About this Book

The first, most likely thing to pop up in your mind, when you hear the word ‘medicine’ is a pill in a plastic box from a pharmacy and a doctor’s prescription.

But in truth, not all medicines come in pills with prescriptions.

There are more fundamental, more basic, more essential healing substances and energies. These are freely available to every one of us in the vast pharmacy called nature, where you are your own doctor and your own body sends out little prescriptions to you every now and then when things aren’t in order. These prescriptions are signs and symptoms that are subjectively appreciable.

Let me give you a small analogy. When you are dehydrated, your body tells you that it needs water. Thirst is what you subjectively experience. Your mouth feels dry and you yourself know that a drink of water (a free and natural substance) will fix the problem. You don’t need a medical professional to tell you that. You just instinctively know that water alone, will do the job.

Likewise, medicines are not limited to the conventional pills or tablets or capsules with names, dosages, expiry dates and barcodes.

There are many other indispensable, reliable and abundant natural remedies - the most vital of them all, being sunlight. It is one among those countless potent remedies in nature’s apothecary.

Sadly, the sun has been maligned as the cause for, rather than the solution to many of our problems. Let me illustrate this fact: you are flipping through pages of a magazine, one among the many stacked up in the corner of the waiting room. A young woman with a somber expression meaningfully holds up a framed photograph of a pretty smiling blonde. “My sister accidently killed herself. She died of skin cancer”, goes the headline of the public service announcement.

Shock and sympathy sweep in. Fear and anxiety creep in.  The message is alarming. ‘Make sun safety a way of life’, is the appeal and you panic. You certainly don’t want to be a victim of solar assault, a sad photo in a frame. So your first reaction is to hop into a shop without delay and purchase sunscreen, the legitimate protection from the dangers of sunlight, as you have been made to believe.

But wait a minute!

All things must not be taken at face value. You have just been deceived by a cleverly crafted lie.
The sun is NOT your foe, it is your friend. You exist because it exists. You are simply ASKING for trouble by abandoning the natural and favoring the unnatural. You are sacrificing your health and possibly even your life for the economic gains of people you do not even know.

Disturbing as it appears, the misleading ‘public service announcement’ in the magazine was actually put forward by a prominent charitable cancer organization and was sponsored by a company with a direct financial interest. In other words, it is nothing but an advertisement that was financed by one of the leading sunscreen manufacturing companies. It featured in several women’s magazines all through the summer. Allow me to quote the precise warning in the advertisement:  “if left unchecked, skin cancer can be fatal”. It also urges people to “use sunscreen, cover up and watch for skin changes”.

Let’s come to the shameful truth. With a little investigation, you will learn that the woman in the picture is a professional model, not a skin cancer victim. Also, the poignant message implied that those who die of skin cancer die because of their own injudiciousness, happens to lack any clear supporting evidence.

To many, this advertisement is an unjustifiable attempt at manipulation of public opinion. To many others it is an absolute breach of trust and faith that has been innocently placed in an organization that is believed to have the public’s best interests at heart. The incident raised a fair deal of concern among academicians and common people alike especially since the same organization became the nation’s wealthiest charity largely through its public relations acumen. The fact that the principal creator of the organization is still remembered for his devastatingly effective cigarette advertising campaigns incorporating the slogan “Reach for a Lucky [cigarette] instead of a sweet” does nothing to restore people’s faith in the establishment.

Yes, the organization is partially correct in telling the public that skin cancer is fatal because there indeed are lethal kinds of skin cancers called malignant melanomas. But these deadly forms of skin cancer comprise only 6 percent of the overall number of skin cancer cases in the U.S. each year; the remaining 94 percent are NOT life-threatening. Unfortunately most people have a very vague comprehension of the difference between the rare but potentially fatal forms of skin cancer and the benign ones. It appears that several organizations aim at exploiting this lack of awareness on the part of the common man. 
The more common types of skin cancer - basal cell and squamous cell skin tumors - are not even considered as cancer in the National Cancer Institute’s SEER database, which gathers epidemiological information on the incidence and survival rates of cancer in the U.S. Basal cell and squamous cell skin cancers rarely metastasize, are almost always readily cured, and very rarely ever kill anyone. No one has ever heard or spoken of these more common cancers as “deadly squamous cell carcinoma” or “lethal basal cell carcinoma”.

To randomly warn the general public, that sun exposure causes deadly skin cancers which mercilessly claim lives, without distinguishing between rare fatal melanomas and the much more common, curable skin tumors, seems like a deliberate effort made to instill fear if not to terrorize people. The motive is quite visibly to promote sales of sunscreens and other sun protection. It is a monetary motive.

The truth: sunscreen, at best, can only prevent sunburn. It cannot and does not prevent the RAREST and only true fatal form of skin cancer - malignant melanoma. No conclusive association has ever been made between sunburns and melanoma. How then is it logical to suggest that sunscreens can save you from death by skin cancer? In fact, studies suggest that people are at greater risk of developing melanomas by the use of sunscreens.

In this book I wish to make people look beyond the contrivances and lies about sun exposure that have been thrown in our faces, and more importantly, to help people realize the countless benefits of sunlight. You deserve to know the truth. In today’s world awareness is everything.