Ike Ekweremadu: How Healthy Are Your Kidneys?

By Femi Kusa/

johnolufemikusa@gmail.com.

 Many Nigerians learn no useful lessons from history. This has nothing to do with the suspension of history from high school curricula. Many of us are not contemplative persons. We rush through our daily experiences, experiencing nothing from them, and making no useful meaning in our lives. We fail to “live in the present”, and make the most of it, but in a pipe dream future and, perhaps worse still, “in the past”. I say so because, despite all the media noise about the Ekweremadu family, many persons I spoke with lately could not answer the following questions:

Where are your kidneys in your body?

What functions do they perform there to keep you healthy?

What signals do they give you when they are not faring well?

How can you keep them healthy every day and add more years to your life?

You won’t believe it; everyone I spoke with failed this simple test!

Let us set our bearing. Ike Ekweremadu was the Deputy Senate President of the Nigerian Ninth  Senate, of which Dr. Bukola Saraki was President. Ekweremadu’s daughter, Sonia, was in a London hospital waiting for any good Samaritan who would donate one of his or her kidneys to her to replace one of hers. Back home in Nigeria, her parents searched for a donor.  One account said Ekweremadu and his wife, Beatrice, lured David Nwaminiukpo, 21, a Lagos trader, to London with a job offer. David Nwaminiukpo, long dreaming of a London job, accepted the invitation.

Another account was that, in London, David Nwaminiukpo was taken to Royal Free Hospital for medical checks and that the doctors, following protocols, informed him about the procedure he would soon undergo. That procedure was the surgical removal of one of his kidneys as a kidney donor. David Nwaminiukpo complained that that was not what he was in London for. The police were called immediately. Ike Ekwermadu, his wife, Beatrice, and a medical practitioner, Doctor Obinna Obeta, were charged and convicted of procuring David Nwaminiukpo for illegal organ transplant and modern slavery. 

They all denied the charges. They will be sentenced on 5 May 2023. The convictions soiled the reputation of Ekweremadu, a lawyer who, ironically, was behind the drafting of Nigeria’s law against human organ trafficking.

The court proceedings dragged on for months, enough time to awaken the interest of Nigerians in kidney disease and why a kidney donor for Sonia was such a big deal. Between 20 and 25 million Nigerians are believed to suffer from kidney disease in various stages. To test the claim that Nigerians are hardly educated by events around them, readers of this column may wish to answer the earlier stated questions.

Living in the present means internalizing or absorbing events that happen around us every day for the lessons they have in stock for us. For they are “messages” packed with profitable lessons for us.

So, away from seeing the Ekweremadus as a couple who sought to remove the roof on someone else’s house for implanting on their own roofless house, please answer those questions about your kidneys and score yourself to know if you are a person who “lives in the present”.

THE KIDNEYS

Whenever I pick beans for cooking to keep busy as a septuagenarian or whenever I have them for a meal, I do not fail to remember my kidneys. The kidney, bean-shaped, is a possible signature tune of a dietary health relationship between them. Red kidney beans, in particular, appealed more to some ancient people in this regard. The Yoruba people of South-Western Nigeria call it EWA POPONDO. It is bigger and more brownish or reddish than other bean species. It takes much longer time to cook, one of the reasons it lost favour with today’s women in the kitchen and the farmer in the fields. But its POD is in good demand in the world herbs market which offers it for cholesterol and weight control questions as well as for kidney offsets such as dropsy, a condition of fluid build-up in the body caused by kidney insufficiency or failure. Everyone has two kidneys, each one almost as big as the size of his or her fist and located just below the rib cage on either side of the spinal column, the right kidney a little lower than the left because of an allowance for the liver.

FUNCTIONS

What do the kidneys do? They are not where they are by accident, and no other organ can successfully perform their functions, although one kidney may add the job of the other to its own without much Ado.

The chief job of the kidney is to maintain homeostasis. This is the upholding of balance throughout the body. If we observe our existence and environment well enough, we should discover that THE LAW OF BALANCE, a law of nature, holds everything together. It prevents the sun, the moon, and the stars from falling upon our earth and disallows collisions among the planets which orbit our sun. Architects and builders respect it with beams, pillars, and cantilevers apart from the right mix of cement, stone, sand, and water mortar. It is there in the pot of soup on the stove in the right amounts of salt, pepper, oil, and other ingredients. We cannot fail to observe it in the right blend of colour in the dressing of many women.

In homeostasis, the fluid balance of the body must balance the minerals, or health challenges will occur. Maintenance of their balance is one of the ways the kidneys help blood pressure balance. Thus, sagging, or faulty blood pressure may indicate the need for a check not only on the heart and blood vessels but also on the kidneys.

The kidneys also help to maintain acid and alkaline balance. This balance is checked on a 0-14 PH scale. Readings below 7 are on the acid side and those above are on the alkaline. Many experts say the body fares well between 7.35 and 7.45 on this scale. Below 7.35 brings acidosis and above 7.45 PH AlKALOSIS. In either case, protein molecules become damaged and dysfunctional and, in extreme cases, may cause death. 

Many people do not realize that their kidneys help them to produce red blood cells without which the oxygen in the air they inhale cannot get into their cells and the carbon dioxide waste on their bodies cannot be evacuated to their lungs for expulsion through exhalation. So, when they are weak and the problem is neither low nor high blood sugar nor vitamin B12 deficiency, they gulp on blood tonics. It is little known that the kidney produces a hormone, ERYTHROPOEITIN, which stimulates the bone marrow to produce red blood cells. Although the liver also makes ERYTHROPOEITIN. This is why frequent bouts of weakness or tiredness call for a kidney function test.

ELECTROLYTE BALANCE is another kidney function. Like CALCIUM and MAGNESIUM which must be in balance to prevent kidney or gall bladder stones, or some forms of arthritis, sodium, and potassium must be in balance to prevent such problems as primary hypertension, sore and tired muscles, and even tumours and cancers. Like other functions, this one may involve life if it goes awry.

The two chief electrolytes are potassium and sodium. Potassium is the salt inside every cell. Sodium is the salt outside the cell in the interstitial or extracellular fluid as the fluid around the cells is also sometimes called. Sodium pushes into the cell; potassium pushes it out. This produces an electrical circuit that takes oxygen and nutrients from the blood plasma in the interstitial fluid into the cell and brings out wastes and toxins. Both potassium and sodium must exist in the right ratios inside and outside the cell for homeostasis to occur, and for the system to be in a state of equilibrium. Every day, many of us do not make this task easy for the kidneys. The homeostatic ratio of potassium is higher than that of sodium. Yet we do not consume enough potassium-rich foods and overdo sodium. Women boil beef or chicken or fish or yam or potato with sodium. They add sodium to sauce and rice or beans. Then, they add monosodium glutamate (MSG) to the entire stuff to achieve that extra taste they believe makes food more palatable, believing the way to a man’s heart is through his palate.

But MSG is a load of sodium. Intriguing is the medical finding of Dr. Max Gerson that tumours and cancers assail tissues and organs in which sodium has invaded the cell and evicted potassium. (Please see the Gerson therapy online). His hypothesis is that it is potassium that extracts oxygen from blood plasma and that its deficiency and consequent shortage of oxygen makes the cell convert from oxidative or oxygen-using existence for fermentative or non-oxygen-using life. Thus, can we infer that the onset of cancer is preceded by the failure of the kidneys to maintain the necessary balance between the electrolyte’s potassium and sodium?

Dr. Gerson tried to prove his cancer hypothesis by infusing his patients with potassium-rich juices and through organic coffee enemas to remove the toxins many of the eliminative five organs (lungs, liver, intestine, skin, and kidneys) did not reasonably eliminate.

Many Nigerian women who are experiencing cases of breast and other cancers as well as uterine fibroids may wish to slow down on MSG. Uterine fibroids may be benign tumours, it is, nevertheless, like cancer, a tumour.

This column cannot address all functions of the kidneys or the complex pathways through which they carry it out. This is the expert field of Urologists and other medics. The job of this column here is to bestir our souls to awaken to the messages in events that the environment is passing to us. Is the environment not inviting us through Ekweremadu experiences, to remember our kidneys and take care of them?

How do the kidneys work? Each kidney is made up of about one million nephrons. A nephron is made up of a sieve or blood filter known as the GLOMERULUS (singular) and a tube known as TUBULE through which urine, wastes, and toxins filtered from the blood by the glomerulus, are sent to a receiving cup and from the cup into the urinary bladder via two larger tubes called the URETERS. The ureters bring the urine out of the body through another tube called the URETHRA.

The nephrons are a wonderful filtration system. If all the 2 million or so glomeruli (plural) in the two kidneys are arranged in a single file, that line will measure about 19 kilometers in length. Whenever there is an imbalance in the system and the brain sends the necessary instructions to the kidneys, the glomeruli do the needful, and there is equilibrium. The glomeruli of the two kidneys filter about 200 liters of blood every day of which about 2 liters are urea, waste, toxins, and water.

How do the kidneys tell if they are not faring well?

From about the age of 40 or 50 onwards, depending on the degree of care or abuse of the body, the kidneys begin to exhibit varying degrees of insufficiency, disease, or failure. The damage may be due to infections, the formation of stones, searing, blockages of the filtration channels, calcification, etc. Some of the causes of high blood pressure are evidenced here. These include ATHEROSCLEROSIS (blockage of blood vessels by cholesterol or other plaque) or arteriosclerosis (hardening of blood vessels by calcium deposits). Cold drinks cause the kidneys to shrink and should be avoided.

Some of the signs through which we may obtain such hints include, but are not limited to, the following:

A) Sharp or dull pains in the upper section of the back, side, and upper abdomen below the rib cage (s)

B) Scanty urine output

C) Cloudy, brownish, or bloody or smelly urine

D) Nausea, vomiting, weakness, and fatigue

E) Skin itch and rashes

F) Confusion

G) Water logging in the feet, hands, face or around the eyelid.

  H). Foaming urine. This suggests protein is leaking from the nephron into the urine. Brownish or cola colour urine may indicate blood leakage. Albumin, a protein, and creatinine may be discovered through a blood test. Albumin in urine may cause the blood to not return enough water to the body.

Kidney damage is measured on a scale of 100 percent for efficiency to zero for complete damage and failure. Some causes of damage or failure may include high blood pressure, diabetes or excessive blood sugar, prolonged use of painkillers and other dangerous pharmaceutical drugs, excessive exposure to chemicalized foods and drugs, sugared foods and drinks, free radicals, and insufficiency of antioxidants to annihilate them, dehydration, etc.

How may we help our kidneys?

Conscious care for the health of our kidneys should begin with the knowledge that the human body generates wastes and toxins throughout its existence and that it is designed with five outlets for capturing and eliminating them. Besides, we should stand in the knowledge that mother nature anticipated environmental impacts through food, water, and air and, before the body came about, provided in the plant kingdom plant tonics for the kidneys in health and medicines in sickness. The five eliminative organs are the lungs, liver, intestines, skin, and kidneys. When one is subnormal, its workload is shared by the others. Many people do not use their lungs to up to 40 percent capacity, for example, because they are sedentary and do not exercise. Thus, carbon dioxide builds up in the system which must be eliminated. If the liver is weak, poisons build up in the body.

Many people do not move their bowels every day, whereas the food transit time should not exceed 18 or 20 hours. There are other people who do not sweat even on hot days or force themselves to not with the application of aluminum-based (and other) deodorants in the armpits and groin. Others block pores in their skin with heavy paints or body creams. The kidneys may overwork and, to worsen their condition, they may not be given enough water to do their jobs well. Rather than drink clean alkaline water, many people ignorantly drink acidic water and so-called “soft drinks”, sugared malt or fuzzy drinks, or beer.

Thus, in my view, to help the kidneys, the best way may be through high colonic irrigations or organic enema coffees advocated by Dr. Gerson. Once the other eliminative organ, cells, tissues, and systems are clean, the urinary system and the kidney should have less work to do.

KIDNEY HERBS

I know of some persons who, down or not, periodically kit up with a lemonade diet, a fast programme on maple syrup, lime or lemon, cayenne, and water which may be run for about one month or more. If it will cure polycystic kidneys, I do not know. What is clear is that it is an intense detoxification diet and stimulant which has helped some kidney conditions.

Recently, some animal and human studies were carried out which recommended some herbs well-known in respect of other organs as good for the kidneys as well. For example, milk thistle was found to help the revival of the nephrons. I will ever remember aloe vera in respect of nephritis, inflammation of the nephrons. About 15 or more years ago, the KOREA ILLUSTRATED magazine reported the case of a Korean man beset with some terminal disease. Soon, nephritis of one kidney joined them, and the kidney was surgically removed. When the second kidney became nephritic, a friend advised him to live on Aloe Vera juice for whatever it may be worth. A dying man will cling to any straw. He did as he was advised, and all his ailments cleared. KOREA ILLUSTRATED published his story in respect of his venturing into aloe vera plantation farming and for his export of this plant to the United States.

Now, we are told the anthraquinones of aloe vera do wonders in the kidneys! We cannot forget dandelion, the traditional liver and kidney herb, and red kidney bean pod which, like aloe, addresses dropsy.

In the treasure trove of mother nature, there are, also, Chanka Piedra for dissolving kidney stones, golden seal root for fighting bacteria, viruses, and fungi, lecithin and magnesium for dissolving the stones, propolis, an anti-microbial, rhubarb root, and stinging nettle, both of which are great blood cleansers, and cordyceps, which energies the kidneys.

According to the publication in March last year of the findings of a study titled PROMOTING PLANT BASED THERAPIES FOR CHRONIC KIDNEY DISEASES in the JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE-BASED INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE, the following herbs were top notchers. Ginger, turmeric, beetroot juice, onions, grape, bitter leaf. The researchers were Muhammad Ali Khan, Andrew J. Kassannos, and Wendy E Hoy. 

On the shelves of health food stores in Nigeria are some helpful proprietary blends of these herbs and many more. Among them are Curcumin 2000X, kidney cleanse and function tea, kidney rescue, Amazon kidney support, KDCL, kidney health, and many more. To these ones, we may add grasses such as Alfalfa, wheatgrass, and barley grass. To them, we may also add horsetail for its silica. Silica alkalizes, for which reason we may not forget diatomaceous earth (DE) or DIATOM. When I am uncomfortable with my urine colour, I add any of them to my diet and achieve clear urine.

If we have learned to periodically clean the fuel filters of our motor vehicles, why should it be a big deal for us to periodically clean our kidneys which are far more useful to us than the filters of an inanimate object which is replaceable, anyway?

FEMI KUSA was at various times Editor; Director of Publication/ Editor-in-Chief of THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER; Editorial Director/ Editor-in-Chief of THE COMET NEWSPAPER. Currently, he keeps a Thursday Column on Alternative Medicine in the NATION NEWSPAPER.

Some of his health columns may be found on www.olufemikusa.com and in MIDIUM a digital platform for writers. He is active also on Facebook @ John OLUFEMI KUSA.

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