reading

Translated by Johnny Lazzaro.

Proofreading: Johnny Lazzaro & Monika Wagner
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ISBN papel: 978-84-686-9243-2

ISBN digital: 978-84-686-9252-4

Depósito legal: M-33718-2016

Editor Bubok Publishing S.L.

Impreso en España/Printed in Spain.

All rights reserved. Total or partial reproduction of this work, or incorporation into a computer system, or transmission in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) is not permitted without prior authorization. The infringement of such rights may constitute an offense against intellectual property.

Introduction

«Today’s truth is tomorrow’s lie»

I must consider that this aphorism has been the leitmotif throughout my professional life.

I can remember the day I heard it for the first time: it was from the mouth of our mentor over 30 years ago,

And to tell the truth, at that time, either due to the excitement for having achieved my Specialist in Pediatrics Degree, after grueling endless guard service or because

I was discussing with my neighboring colleague on a case that we had seen in the last review, I must say that I did not understand what it really meant.

At first, I thought that it had been a kind of joke the master wanted to play us, as if pointing out that all that we had learned with so much effort was worth nothing, which seemed to be what my colleagues had caught, judging by the laughter that flooded the sala magna of the University.

But it was long after when, over the years, through in-

depth studies into my specialty, and opening myself to other medical fields, I could understand the meaning of those words: «Despite everything you have learned, if you don’t keep up to date, your knowledge, that is your truth, will disappear». I felt like being born again and that made me understand that not only do we have to keep updated because knowledge advances and, occasionally, it may even contradict itself, but also, there is not only one inescapable and irrefutable truth. There are many truths and all of them are important. As a network of threads, each thread constitutes one truth that has the same value as the others, because if you touch it, the whole will be affected.

I have never discarded a piece of information, a concept or a point of view. Everything is valid within the critical mind. We have the capacity of discerning, by using the filter of our intelligence, that is based on lessons learned and on the solidity of our experiences. For this reason, l never discard a concept, however strange it may seem, I try to integrate it within that network that we call life.

If I cannot fit it, I put it in a position of study for the future generations to finally do it, in the light of new knowledges.

By this book I do not intend to tell the Truth, I only intend to expose those ones I found in the field of health and aging and which have the value of the observations throughout my professional life, because the truth is shaped by the experiences and the knowledge acquired by each of us and we use it as a prism to view life under our personal viewpoint.

Therefore, what you are going to read here may be refuted, denied, shared or accepted, and all choices will be valid, because each of us is entitled to find his own truths.

Dr. Marcos Mazzuka Petitta

I
What is cell regenerative medicine?

Before the second world war there was a character whose knowledge embraced all that we consider today to be the medicine : the doctor. With his briefcase and a few instruments he managed to accomplish what French doctors Bérard and Gubler claimed since the 19th century: «To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always».This character had a broad view of the patient’s condition because he became part of the family. Therefore he knew his way of life, customs and vices, and within his scientific knowledge of the time he could give a diagnosis, and consequently, a treatment.

However, the interesting thing was the dismemberment of that physical-emotional-spiritual entity called human being into pieces, and the name of these pieces gave rise to what is known today as the «medical specialties».

Maybe at the beginning the idea was laudable: the scientific knowledge, based on the study of matter, what is visible, palpable, was increasingly huge and almost impossible to be retained by the limited brain of a single man. For this reason it was decided to investigate every single apparatus, organs and systems as if they were a machine spare parts in order to, in a joint review, give a later diagnosis much more accurate and effective for therapeutic purposes. According to my point of view, two big mistakes were committed: one initial, conceptual error, followed by an error of praxis.

The first to which I am referring is that, a priori, by the mere fact that when something is not tangible or measurable it is completely discarded: that is, the spiritual element.

But this is perhaps understandable, because it used to be a medicine which had focused for the past two centuries on the study of matter, having no instruments to measure what Aristotle recognized as the center of our «being», the soul; in addition to being somewhat uncomfortable for a science which rules out any possibility of intervention from things that are not understood or accepted.

Better luck there was for the other human element, emotion, under the influence of great thinkers-observers as were Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, who provided the basic concepts, but not all of them accepted, on the role of the human psyche. This lays the foundation for what is known as psychoanalysis, which for many is closest to spirituality, to what medical science can approach.

The error of praxis is a consequence of misconception, because with the advent of the specialties, time did not help at all, just the opposite of what was believed, in fact they could not serve for a better study of the parts, i.e. to have a better vision of the whole, but would turn, like almost everything touched by man, into something selfish and sectarian.

We would see then, how the society itself raised the specialist doctors to ranks that varied according to the importance of the organ they treated. The cusp is reserved for the neurosurgeon and the cardiologist, because we were taught that those are the «important» organs, and at the wide base is the dermatologist, for considering of less importance the one who takes care of the health of our skin, organ that certainly represents the first window to a diagnosis of health, as clearly expressed by Hippocrates more than 2,000 years ago, and whose famous description of an acute abdominal event, the facies hipocrátical, endures even today, after so much time, so much so that any medical student knows the phenomenon for its validity. As we can observe, such discrimination is found in the social imaginary: it is not based on something real.

We doctors indulged ourselves in being flattered by a society directed by the interests of the growing pharmaceutical industry, up to the point of thinking that we ourselves are those who heal, completely forgetting the precept of Berard and Gubler. Saying that medicine has lost its soul has never been more appropriate.

After my first fifteen years within this fearsome practice, and tired of attempting to search for the truth with limited success that medicine offers, I tried to find a different «truth». Being a physician with scientific opinions, I headed towards the search for a common denominator of that dismembered body, I did not take more than a few minutes to understand that I had it in front of my eyes: the cell. The pleasant surprise was to discover that famous scientists had already been devoting themselves to its study for not less than 60 years and had reached unimaginable developments in the understanding of its functions. One of them is Denham Harman (1), who in the 50s of last century dared to say that cell aging (damage) is a disease that could be reversed thanks to the discovery of free radicals and the harmful oxidative stress.

This gave rise to my interest in the cell regenerative medicine (CRM), because I understood that the cell was the key piece to dismantle the idea that the human being, in its broader context, must live while depending on a miraculous potion provided by pharmaceutical companies. No, the human being solely depends on their capacity of recovering one or more lost balances.

After the accumulation of knowledge in this field over the years, I have summed up what in my opinion is a complete view of the human being. My desire is to share how to maintain your health and always lead a full life.