Health and The Elements?

[brandongilbert]

Has anyone thought about this?

How health relates to the 5 elements? It makes sense to me and a lot of ancient systems believed everything was comprised of the elements...

What do you think?

OH and I just saw this.. Apparently Daniel Vitalis is doing a program on the elements..His work on water and smoothies changed my life forever.

Check this out...

Daniel Vitalis Presents Invincible Health Master Class

No thats not an affiliate link, Im just passing it on to other intelligent health conscious people. Check if you'd like.

[ginkgo]

Up until the late 1800s modern medicine was based on the 5 elements! At that time the most popular treatment by MDs was bleeding or bloodletting due to too much of the water element. If bleeding a pint did not help, then they would bleed them of another pint.

Healthy people were supposed to get bled for disease prevention. Besides MDs it was also done by barbers and professional bleeders. Millions of people died from this practice that the doctors used.

Wikipedia says "Bloodletting (or blood-letting) is the withdrawal of often considerable quantities of blood from a patient in the belief that this would cure or prevent a great many illnesses and diseases. It was a tremendously popular medical practice from antiquity up to the late 19th century, a time span of almost 2,000 years." "Bloodletting was used to treat almost every disease."

"George Washington asked to be bled heavily after he developed a throat infection from weather exposure. Almost 4 pounds (1.7 litres) of blood was withdrawn, much of it without a doctor's supervision, contributing to his death in 1799."

[Antarananda]

The philosophy of the Five Great Elements (Pancha Mahabhuta) is a central and important tenet of the Vedic Samkhya philosophy, and is also one of the foundations of Ayurvedic medicine.

The Upanishads outline how the material universe and the human body is essentially comprised of the building blocks of the Mahabhutas: From the Self (the Eternal formless Cosmic Self) arose Ether; from Ether, Air; from Air, Fire; from Fire, Water; and from Water, Earth. From Earth arose plants, and from plants Man.

These elements don't only refer to the gross forms which we can perceive through our senses, but also to a subtle energetic form.


There's reason to believe that Hippocrates was influenced by Vedic thought as far as it relates to health of the body and treatment for disease.

However, the way bloodletting was understood and performed in the West was an unsound, uninformed and dangerous practice. Bloodletting does not remove only the water element. It predominantly reduces the fire element, and secondarily water. In Ayurvedic terms, it reduces pitta, one of the three doshas.

Bloodletting is very useful in reducing certain toxins in the body which can lead to skin diseases like acne and psoriasis, and other diseases caused by very high pitta. In Ayurveda, traditionally leeches are used, because they are aseptic, and drop off once they have their fill of blood This reduces the danger of excess bloodletting. It is still used under medical supervision in some Ayurvedic hospitals in India, but it was never meant to be a universal cure-all as implied above.

Daniel Vitalis is doing good work (I was given a free copy of his ElixirCraft Mastery course), but there remains much room for a deeper understanding, since he is using only the limited Greek view, and not the more fully fleshed out and practical Hindu / Buddhist perspective as it applies to the human body and its health balance.

[bluedragon]

In Chinese medicine and Qigong, everything is based on the knowledge about energy - and the 5 elements are just 5 distinct manifestations of energy.

Daniel Reid has some great books about Qigong, the 5 element nutrition, and one called Tao for Health, Sex and Longevity which talks about many health aspects that I found most revealing.

Chinese medicine is very effective due to its holistic approach. Using the 5 elements nutrition, for example, you can tackle very subtle problems such as feeling too passive, feeling "cold" both physically and emotionally, feeling ungrounded, etc. Anything that's not right in the body, you can heal, the natural way.