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Covid-19: An inflection Point for the Natural Health Care Industry
New data rolls out every day, many times a day. A dear friend with whom I share the health obsession, and who works with a similar virus to the one which triggered my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome #RECOVERED, sent me Joseph Mercola’s take. Mercola is so hated by big Pharma, his research is buried many Google pages deep, but he is among the most insightful research physicians and naturopaths out there and is followed by many. The interview below is linked here.
Mercola believes that the health of the immune system which encounters COVID is everything. If standard-of-care was not get-sick-and-we’ll-drug-you-till-you’re better, and instead was the slow and painstaking process of building your immune system, your nutritional profile, your flexibility and strength, many fewer people would have succumbed to the violence of the virus. Mercola recommends Vitamin C infusions, which are being used in China, stating that the antioxidant activity of vitamin C “may help prevent cytokine-induced lung damage…cytokines are small proteins released by cells, which trigger inflammation in response to infections. Severe lung inflammation with COVID-19 can lead to respiratory distress and even death.” The cytokine storm in COVID is the marker of profound danger.
You can view Dr. Richard Cheng’s NIH presentation on April 8th, 2020 here:
Abram Hoffer, the psychiatrist, and nutritionist, Mercola’s mentor, who, along with his fellow researcher Linus Pauling founded the natural health movement, swore up and down that 9,000 mg of Vitamin C could cure lung cancer. The wealth of health data deliberately buried by Big Pharma especially now with the Gates Foundation’s drive to vaccinate the world is shocking. If you were under the care of a naturopath, right now, and on top of all your various metrics including the usual, as well as a hormonal, allergic, and nutritional profile, it would be very damned hard for COVID to take you down. But never mind, the profits to be made in forcing a vaccine on humanity is worth the 20% or so who react badly to that vaccine. Despite the contempt leveled on anti-vaxxers, there is no vaccine that does not carry serious side effects to those vulnerable.
In any case, as reported by the Atlantic yesterday, those who are succumbing, rather than the elderly, those with hypertension and diabetes and obesity, are disproportionately people of color on the lower end of the socio-economic status. Sixty percent of the people who die with COVID in Chicago are black whereas the population is only 15% black. These are people who can’t afford the $250 a month I take in nutritional supplements, who don’t have a forest to hike or a green house to live in. Instead, they are the people who make my life and yours, possible, those who live in multi-generational households, where one job feeds six or seven, and that job is critical. Social distancing is for the relatively rich.
“There’s a big difference in how people handle this virus,” says Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases at Northwestern University. “It’s very unusual. None of this variability really fits with any other diseases we’re used to dealing with.”
This degree of uncertainty has less to do with the virus itself than how our bodies respond to it. As Murphy puts it, when doctors see this sort of variation in disease severity, “that’s not the virus; that’s the host.”
It will take a generation to rewire the medical system to teach that basic self-care is utterly critical to present well-being and that it is easy and cheap. You can bet that not one of Gywneth Paltrow’s army has died of the virus that is eating Manhattan. Their wellness contortions may read as vanity, but in fact, most are well-founded and are the necessary future. Perhaps not at her price point.
Just under the surface of consciousness lies an entire army of highly educated men and women who know just how to promote well being to the point you will never need critical care, you will never have a heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s or dementia. You will never experience the ferocious cost to wealth and family these illnesses bring. I see them as struggling to break through and this may be their transforming moment, their inflection point, their hinge in history.
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Resting On Our Laurels – Does this shutdown point to a New Earth?
Have dropped this ball in the last three weeks or more – writing about health hacking seems gratuitous when people are afraid they are going to die. It is, however clear that there are methods to prevent COVID from taking over your system: Zinc, Vitamin C, nebulizing peroxide, Quercetin. Sinus rinsing three times a day, preferably with a neti-pot, and gargling Listerine three times a day will dilute the viral load if it is in your system, and allow you to build immunity to it. Pharmaceuticals, hydroxychloroquine, Z-Pak together with Zinc, if you qualify, equally can clear the path for your immune system to work. We know that obesity and diabetes set you up for it, as does heart or lung disease, or anything autoimmune. Age. Here’s a statistic that should scare us all: 25% of women have an autoimmune disease.
COVID is a violent pathogen when it finds the right host as if it was a virus to cleanse the world of the weak. A version of the native Indian custom of leaving the sick and old to die alone in the woods. What intrigues me is whether it was engineered in the Wuhan labs to be so.
On to happier things! I have been using the time to stop shopping for anything but absolute necessaries, and it proves one hell of a relief. The world hasn’t stopped selling though, but now I see the targeted ads as a deep and annoying intrusion, no matter how compassionate and pretty and informative the editorial bumpf they are wrapped in.
Instead, I’ve been taking my cat for a walk in the forest.
I have also been intermittent fasting, seriously this time, 16 hours leading to 18 hours building more days of less eating ‘window’ as it is called. I feel myself getting younger. No seriously, lighter, younger, 25% more energy. It is damned wonderful.
Also have gone back to yoga since they’ve closed the parks, the gym, the swimming pool. Turns out I love it, after saying I hate it for the last 25 years. Further, our paradise of a walled garden, well-watered (an actual definition of paradise) is even more paradisical than it was a month ago. Spring is coming, flowers peeking up and out, my garden slave busy outside with his ground cover and mulch.
Plus I’ve had time to go back to meditation and am starting to take it with more seriousness, imagining I will try out the other teachers of Anapanasati rather just Larry Rosenberg of Harvard Square. My writing voice came out of deep meditation decades ago, and I am going to challenge it to a greater depth of feeling, deeper thought. Apparently, if you take it real serious you can start seeing light beings. I am all for that. Take a look at this photograph, taken just after we buried my darling Tiggy down by the creek. I was trying to distract myself from wrenching sorrow by taking photographs of Jamie’s garden for his mother, and when I looked at them, goosebumps. In two shots out of a couple dozen, there he was. That, my dears, is a light being, something they used to call ectoplasm in the 20s now called plasma in the New Age community. That swirl is otherworldly, my dog, my soul’s companion, trying to make me see him one last time. You can see he was dashing from the little greenhouse to facing me while I was taking the photo.
All the above are the intense pleasures of introversion absent the raucous demand of the getting and spending world. People are beginning to ask – here’s a magnificent essay on what’s about to drown us all – can we get these benefits permanent-like? Is there a way to not dash around like headless chickens yet still live with promise and vivacity? Maybe a little, probably not much. Six billion people on earth depend on the citizens of western economies getting and spending their little hearts out. This is a respite. And possibly a signpost to the future, 200 years in the future. A new earth.
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Beijing Officially Disapproves
It is impossible to over-estimate just how fuckity-fucked is the Chinese Communist Party and the entire country of China. But Tim Blair, a blogger for the Daily Telegraph (link here) in Australia has managed to outline just how hard we will all be listening to the CCP from now on to forever. Which is only for the laugh. Here’s a bit of it. Read it and cheer for the messy, chaotic, real-world where such writers thrive and do not have their organs harvested.
“Recently the Daily Telegraph has published a number of reports and opinions about China’s response to COVID-19 that are full of ignorance, prejudice and arrogance.“
Response: “If a state-owned newspaper in China received this kind of complaint, subsequent days would involve journalists waking up in prison with their organs harvested.
“Tracing the origin of the virus is a scientific issue that requires professional, science-based assessment.“
Response: “Sure it does. How professional and science-based was the claim published on March 12 by China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan”?”
“The origin of the virus is still undetermined, and the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “COVID-19”.“
Response: “The World Health Organisation also appointed Zimbabwean murderer Robert Mugabe as its Goodwill Ambassador and declared on March 2 that the “stigma” of the coronavirus “is more dangerous than the virus itself”.
“The World Health Organization does a lot of stupid stuff.”
We will survive and laugh again.
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This Is Bullshit
The past few days have been spent inveigling powerlessly against the virus that closed down the world. This morning I had a brief exchange with a physicist friend, the kind of physicist who is a physicist’s physicist, but who nonetheless holds down a top job in the real world applying his talent and skill. He, like me, thinks this shutdown is largely Democrat bullshit, and he and statistician friend, when US deaths were estimated to run to 2,000,000 were laying bets they would be more like 50-80,000. Deaths stand at 10,000 now, with curves flattening in all but the densest pockets holding those with the most dangerous preconditions. I bet they don’t even reach 20,000. But we have lost $10Trillion.
By the way, those most vulnerable, other than the elderly, are service workers who push themselves brutally hard because they feed us and their families and cannot afford to shelter. Mostly these are people of color, who use sugar to fuel their brutally hard lives, who are diabetic or pre-diabetic and are often obese. (Fast food being fast and cheap) Meanwhile, fit, trim office workers lounge around their flats, sharing their healing recipes on Instagram.
He follows this website, and now I do too. https://covid19.healthdata.org/
It shows that there are enough beds, ventilators and ICUs to weather the storm in every state but New York, which has the hospital ship and the Javits Center. Plus the deaths projections are way way way off.
This thing is nearly over.
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Where is Everybody?
Very upset about Boris Johnson. Despite my deep-down feeling that this has been over-played for political reasons, it is clear that those of us who deal with the public in the urban centres are at enhanced risk. BoJo who is the top extrovert on the planet and who has worn himself thin over the past two years is most vulnerable. The rest of the day will be spent worrying about him.
I met him once when I was still being a journalist, spent 20 minutes in his office at the Spectator. He was younger and gorgeous and possessed a firecracker of a brain. My mind moves fast but he ran circles around me and earned my eternal admiration. Long live.
