The marvellous Indian toilet

LAHORE:

Although the Britannica entry on Sir John Harington — courtier and wit who lived in England in the 16th century — credits him with having invented the flush toilet for Queen Elizabeth, most historians are unanimous in their agreement that it was actually fellow English engineer Thomas Crapper who brought widespread use to it three centuries later.

And that would be when several prominent natural health specialists of fame, including Dr Bernard Jensen, and most recently, Dr Mercola, trace the etiology of the rise of various ailments of the lower digestive tract in the Western world. Most strongly linked are frequent bouts of constipation and the eventual development of hemorrhoids, the latter of which over half the population over 40 years old in the United States develops over a lifetime.

Constipation and eventual hemorrhoids — what?

Constipation is an ailment familiar to the vast majority of us. We are, however, less familiar with a more serious condition with which it is linked. In his piece, For Best Toilet Health: Squat or Sit?, Dr Mercola explains:

“Hemorrhoids are veins in the wall of your rectum and anus that have become twisted, swollen and inflamed…the resulting lumps can cause pain and bleeding.”

How come?

Hemorrhoids develop most often due to an increase in pressure in the aforementioned area, which in turn follows from straining during bowel movements. As a result, they frequently develop in people with constipation.

Dr Mercola goes on to explain that sitting to defecate isn’t merely unnatural or novel to the human race (infants, for example, squat spontaneously), but there are several mechanisms that make it vastly inferior to the latter.

i) It doesn’t allow for a sharp enough ‘anorectal angle.’ In other words, sitting on a toilet puts the knees at approximately a 90-degree angle to the abdomen, unlike in squatting, where the knees are pressed against the torso and the angle is significantly sharper, priming the individual for evacuation of the bowels.

ii) Following from the above, in sitting to defecate, individuals need to supplement the lack of internal force with straining. This effect causes a temporary disruption of blood flow to the heart.

Dr Mercola also identifies four internal mechanisms that make squatting a crucial intervention for constipation, and also refers to the studies carried out by Dr Berko Sikirov, an Israeli physician who demonstrated with a group of hemorrhoid sufferers that the incidence on the condition can be almost completely eliminated by making this change.

The Return

As documented in an article in Slate Magazine, How bathroom posture affects your health, the public first took notice of the issue at hand when in 1978, President Jimmy Carter suffered from a case of hemorrhoids so severe that he had to be absent from office that day. In later years, entrepreneurs in the US who are engineering devices that allow one to squat on flush toilets have found reasonable success.

Alongside, Britain has recently seen a re-introduction of the squat toilet for public use. As documented by an article in BBC, Squat Toilets in Rochdale Shopping Centre, squat toilets were installed recently in Greater Manchester as part of a move to be more accommodating towards Muslims, who had expressed their reliance on the latter for religious reasons. While the reasons for the change stem from the desire from the locals to advance the ethic of “becoming more cosmopolitan and global-minded”, it does give a glimmer of hope that there is potential for the Indian toilet, and our best interests at hand, to increasingly find a role in the West in the future.

In the meanwhile, let’s turn our attention to our own backyard and not continue to abandon the marvellous Indian toilet.

The author is the head of Scholars by Profession, a local research-initiative. Find out more at here. 

Published in The Express Tribune, February 25^th, 2013.            

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