From the desk of Dr Sam Shohet
BDS MGDS RCS(Eng) LiAc MBAcC ICAK
GENES AND THINGS
Cures for all
In the last couple of months we have all seen the big headlines about the discovery of the genes for MS, the genes for diabetes, the genes for obesity, the genes for…….. and the excitement that pretty soon drugs will be formulated to cure us of all these ills.
We have also heard the news about how gene therapy was going to be used to cure disease, change our ‘bad’ genes or even help us to “grow” new tissue to replace that which is old, diseased or lost.
I, like most of you, am especially fond of scientific discoveries and breakthroughs especially if they are of “Star Trek” and “Frankenstein” qualities. The truth is that usually when something sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is; and science is no exception. So I am going to try and give you a very simple explanation of what genes are and how they work, then you can make up your own mind using basic logic as your guide to the truth.
What are genes?
Genes are nothing more than a manual, much like a car manual. A car manual contains everything to do with the car from the type of petrol to fill the car up with, the tyre type and air pressures to such mundane things as washing instructions. Like a car manual, Genes contain all the information necessary for everything to do with life and living from the food we eat to the way we deal with chemicals and infections. So we can hardly blame our genes when our body reacts in a certain way, when we eat the “wrong food” for instance, any more than we can blame the car manual when the car breaks down when we put the wrong type of petrol in the tank.Genes make the body make proteins of which we are made. An important collection of proteins made by genes are enzymes which convert one substance into another substance and another and another until we make the chemicals that we call living and life. This is how we all function.
How do enzymes work?
Enzymes need tools to work and these tools are vitamins called co-enzymes and, minerals called co-factors. As we all know, vitamins and minerals come from food and since our food is no longer so well endowed with these tools, the enzymes are not able to perform properly as there are not enough tools to go round to satisfy every process in the body. The body is then forced to compromise as to the best way to use its limited resources.
The Four Tenets to Life
Naturally, the most important use of these resources has to be to support the processes which keep us alive:
Breathing – without air we are dead in minutes
Water absorption – without water we are dead in days
Food absorption – without food we are dead in weeks and
Processing sunlight – without the sun we are dead within months
These life saving processes make a great deal of waste products which need to be eliminated as they too could become life threatening. We can see from this how illness or disease could manifest themselves in a body which has been compromised, depriving other systems of the very tools they need to function at peak and result in signs and symptoms that we call arthritis, heart disease, cancer and so on.
Our Individuality
There are close to 35,000 genes in each of our cells which give us more combinations and permutations than there are stars in the whole galaxy. This makes each and every one of us absolutely unique so when something goes wrong we must surely be treated as individuals rather than the same as everyone else.
This uniqueness should also be considered when medical tests are done such as blood, urine, saliva and so on since what appears to be normal for one person may be too much or too little for another. Unfortunately, treatments are not provided for individuals but for signs and symptoms – a one-size-fits-all philosophy we have all been brainwashed into accepting as the norm. This perhaps explains the side effects of nearly all treatments whether with drugs, surgery or any other therapy.
Only YOU
With this in mind you have to decide whether you would rather be treated as the unique person you are, find out what the problem is and then exactly how to deal with it naturally, or wait for gene research which could take years if not decades and then only to find out that science has got it wrong yet again and that there is no way to influence a set of genes without affecting the others since they are all part of the same system: you.
Warm regards
Sam Shohet