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very year, most Muslims
perceive Ramadan from economic, social, moral and spiritual perspectives. What
they don’t seem to know is that the practical lessons of this sacred month are
far beyond those scopes.
Science is in a state of
continuous evolution and new discoveries follow one another's heels. A large
flow of information often come like a spring from scholarly mediums and put the
modern man on the right path of knowledge.
Biologically, human
beings grow old and eventually die. Very few people ponder over this
occurrence. We have all accepted it as a natural phenomenon which we must abide
by willingly or unwillingly.
Apart from old age, most
people die not because they are naturally ripe for death but because the blood
flowing through their coronary arteries clots sometimes prematurely and render
their body systems partially or fully ineffective.
Because of the excessive
consumption of certain improper diets, and other defective factors in our
biological set-ups, human arteries become hard and rusty hence the mad rush for
treatment in hospitals or traditional apothecaries.
This process of rustiness
in human system is medically called Atheroma. And many theories have been
advanced to explain its mechanism especially how it causes rustiness in human
blood vessels.
One of the great
advantages of fasting especially in the month of Ramadan, is to increase the
power of the blood to dissolve blood clots whether those clots are in the
coronary arteries of the heart that cause heart attack or in the cerebral
arteries that cause stroke. This is where fasting comes handy as a miraculous
healer.
Fasting does not only
lower blood pressure and alleviate severe chest pain (angina pectoris)
resulting from a reduced supply of blood and oxygen to the heart, it also
prevents an arterial disease (arteriosclerosis) occurring especially in the
elderly as characterized by elasticity and thickening of the blood flow. Not
only that. Fasting also reduces the mortality rate of heart attack.
The
blood sugar is maintained at a steady level during fasting even as the
glucose being formed at that level from
glycogen and natural fat mobilized to dispose tissue function effectively.
In a
nutshell, Ramadan brings about an increase in secretion of growth hormone by
the pituitary which causes an increase in human weight and acceleration of
linear growth with widening epiphysis (the end of the lung at the point where
it was previously separated by cartilage to allow bone to grow) especially in
young animals. Thus, with fasting in Ramadan, a competent doctor can be said to
have been imported into the workings of the body system.
Dr. Femi Abbas is a columnist at The Nation Newspaper and can be reached via: e-mail: femabbas756@gmail.com Tel: 08115708536 (Text only)
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