Skin Disease

The Human Skin—Engineered by God

So what is skin?
Skin is a miracle garment. It's soft, pliable, strong, waterproof, and self-repairing.



 

What would you be like without skin?
The answer is, quite simply, a big squishy mess! Your skin is like a very large container. It's the largest organ of your body, and without it, all your delicate insides would spill right out.
 

Skin doesn't just cover you!
Your skin doesn't just cover you. It does a whole lot more. It functions as protective wrapping. Along with a layer of fat underneath, it insulates you against all kinds of bumps, bangs and wear and tear. It keeps germs and water OUT (unless you have a break in your skin) and keeps your body's fluids and salts IN.
Skin manufactures and oozes out all sorts of wonderful liquids. Waxes and oils act as your body's natural water proofer and a protector against germs. They make your skin softer. Your skin also contains glands which manufacture sweat. With sweat, not only does your body get cooled by its evaporation, but it has a convenient way to get rid of chemicals it doesn't need.
 

How does it do all this?
Skin is alive. It's made of many thin sheets of layers of flat, stacked cells in which you'll find nerves, blood vessels, hair follicles, glands, and sensory receptors.
Older cells are constantly being pushed to the surface by new cells which grow from below. When the old ones reach the top, they become wider and flatter as they get rubbed and worn by all your activity. And, sooner or later, they end up popping off like tiles blown from a roof in a strong wind. In fact, every minute 30,000-40,000 dead skin cells fall from your body! In approximately a month's time, your body has made a whole new layer of skin cells!

 

Ever wonder what makes different skin colors?
A pigment called melanin. More melanin in your skin cells makes your skin darker, less makes it lighter. Sitting in the sun can also cause more melanin to be manufactured in your skin cells. The result? A suntan.

SOME FACT ABOUT YOUR SKIN:

• As an adult, you may have more than 20 square feet of skin -- about the size of a blanket.
• You are likely to shed some 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime.
• Right now there are over a million dust mites, microscopic critters invisible to the naked eye, on your mattress and pillow, chomping on the dead skin cells that fell off you last night!

In one square inch of human skin you find the following things:

19 million cells, 625 sweat glands, 90 oil glands, 65 hairs, 19 feet of blood vessels, and 19,000 sensory cells?

The human skin is considered the largest organ in the body (about 16% of your body weight), and covers an area of 20 square feet. Your skin, or integument, has many different protective and metabolic functions that help keep your body stabilized.

SKIN LAYERS
We have three skin layers. The outer layer, the epidermis, consists of rows of cells about 12 to 15 deep, and is between 0.07 and 0.12 millimeters thick (about as thick as a piece of paper). This top layer is composed mainly of dead cells that are being replaced constantly by newer cells

The cells at the base of the epidermis are alive, and are constantly growing and multiplying so that cell after cell is pushed upward and away from the dermis. Without a blood supply, the cell dies and much of it, aside from the inert keratin, atrophies. The vicissitudes of existence are constantly rubbing away some of this dead material from the surface of our body, but this is constantly being replaced from below, and we retain our epidermis ever fresh.

 

FUNCTIONS OF SKIN
One of the most important functions of the skin is to provide us with a sense of touch.

The most important property of the skin is that it contains our sense of touch… The sense of touch is difficult to investigate. All other senses have a definite key organ which can be studied, but the skin is spread over the entire body and cannot easily be delimited or “switched off.” In the case of vision, scientists can observe blind persons to learn more about seeing, and they can study deaf people to learn more about hearing. But this is impossible for the sense of touch.

Although we “touch” with our epidermis, the sense of touch actually is recorded in the dermis and passed on to the central nervous system.

Another important function of the skin is that it helps the body keep a constant temperature).A person’s average body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but if it increases by 7 or 8 degrees, and remains there for any of length of time, a person will almost certainly die. So how does the body keep a generally constant temperature? It does so via a method of cooling known as perspiration. The main sources of body heat are the internal organs that work all the time, such as the heart and kidneys. The heat created by these organs is carried off by the blood and distributed evenly throughout the body. This is an efficient way to diffuse the heat at a slow pace.

We are equipped with tiny glands distributed all over our skin, about two million of them all together, the purpose of which is to bring water to the surface of the skin. On the surface this water is vaporized and heat is in this manner withdrawn from the body. The glands are sweat glands and the liquid produced is sweat or perspiration. A sweat gland consists of a tiny coiled tube, the main body of which situated deep in the dermis. The tube straightens out finally and extends up through the epidermis. The tiny opening on the surface is a pore and is just barley visible to the naked eye. When you are working or playing hard, and heat production is increased, the sweat glands accelerate their production of perspiration. This is also true when the temperature is unusually high. The rate of production may then outstrip the rate of evaporation, particularly if humidity is high, since the rate of evaporation declines with the rise in humidity. Perspiration will then collect on the body in visible drops and we are conscious of sweating.

The skin also acts like a chemical-processing plant for the entire body. When you are outside, the skin absorbs ultraviolet rays from the Sun, and then uses them to convert chemicals into vitamin D. This vitamin is very important to our body because it helps stimulate the absorption of calcium. Without calcium, our bones grow thin and brittle, eventually leading to diseases such as rickets and osteomalacia (skeletal diseases that weaken bones). In addition, the epidermis contains a special pigment called melanin, which is responsible for the variety of color in our skin. It also acts as a protection against ultraviolet light.

Skin also helps protect the inside of the body as a Shock Absorber. If we didn’t have this “shock absorber,” it would be practically impossible to do physical activities without damaging internal organs or bruising easily.

It is impossible that evolution could have produced such an important and complex organ as the human skin. The many intricacies of its functions are evidence of a Creator. One writer remarked: “The skin is a miracle of evolutionary engineering: it waterproofs the body, blocks out and destroys harmful bacteria, regulates temperature, and continuously communicates with the brain” Yes, the skin is a “miracle” all right—but not a miracle of evolution. And yes, the skin was “engineered”—but the engineer was God!



 

Ik Onkar---God is One(Guru Nanak Dev Ji)

There are few hundred Skin Disease conditions any one can find on the net and all these diseases are mostly treated as a local problem with medication and local applications. But the reality is this that all these diseases are manifestations of the internal disorders on the skin.

From the above understanding we can say safely that in holistic medicine we do not treat skin disease alone, but we treat the whole person according to his\her underlying cause of the problem and all obstinate diseases get cured.

At Josan Holistic Hospital we concentrate at root cause of the skin disease and employ those approaches which are relevant to the individual treatment.

Baba Ramdev on Skin Diseases