Practising Qigong is but one aspect of achieving and maintaining good health. A holistic approach is necessary to ensure total wellness, and this is a very important area of my work. It would be a pity of one practises Qigong but has a poor diet and unhealthy lifestyle, and whatever benefits acquired from Qigong will not be lasting. This has always been a consistent reminder in my articles. So I am also conducting a “Healthy For Life : Wellness and Anti-Aging Seminar” on the preceding day. For details please see below.
My wish is to help reverse the appalling trend in unhealthiness in our society. A survey in 1999 among Malaysians aged 40 and above showed a shocking 61% had problems of obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol or high sugar levels. Many had multiple problems which put them at high risk of getting heart attack, stroke, cancers, diabetes, kidney disease and other chronic ( and often fatal ) diseases.
There are already so many with full-blown diseases that require them to take prescription drugs every day. It is not unusual to see patients taking 5 or more drugs daily for hypertension, heart disease, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Over time, the doctors have to increase the drug dosages to keep up with the invariable worsening of the diseases with age. Soon, the number of drugs have to be increased when the maximum doses are reached, but optimum control is not yet achieved. Then there are the myriad of side-effects that have to be tolerated, or overcome with even more drugs. This is the typical scenario with drug-based therapies.
However, all the while, the health problems actually remain in the patients. Only the symptoms and signs ( medical parameters ) are suppressed as long as the patients remember to take their drugs on time. If you don’t believe me, just think what will happen if these patients miss their medications just for one day.
In other words, most drugs do not heal the patients but just “control” the problems so that no damage to organs occur. Unfortunately, damage still occurs, although at a slower rate than if no such treatments were given. Finally, the patients still succumb, although there is undoubtedly some improvement in quality and duration of life compared with not getting any treatment at all.
A better alternative is to aim for reversing the disease itself, not just the symptoms. By this, the treatment end-point is to have a healthy patient with normal health parameters without having to take any drugs.
This is definitely possible for most health problems and diseases. However, there must be commitment and discipline to give the body all the nutrients it needs to repair itself, and to stop the body from getting all the toxins, carcinogens and pollutants that had been poisoning it all this while. There must be a major and sustained change in diet and lifestyle, including doing sufficient exercise, and many other measures to try to recover the healthy state that the body used to enjoy when it was young.
A key ingredient in achieving good health and reversing any disease is building up the life force or qi in the body. I have explained in detail what qi is all about and described many different exercises that are beneficial for various health problems, and for the different organs.
I have also explained that eating fresh, raw foods can also help increase qi, and also the tremendous difference in the health benefits achieved compared with eating “dead”, cooked or processed foods. Make eating fruits and vegetables a major item in your diet. If you cannot eat them fresh, at least eat them raw. If you have to cook the veges, then just steam them and don’t kill the goodness by overcooking. For cooking oil and dressing, choose olive oil or our vitamin E-rich palm oil.
Honey is another qi-rich healing food. The magic of honey is that the qi is retained over long periods and storage is not a problem. In Sufi Healing, as in most traditional and natural therapies, honey is an essential ingredient of many remedies. Modern science analyses the honey and understands the nutrients, sugars and enzymes it contains, but cannot explain all the benefits reported which are beyond the known benefits of these ingredients.
In Sufi Healing, honey has a unique healing energy that permeates whatever food and liquid it is mixed with. Its healing potential is very wide, though much of it is still not understood. No wonder its use as a healing food and medicine has been documented over thousands of years.
Through the awareness created by this column, I received many invitations to explain and demonstrate Qigong to various groups and organizations, and all were happy and excited to learn about this remarkable exercise and many were eager to practise. This is more so with everyone’s nagging fear about getting cancer.
Recently the Health Ministry released some frightening figures about the rising incidence of cancers among us, with the life-time risk being confirmed at 1 in every 4 Malaysians.
Although heart disease and stroke together are still the leading causes of death, to regain cardiovascular health and prevent these diseases is relatively easy ( reduce weight, reduce cholesterol, reduce carbohydrate, eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, learn to manage stress, and exercise regularly ). Six months of intensive exercise, for example, has been shown to enable 40 year-old men to improve their cardiovascular fitness to that of 20 year-olds.
The same is unfortunately not true for reducing cancers. Although the above measures may also reduce the risk of cancer, the improvement is not as impressive. The battle against cancer is far from being won, so any measure that may help should be given serious attention. Thus the health authorities should support studies to prove the beneficial effects of Qigong as there are so many living testimonies of people who have recovered from all sorts of diseases, including terminal cancers, after practising Qigong, but there are insufficient properly-conducted studies to translate these testimonies to scientific evidence. This is important since if Qigong can reverse cancers, that it can certainly prevent them also.
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