do kill. Because recent figures have shown that prescription medications, when used according to the instruction of doctors, nonetheless kill over 106,000 people, and make 2 million people sicker than before taking the medication. And then there is another group who die from faulty prescriptions, incorrect prescriptions.
So between them, about 250,000 people die from drug-related problems, medication-related problems. This makes the drugs the use of drugs the number three killer processes in the country -- protected and licensed killer process. After heart disease, which kills about seven or eight hundred thousand, cancer which kills about 500,000, drugs kill 250,000 people.
Mike: So it's fair to say that pharmaceuticals, as packaged by modern medicine, are the third leading cause of death in this country.
Dr. B: Absolutely, and they are useless, because most of the medication they are using is to cover up symptoms and signs and complications of dehydration in the human body. The human body manifests dehydration by a series of symptoms and signs, perceptive symptoms of dehydration -- in other words, brain senses dehydration, or tiredness when you haven't done a good day's work, or first thing in the morning when you want to get up out of bed and you're tired, you can't get up -- that is a sign of dehydration. Then anger, quick reaction, depression, these are all signs of dehydration, when the brain has very little energy from hydroelectricity to cope with the information or take action. These are some of the perceptive signs of dehydration. Then the body has its drought management program, which are allergies, hypertension, diabetes, and also immune diseases.
The link between dehydration and asthma
Mike: I'd like you to elaborate a little more on asthma, and the idea that the body is managing its water supply deliberately in a way that produces symptoms that are called asthma.
Dr. B: Yes, well you see, drought management means that you have to clog the holes where water is lost from the body. Water is the most precious commodity in the interior of your body, and when not enough is coming in and more is being lost, this is a no-no situation for your body. The intelligence behind the design of the body has it such that a drought management program will kick in, and then allergies are a sign of dehydration because the system that regulates water balance of the body suppresses the immune system, because it's an energy-consuming situation. Then you get asthma.
You see, we lose about a quart of water through breathing every day. It is actually the surface tension in the alveoli of the lungs that produces contraction of these tiny membranes, and air is pushed out. And in the process, that water will leave with the air that is leaving. So you lose about a quart of water in breathing. We need to replenish that. When we don't replenish it, the body tightens up the bronchials and plugs up the holes and we call this reduced air flow in the lungs because of dehydration, we've labeled it as asthma.
Mike: Right. I've always been amazed that the willingness of modern medicine or western medicine to come up with these complicated sounding labels or names for diseases that should really have simpler names.
Dr. B: Jargon peddling is the way of commercial medicine. Sick-care system survives and thrives on pushing these jargons into the minds of the people, because people don't understand what these jargons, they hear them and they don't associate with anything in the body, but associate them with those jargons of fear that are drummed in the minds of people.
Now, children, there are 17 million children in America, probably more because the numbers rise every year, who have asthma, and the reason is, at the same time, children have been consuming more and more sodas. Three year olds to five year olds have been consuming three times as much soda in the last ten years than in the ten years before that. So these people are getting dehydrated, they are consuming more sodas, which doesn't function in the same way as water, and that is why they get asthma. Now, give these children water, and their asthma will disappear very quickly, in a matter of a few hours, completely the breathing becomes normal. The need for these inhalers will disappear.
And when I contacted the NIH and explained all of this, the gentleman who was in charge of this said I was so ignorant on what was going on, and yet he wanted to protect his freedom, and so he ignored the information even though I had gone to Clinton, President Clinton to ask him to intervene, and give breath back to these children. But the NIH was adamant to use medication. He wrote me, actually, and said we are satisfied with the way asthma is being treated. So, this is the situation. Now 17 million children is America can recover in a matter of a few days if everyone in the country started talking to asthmatic people and saying water is what you should take. Can you imagine a solution so simple?
Mike: Yes. Yes I can, and there are many such solutions available to treat a great number of chronic diseases, just like you've been describing here. Of course, the pharmaceutical industry I think would be horrified to have that information become widespread.
Dr. B: Yeah, well, because what I'm saying is totally anti-business, and we are not talking about a few hundred thousand dollars, we are talking about a few billion dollars a year.
Treating hypertension with water
Mike: For the pharmaceutical industry, the existence of disease is a business question, because let's face it, the pharmaceutical industry is a for-profit industry. Profits are always first, and at least it's my belief, and it seems that you share it, that any therapy that competes with those profits is minimized, marginalized or outright attacked.
Dr. B: Yes, recently there was an ad on the television. It was very interesting -- I didn't realize it at the beginning, but I now realize that the ad was speaking to me. In other words, it was an ad against my statements. Because I've said that the heartburn is a sign of dehydration in the human body and you should drink water. And this guy comes and sits at the counter and asks, “Give me a glass of water, my heartburn is killing me.” Or something like that. And the lady behind the counter says, “Water doesn't cure heartburn -- this medication does.” So see, this is how the pharmaceutical industry fights the information that I put out. But nonetheless, people who did discover that water could cure their heartburn are wiser than those who buy into that advertising stunt.
Mike: It seems like there are almost two different groups of people in the United States. There are those who are now dependent on multiple pharmaceuticals to treat everything, every symptom that they have, and who alter their body chemistry and their brain chemistry through drugs, and then there are those who are educating themselves about the true causes of health. They're drinking water, they're avoiding food additives, they're engaging in exercise -- it seems like there's a chasm that's widening between these two groups.
Dr. B: Absolutely. That's why alternative medicine has picked up and you're getting more people going to alternative medicine than conventional medicine. You see, I've sold at least over 600,000 copies of my book Your Body's Many Cries for Water over the past 10 years. And so I've had over several thousand radio interviews in the past 10 years. Information is getting out into the hands of the public, so the pharmaceutical industry has to naturally increase its advertising to nullify this information that I have put out. That is why they have produced this ad -- one of many, actually.
Anyway, we were talking about drought management programs in the body. Hypertension is another one of these problems. When there isn't enough water in the body, or the body becomes dehydrated, 66% of the water loss is from the interior of the cells. 26% is from the environment around the cells, and only 8% is lost from the vascular system. But the vascular system is an elastic system -- it tightens up and takes up the slack so you don't see the problem that is going on inside the cells of your body by testing your blood that is being tested in so many conditions. If people drank water on a regular basis and took enough salt and minerals to expand the capillary beds, hypertension would disappear completely.
And there are 60 million Americans who don't realize that actually hypertension is one of the manifestations of drought management programs of the body when the body begins to operate a reverse osmosis process, to deliver water into the interior of those cells which are 66% water deficient. Now the pharmaceutical industry and the medical doctors arrogantly and ignorantly are treating hypertension with diuretics.
Mike: Let's get rid of the water!
Dr. B: They are getting rid of the water in the body, at a lot of, how shall I say, effort.
Mike: Isn't this an example of the arrogance of modern medicine in believing that it knows more than nature, it knows more than the body?
Dr. B: We, as doctors, are really 007 agents of the pharmaceutical industry. We are totally blind and ignorant and the pharmaceutical industry has hijacked medicine. We learn a couple of years of physiology, and soon as we go on the clinical side we are asked to forget those and begin to learn pharmacology in order to treat symptoms rather than understand the primary cause of the health problem.
Mike: But you were trained in classic, conventional way...
Dr. B: I had to educate myself.
Thinking outside the box
Mike: What it is that drove you to explore beyond the limited thinking of conventional medicine?
Dr. B: I'm always a curious person. I've been a curious person ever since I was born as far as I know. One day we had a thief come into the house and was on the wall, and I was only a two and a half year old boy. I went to him and said, “What are you doing here? Can't you see you're scaring everyone? Why don't you go?” I wasn't scared, I was curious.
That is what I am, right throughout my life, and that is why when I discovered that water cures pain, then this was an entrance for me to get into it and find out what was the reason. And that was when I discovered that my education was no good. I didn't learn medicine, I learned a little bit of anatomy and a little bit of histology, which stood me in good stead in order to understand the rest of the stuff.
Mike: You are, I'm sure the listeners would agree here, you are to be applauded for being able to venture outside of conventional medicine.
Dr. B: I'm only a healer because that's my way of thinking. I don't think about money, because money is, if you do a good deed, money will come as a by product of that good deed.
Mike: I agree with you wholeheartedly there.
Dr. B: You don't have to try and take the last drop of blood out of a person who comes to you in order to get help from you. That is against my nature. That's why I've put out my information for everyone to use on the internet, and it is only for further use or further education that I have produced my books and so on, and those books unfortunately, the cost of printing, distribution, forces the price on the information. If the pharmaceutical industry had the information that they were going to sell, for example the information in my book Your Body's Many Cries For Water, they would ask for $10,000 a book, not $14.95.
Mike: And, if they could, they would patent water...
Dr. B: They would patent it.
Mike: And try to sell it to you at $100 a dose, right?
Dr. B: That's right. So, basically, this is what's going on in medicine in America. Joint pain, back pain, arthritis cause by chronic dehydration Dr. B.: The human body also has its emergency calls for water. These are localized emergency calls. We call these heartburn, rheumatoid joint pain, back pain, migraine headaches, colitis pain, fibromyalgiac pain, even angina pain -- signs of dehydration in the body.
And the mechanism is very simple -- when there isn't enough water to be evenly distributed and certain parts of the body are working but not receiving enough water to deal with its toxic waste and metabolism, and the toxic waste builds up that area, the nerve endings in that area register the chemical environmental change with the brain. And the brain translates this information for the conscious mind in the form of pain.
Mike: So it's just the interpretation?
Dr. B: It's an interpretation, yes. So the conscious mind gets the information that, hey, this area we can't use anymore, it has a shortage of water. Of course, the conscious mind should have known that, but bad education has robbed us of that information. We think this pain is a disease.
Mike: The predominant diagnosis of this, of course, I think in the minds of most people, and especially in most M.D.s would be that there is something physically or structurally compromised in that area.
Dr. B: Well, of course, the compromise is when the tissue is dehydrated, it's changing structure. The plum-like cells become prune-like. Prune-like cells do not function in the same manners as a plum-like cell. So, that is how symptoms are produced. These symptoms mean, okay, let us get the ingredients that the body needs into the system. Now, when we say dehydration, water also brings a lot of other goodies to the cells. When we are dehydrated, these goodies are not delivered either. So, we need not only correct dehydration, but also to supply the minerals and vitamins and so on so that the body can repair itself.
