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 Autumn 2008 issue #15

Going, going, going, Bald! by Cornelis van Dalen

It must be Monday. A cleverly written Public Relations (PR) article was published in the newspaper on a Monday [The Times, London, 13 Oct 08] to introduce a product designed to help men with their balding pate. Promotional pieces often come disguised as news, especially on Mondays after the journalist’s weekend break. But first let us introduce the topic. ‘Scientists’ have identified that one out of seven men have a genetic profile that dramatically raises the chances of going bald at a young age. 

Men inheriting two specific genetic variants are seven times more likely to develop male pattern baldness by the time they are forty years old. So, the geneticists tell us, knowing this DNA determinant will allow young men to discover with great accuracy whether they are likely to lose their hair. The ‘researchers’ say this genetic discovery will encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop ‘some interesting’ therapies for early treatment rather than treating late stage hair loss.

The drug now available was mentioned in the article and the company which will test your DNA also gets some free media space. No doubt business will bloom, as many are sensitive to losing hair. On the other hand it is often said that bald men are more virile – what they miss out on in looks is compensated for in the bedroom, hey ladies! But the consequence will be revealed at the end of this article.

In the United Kingdom it is fashionable for men to have very closely shaved, if not actually a clean-shaven head. It’s endemic in certain parts of the country. Hair loss is not only confined to men. Women too lose hair. Alopecia areata and other forms are common at the time of pregnancy, for example, and this soon passes after parturition and when the baby has been weaned. Drugs used for the treatment of disease also have an effect on loss of head hair. Chemotherapy is one very tragically dramatic example.

The newspaper article represents a deepening of the scientific stance of the role of DNA in shaping people physically and mentally. We are frequently assailed with the possibility of some real ‘breakthrough’ in the treatment of common or uncommon disease which afflict human and animal life through the knowledge of and the manipulation of the genes. This expands the scientific stance that all genes are permanent boundaries of life – unalterable (except by inference) and immutable. Yet increasingly there are a quiet minority of ‘scientific’ people which show that genes are changed if the person changes. Genes do not define your life and diseases – you do. The factors of hereditary (the new term is genetic) bear influence upon the individual only for the first seven years!

Now this is all very salient for I had just finished reading the book ‘The cause and Cure of Human Illness’ [Kranke Menschen] by Professor Arnold Ehret. [1] This book was first published in Munich in 1910 and has remained unpublished in English till 2001. Ehret was a teacher and suffered terribly with kidney disease until he cured himself with Nature Cure. This led him to create and promote the cure of fasting and the mucousless diet which consists primarily of fruit. Importantly he learned and taught that health is an intestinal condition; to use another person’s expression ‘death lurks in the intestines.’ [2]

Staggeringly, when I arrived in Britain some sixteen years ago, I could not but be alarmed at the number of bald and balding men. Yet one hundred years earlier Ehret was equally concerned for European men. Would we not be horrified at the sight of a bald woman, he asks? Fashions change. We have periods when beards are in vogue. Now baldness is fashionable – just shave the remaining head hair. But this baldness reveals something much more disturbing.

Ehret says: “It is easy to draw the conclusion that an unattractive organism is equivalent to a sick organism, i.e., that nature reveals an organism’s internal, physiological disturbances and diseases by presenting an outward disharmony in its shapes and colours.” [3] Do we not delight in beauty? And beauty in a human is a form moulded by true health? It is said that beauty competitions should not be for the young but for the mature – for beauty in youth is given by God, but beauty in old age is self created. “For those rigorous and aesthetically orientated observers of nature, the organism’s language of colour and shape is equivalent to the value of inner functions, spirit and soul of the organism.”
head hair 7 organs
Head Hair & Related Parts of the body:
A – Kidney/Bladder; B – Lungs/Large intestines;
C – Heart/circulation/small intestines;
D – Spleen/Pancreas/ Stomach; E – Liver/gall bladder.
Ref: Kushi, Oriental Diagnosis


The most striking symptom of aging is the loss and greying of hair. This means that the generations of men are weakening as hair loss is increasingly seen in young men. The cure for baldness and greying hair comes out of an understanding of the true function of hair and the importance of human hair in health and sickness.
 
“For the discouraged and hopeless bald-heads I want to mention some interesting and scientifically based facts: …according to Albert, a woman suffering from nervous puerperal fever, lost her blond hair and black hair grew back. In another case a brunette woman lost her hair during an illness and flaming red hair grew back. The grey hair of a 66-year old woman is said to have turned black shortly prior to her death...  a woman developed black hair instead of blond hair, which had fallen out when she suffered from black typhus.” [4]

Ehret reveals some remarkable facts: there are two major roles in the importance of hair, one physiological, the other biological. Hair protects, and provides a warming layer. A cold environment increases growth of hair. “But more importantly, the biological function includes the active role of hair in relation to the senses of touch and smell.” The hair has a role as an organ of scent…. It is appropriate to speak of a certain odour of hair that creates an atmospheric quality around every being (including humans), which influences every creature who comes close enough to inhale this scented atmosphere.

This smell plays an extremely important role is interrelationships of animals. Its main role is a ‘love-charm,’ the scent of the partner’s hair in sexual relations…. Humans develop pubic hair, beards and hair in their armpits at puberty. This hair plays an important role is courtship, because people know very well, at least instinctively, about its relevance.” [5] The scent of human hair is more intense with a big amount of highly developed hair and an increased body-temperature. It was also traditionally known that a newly purchased dog or horse would develop immediate liking for its new owner if fed some of its owner’s hair!

As scent organs of the human body, human head hair especially dissipates bodily evaporations. As discussed in previous articles, the smell of sick people is of the perspiration of the head and armpits, for this is where we first perspire. Sickness is health because sickness is discharge – we have illness to be well. To quote Ehret: “sickness is a process of the body’s deterioration and decomposition, or of the excretion of mucous caused by the ingestion of excessive and unnatural foods and their cumulative build up in the digestive organs over time.” [6]

“I am perfectly sure,” affirms Ehret, “especially because of my numerous interesting experiments with my own body, that the main cause for the loss of hair can only be an internal one. It is not surprising that the whole hair including hair roots become pale, dies and falls out if we consider that the hairs, the ‘scent-pipes’ (the ‘exhaust-chimneys’) constantly have to discharge gases that are sticky, acrid and very full of sulphur dioxide, instead of natural, scented fragrances…..The main cause for hair loss are disorders of the digestion and metabolism, it follows that only through those areas can there be an alleviation of symptoms.” [7]

The master naturopath has spoken: nature cures for the digestion and metabolism is the answer for greying of hair, and loss of hair. Look at a man with a bald pate see a constipated soul! See greying hair early in life see stress and nutrition deficiencies, as these are the primary disturbers of digestion and metabolism.

“Beautiful hair is not only a major factor of fancy and attraction, but is mainly a manifestation of unfolding, blooming life, just like the blooming of flowers. Today’s dismaying number of bald people has to be seen as a symptom of decreasing strength of the individual and the decline of a people. Full and lustrous hair is not only the sign of youthful life and strength, but it also strengthens the life’s energy.” [8]

By Ehret’s own life and of those who sought his help, hair can re-grow beautifully. The human being does not need DNA sequencing as a determinant to hair loss or its desired pharmaceutical cure, but to lead a life based on natural eating and living which strengthen the body, soul and spirit. 

Here Ehret quotes from Goethe’s FAUST Part I:
Mephistopheles:
    My friend, now you are talking wisely.
    For your rejuvenation there is a natural means;
    Only it is written in a different book
    And is a strange chapter.
Faust:     I want to know it
Mephistopheles:
    Well, then! A means, available without
    Any physician or magic:
    Start hacking and digging,
    Maintain yourself and your senses
    In a very limited circle
    Eat only unmilled food,
    Live with the beasts as a beast, and do not
    Slaughter them
    Work the land yourself from which you harvest;
    This is your best means
    To rejuvenate yourself another eighty years!
Faust:    I am not used to this, and I cannot conceive myself,
    To take spade into my hand.
    This narrow life does not fit me.
Mephistopheles:
    Well, then we have to resort to witchcraft!

© Cornelis van Dalen 2008

Endnotes:
1. Professor Arnold Ehret, The cause and Cure of Human Illness, Ehret Literature Publishing Co, New York, 2001
2. Cornelis van Dalen, ‘Secrets of the Human Body and other confessions,’ New Physis Newsletter, issue #10, Autumn 2006.
3. Ehret 78
4. Ehret 84-85
5. Ehret 80-81. See also Michio Kushi, How to see Your Health: Book of Oriental Diagnosis, Japan Publications Inc, New York, 1980.  Here the reference is to hair as constitutional condition, strengths and weaknesses as outlined by Kushi.
6. Ehret 84
7. Ehret 85
8. Ehret 86
 
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