Free radicals and complex diseases

With their locations, this shloka (I may not have rendered it accurately) speaks of the five named airs in our body. In very recent 'western' understandings, minute quanities of toxic gaseous excreta from our body's cellular factories is spoken of as "free radicals" and the Devil in chief being the highly reactive ozone--the same stuff that, as a layer, protects us from cosmic radiation. Various foods, e.g. tomatoes, are recommended to keep these free radicals in check.

My own experience tells me that free radical mismanagement precurses nearly all dis-eases. Aside from foods, physical activity--and running is just one of them--even as it generates some toxicity in the muscles, also helps manage these free radicals. What makes more sense to me is be benignly dismissive about the names people give to complex processes, cancer, diabetes and so on. in any case, what is being identified are symptoms. Current efforts mounted to 'cure' symptoms will fail, as they do not understand processes nor treat them holistically (they are constituents of a larger whole).

While this approach fattens the multinational pharmaceuticals and the health industry, their remedies cause more diseases down the line. The late Aldous Huxley (whose brother Julian was an important biologist) once said, "What does not have a single cause, cannot have a single cure." Most life is so evolved and organized as 'creatures' that, barring accidents, there is little likelihood of single-cause failures.