Diseases caused by dehydration include those attended by pains of different nature. Pain is a desperate request of your body for water. The point is that the reason of occurrence of pain syndrome is acid burns inside the cells. Depending on location of these centres of high acid content pain may occur in different parts of the body. Classical pains are no more than the evidence that acid accumulations need to be cleaned with a big amount of water. These are pains during heartburn, dyspepsia, angina, colitis, as well as rheumatoid, lumbar, fibromyalgic pains and migraine.

Normal condition of the intracellular fluid is a weakly alkaline environment. The point is that the water circulating in the body gets into cells and carries molecules of hydrogen out (and it is just the molecules of hydrogen that determine the acidity level). The body needs to be adequately hydrated so that it will be able to maintain the normal hydrogen ion concentration (or normal pH) equal to 7.4. In dehydration the acid accumulates inside the cells causing burns that provoke pain. If the body is adequately hydrated it keeps the weakly alkaline environment.

Indicator of efficient acid removal is the light colour of urine. If urine is bright yellow or even orange in colour this is an alarm signal of a dangerous dehydration degree.

The first sign that the acid concentration in the body is becoming critical is heartburn pain. This is the way the mucus membrane of the stomach tells that our body needs water.

Pain mechanism is connected directly with increase of histamine production which is the main “witness” of dehydration. When this connection was discovered drug industry immediately began to produce a huge number of antihistamines. However, to relieve pain attacks you don’t need to swallow packages of suprastin; it will be enough to take a glass of clean water. When our body is adequately hydrated the histamine’s activity restricts. Otherwise, the histamine’s activity intensifies that among other things may result in increase of acid production in the stomach. This immediately causes heartburn – the first and the truest indicator of thirst.

Many people think of this pain – the heartburn pain – as a hunger and try to satisfy it by taking antacids or having a snack. As a result, in the first case we put our body in danger as most antacids contain aluminium which causes diseases of nervous system (it is proved that accumulation of alluminium is the body is connected with development of Alzheimer’s disease).

In the other case when we think of the sense of thirst as the sense of hunger we overeat. This is the cause of overweight and disturbances in digestion. These problems persist and even aggravate as the body starts to spend the valuable water on producing of additional quantity of saliva instead of using it for removal of the acid.

As we aren’t used to think of the heartburn as a signal of thirst many of us bring the situation to ulcer of stomach. The ulcer appears in a place of a constant acid burn that cannot be eliminated by additional food.

This pain appears at the first signs of dehydration and may mislead not only a patient but also a doctor who might consider this symptom an indication for diagnostic surgery. In some cases the pain localizes around the appendix and looks like appendicitis. Sometimes it moves to the intestine and looks like colitis. In fact, all these symptoms are indications of dehydration of the body and signals of thirst that our body sends us. In some cases in order to eliminate the pain you need just to drink a glass of water.

Strange as it may seem, bulimia is another manifestation of the sense of thirst. People who suffer from bulimia just cannot distinguish between hunger and thirst. Vomiting that is illustrative of bulimia sufferers is just a defense reaction of the body which cannot cope with excessive food because it doesn’t have enough water to digest it.

Colitis, the large intestine pain, is also a result of inadequate hydration. At the final stage of digestion water is needed to enable final products of digestion to pass normally through the intestine. This segment of the intestine is concerned with final formation of “dry residue” and in case of insufficient water supply the intestinal peristalsis intensifies that may cause pain. In this case you need to drink every morning on an empty stomach 2 or 3 glasses of water and the problem of constipations and pains during passing of dejection through the large intestine will disappear by itself.

Another type of pain, migraine headache, is also provoked by a high production of the histamine. If the brain is not adequately hydrated then stress, thermoplegia or alcohol intoxication lead to a high production of the histamine which causes headache. Therefore, migraine is another signal of dehydration of the brain. It is noteworthy that migraines cannot be relieved by almost any of pain killers because the pain signal is sent by the central nervous system.

In other cases, when pain is localized, for example, in joints and manifests itself as rheumatoid arthritis taking of pain killers produces a short-term effect but doesn’t cure. In this particular case treatment is just pain management but not elimination of the source of the disease. This also holds true for waist pains: chronic pain in joints and in the low segment of the spine tells that these areas are not adequately hydrated.

So, pain is located in the area of insufficient water supply and local dehydration. The cause of all joint and spine pains is that a cartilage separating bone structures, if not adequately hydrated, loses elasticity and its slide capacity reduces. As a result, the bones begin to rub against each other that causes pain and leads to death of the cartilage’s cells. This may result in osteoarthritis, the last stage of the process caused by dehydration.

At this stage a person cannot live without strong pain killers. Today a clear dependence has been stated between taking of pain killers and… development of hypertension. In this connection the only advice can be given: drink water to avoid destruction of cartilage and bone tissues and to prevent development of hypertension.