The Healing Power of the Sun: A Comprehensive Guide to Sunlight as Medicine - Softcover

Hobday, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 164411402X ISBN 13: 9781644114025

Verlag: Findhorn Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Explores the many beneficial effects of sunlight to prevent and treat illness and boost health and well-being

• Shares scientific research on sunlight therapy and tuberculosis, as well as studies on sunlight with regard to osteoporosis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, tooth decay, psoriasis, heart disease, and several forms of cancer

• Reveals how the sun can act as a natural disinfectant, killing viruses and bacteria, and how this wisdom was put into use by doctors

• Explains how sunlight affects eyesight, sleep, mental health, and the immune system

For thousands of years, the human race lived in harmony with the sun and used its heat and light as medicine. In recent history, however, with skin cancer on the rise, we have become too focused on the negative effects of the sun. Fortunately, science has made new discoveries showing just how beneficial the sun truly is to our lives.

In this new edition of The Healing Sun, Richard Hobday draws on historical and scientific evidence to explore the many ways that sunlight affects our health and well-being. He shows how the sun acts as a natural disinfectant, killing viruses and bacteria outdoors as well as inside buildings. The author highlights how sunlight therapy has been used to prevent and treat serious health problems like tuberculosis and other infections in the years before antibiotics were developed. Explaining how doctors of the past realized that sunlight and fresh air helped patients recover, he shows how this wisdom was put into use by doctors such as Niels Finsen, Oskar Bernhard, and Auguste Rollier, who each contributed substantially to the development of heliotherapy.

Hobday also examines the role of sunlight in regard to conditions like osteoporosis, rickets, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, tooth decay, psoriasis, heart disease, and several forms of cancer. Exploring the sun’s effects on body and mind, the author reveals how our modern artificially lit lifestyles can throw off our biological rhythms, create stress within the body, and lead to poor sleep as well as worsening eyesight, cataracts, obesity, depression, and weakened immune systems from lack of vitamin D.

Showing why and how we should welcome the healing sun back into our lives, this seminal book reveals how humanity needs sunlight for health and well-being and for vitality and happiness.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Hobday, MSc, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized researcher and author with many years of experience in solar building design. A leading authority on the history of sunlight therapy, he lives in Scotland.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

From the Introduction

This book explores the benefits of exposing your body to the sun, rather than the dangers. It has been written with the aim of restoring a little balance to the currently rather one-sided debate on sunlight and its effects on human health. You may be completely unaware, as I was when I began the research for this book, that in the right hands sunlight is a medicine. Throughout history it has been used to prevent and cure a wide range of diseases, and a few doctors still use its therapeutic properties to good effect. However, at the present time it is widely held amongst certain sections of the medical profession and the population at large that the damaging effects of sunlight on the skin far outweigh any benefits. Public health campaigns reinforce this message in an attempt to curb the annual increase in skin cancers. Any illusions about tanned skin being a sign of health or providing more than minimal protection to further exposure to the sun’s rays seem to have been dispelled. So why read a book on the positive effects of sunlight and sunbathing?

To put it bluntly; your life could depend on it. Sunlight may cause skin cancer, but there is also evidence that it could prevent a number of very common and often fatal diseases: breast cancer; colon cancer; prostate cancer; ovarian cancer; heart disease; multiple sclerosis; and osteoporosis. When combined, the number of people who die from these conditions is far greater than the number of deaths from skin cancer; which is why the current bias against sunlight needs, in my opinion, to be redressed, and why I would advise you to read this book.

But before going any further, let me explain how I came to write this book. Usually books of this kind are written by doctors of medicine, or medical journalists, and not doctors of engineering. However, my background is a little unusual in that for many years, while I was designing or evaluating what could broadly be called solar energy technologies of one form of another -- solar collectors; equipment for use in spacecraft; and energy-efficient buildings -- I was also studying complementary medicine. Working alongside architects on one particular project I became aware of a ‘lost’ tradition of designing sunlit buildings to prevent disease, rather than to save energy, and I became interested in the healing powers of sunlight. I began to study the history of sunlight therapy and found that the physicians who practiced this ancient healing art, and the architects and engineers who supported them in their work, used sunlight very differently from the way many of us do today. As I am particularly fond of sunbathing, and only really feel fit and well when I have a tan, this came as something of a revelation. So, in the following pages I have attempted to summarize what was known about sunlight therapy in the past. In comparing this with some of the latest findings from medical research on sunlight and health I have, as you will see, come to some rather controversial conclusions. In order to understand them fully, I would strongly advise you to read the whole book rather than go straight to the final chapter.

The sun transmits energy in the form of electromagnetic waves: radio waves; microwaves; infrared radiation; visible light; ultraviolet radiation; and x-rays. Only a small amount of the sun’s energy reaches us, as most of it is filtered out by the earth’s atmosphere, so solar radiation at ground level is composed of visible light, and ultraviolet and infrared waves. Until the latter part of the 19th century it was thought that the ‘heat’ of the sun -- what we now know to be the infrared rays -- caused sunburn. Then scientists discovered that it is the ultraviolet component of sunlight which causes the skin to tan, and they began to use ultraviolet radiation on skin diseases. They then found that they could get better results with sunlight itself.

Attitudes towards the sun and its healing powers have changed quite markedly throughout history, because of scientific discoveries of this kind, or changes in fashion. Pale skin has been, and still is, considered desirable in countries with agricultural economies where the majority of the population work outdoors, and where a suntan is the mark of the laboring classes. Down the centuries, the well-to-do have done their best to keep the sun at bay. Society ladies used veils, parasols, wide-brimmed hats and even skin-whiteners to keep their complexions ‘pale and interesting’. But in the developed world, where comparatively few people work outside, the opposite applies: tanned skin continues to be fashionable and a sign of prosperity for many people, despite public health campaigns advising against sunbathing. Tanning in order to follow the dictates of fashion has little to do with health. A ‘vanity tan’ has little in common with the forgotten art of sunbathing for health. By the same token, enjoyment and appreciation of sunlight is very different from the carefully considered use of the sun’s rays to treat serious diseases.

Sunlight therapy has a habit of being discovered and then falling from favor, and when this happens it disappears almost without trace, sometimes for hundreds of years. It was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century, but has since seen a dramatic reversal in its fortunes with the result that a great deal of knowledge about the healing powers of sunlight has been ignored or forgotten. Did you know, for example, that sunlight kills bacteria and is quite capable of doing so even when it has passed through window glass? Also, were you aware that sunlit hospital wards have less bacteria in them than dark wards, and that patients recover faster in wards which admit the sun? Perhaps not, but as infections actually caught in hospital are now the fourth most common cause of death after heart disease, cancer and strokes, it is worth bearing in mind.

In fact, your forebears were probably better informed about the sun’s healing properties than you are: people hold very different views on sunbathing depending on when they were alive and where they happen to live. Take, for example, a typical well-educated resident of Essen or any industrial city in Germany in the 1920s. Let us say he had served in the German army during the Great War, was wounded, and returned home having recovered from his injuries. Someone in these circumstances would have held sunlight in much higher regard than many of us do today. He would probably been aware of the scientific discoveries that had been made about light in the years immediately before the war: in 1903 the Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to the Danish physician, Niels Finsen, in recognition of his success in treating tuberculosis of the skin with ultraviolet radiation. Then again, during the war military surgeons may have used sunlight to disinfect and heal his wounds at a sunlight therapy clinic in the Black Forest, or a similar institution in the Swiss Alps. Had he contracted tuberculosis on his return to Germany, sunlight therapy, or heliotherapy as it became known, might have been used to aid his recovery. The physicians who supervised the treatment of his wounds or tuberculosis would have paid very close attention to the way he responded to sunlight and, in particular, how well his skin tanned. In those days, the deeper the tan, the better the cure.

Sunbathing for health in this way required the services of skilled physicians who knew precisely the conditions most favorable for their patients: the best time of day to expose them to the sun; the best time of year; the correct temperature for sunbathing; what foods to give; how much exercise to allow in each case; which type of cloud cover would let enough of the sun’s rays through to cause burning and so on. Then, as now, the overriding...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Findhorn Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 164411402X
• ISBN 13: 9781644114025
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: webstar; casetta@mondadori.it; ; Via Mondadori 1,; Segrate Milano; 20090; Italien