Dr Matt’s Newsletter April 9, 2023– Easter Sunday: What would Mother Teresa do? Part 3
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
As my avid readers will easily guess, Easter Sunday reminds me of people who have had “Near Death Experiences” and “Death Bed Visions” as described in my prior newsletters. Just like Jesus’s disciples, people in our own backyards have encounters with loved ones who died, and they also receive spiritual healing. These events are something we hospice professionals hear on a regular basis from patients and families in hospice care.
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Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
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Today’s newsletter sections include:
Music of the Week – Franz Liszt was the first movie star – except they did not have movies back then…
Inspirational story from Mother Teresa’s biography, “To Love and Be Loved” by Jim Towey – Part 3. We finally get to one of my main reasons for telling her story: her utter lack of fear of people with “super-bugs” such as leprosy, tuberculosis, and AIDS. She saw how much they needed to be loved, and how many of them recovered their health when given spiritual and nutritional sustenance. I wonder what she would have done with people diagnosed with covid-19? Give them extra tender loving care, just like she did for everyone else who needed it, of course!
Another plug for RFK Jr, Joseph Ladapo, and Ron DeSantis – and another of Dr Matt’s “Crazy” ideas…
Research of the week – Masks again: I have no political motivation to send the latest research showing the harms and lack of efficacy of masks, and I do not care if people are republicans or democrats: I just want to know if people are smiling at me or frowning at me… :-)
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Music of the week – Franz Liszt a “movie star” before movies: Why refer to him as a “movie star”? He had rugged good looks, was a gifted artist, and had long term affairs with married countesses and princesses.
Liszt was a Hungarian musical genius who lived from 1811 to 1886. Unlike Beethoven and Mozart who both had severe health problems and died relatively young, Liszt had a long career and died at the age of 74. Like Beethoven and Mozart, he is considered the greatest piano virtuoso of his era, but he appeared to cope with early stardom a bit better, if still far from a “normal” life which I will describe a bit later. Here is an etude to listen to while you read about Mother Teresa’s devotion to the “lepers” of society.
Etude #3 – “Un Sospiro”
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Part 3 from Mother Teresa’s biography, “To Love and Be Loved” by Jim Towey.
Why did Mother Teresa and he Missionaries of Charity sisters and brothers specialize in helping people with leprosy, tuberculosis, and AIDS? Because everyone else was afraid of them!
Last week, in the newsletter from April 2nd, we saw how she finally embarked on her mission to serve the poorest and most ill people in the world, commanded by a voice she heard in a spiritual experience. However, she found herself in “tortures of loneliness” without her sisters and brothers of the church. The newsletter from the week before, on March 25th, told the story of her spiritual experience and how similar it was to what Near Death Experiencers have described in thousands of interviews with people like UVA psychiatrist Bruce Greyson.
This week is the story of the end of her loneliness, as courageous young women joined her and formed a group that eventually grew beyond her dreams. With these first devotees she established a routine of work and prayer that fills each day, with only 30 minutes of free time. They also found a common purpose in serving people cast out by society, especially people with stigmatizing illnesses like Leprosy, Tuberculosis, and AIDS.
In 1948 when she started to work with extremely poor people in the slums of Calcutta, she realized that the worst illnesses were the ones that frightened people’s families, friends, and caregivers away. When AIDS became the newest frightening diagnosis in the early 1980s, she saw clearly that people were abandoned due to fear of infection just like people diagnosed with leprosy in India. This brought her mission to the United States and to Washington DC, where she opened homes specifically designed for people diagnosed with AIDS. She realized that even in wealthy countries, people with the latest super-virus were being abandoned, just like the “lepers” on the streets of Calcutta.
But back to 1948, all alone in the streets of one of the poorest slums in Calcutta, “Sister Teresa” did not have an easy time. She intended to ease the suffering of people with illnesses of poverty, but she herself suffered “tortures of loneliness”. She needed a community just as the people on the streets did, and when a young woman came to join her sisterhood, a community of sisters began. “Sister Agnes” was the first to arrive. She had been a student when mother Theresa was teaching at the Catholic girls’ school in Calcutta. After Sister Agnes, every month of two, more young women came, and by the end of her first year there were 12. Two of them were so young they still were finishing their high school studies.
One of the ways to keep her group together was to have a strict schedule, similar to many monastic traditions as described in my newsletter from December 14th. This schedule continues to this day. “Each day the sisters get up at 4:30 AM, are in the chapel for morning prayer at 5 AM, and then do household chores before returning to the chapel for mass. After breakfast they attend their work on mission assignments, returning for prayer at midday.” This is only the beginning: after lunch a 30 minute rest, another period of prayer, tea-time together, an hour of prayer, a spiritual reading, and then afternoon mission work. At 6:30 PM a final hour of prayer before the dinner bell rings at 7:30. After dinner there are more household chores, bathing, washing, and preparation for the next day’s work. Finally some free time for a half an hour each evening and “by 10 PM the missionaries of charity are asleep.“ (Pages 47-48).
From before sun-up until well after sun-down, the missionaries of charity are working to help others as well as to working on their own body, mind, and spirit. This is still the same schedule they have today, over 80 years later.
Some early quotes from Mother Teresa’s journal show how she was drawn to people cast out due to fear of infection: “A very poor woman dying I think of starvation more than TB” (Page 45).
From Jim Towey’s description: “To be a leper always meant ejection from all organized parts of society, including family and friends, and life in exile as a beggar. In the Middle Ages, people accused of having leprosy had to wear special clothing and ring a bell when people came near to warn them.” (Page 96). “The Missionaries of Charity set up mobile clinics bringing services to neighborhoods with high concentrations of lepers, … and by the time I came to witness such work, the Missionaries of Charity had already logged four million patient visits with lepers at clinics throughout India… Mother sought to give lepers meaningful work and purpose in serving others, not just simple charity” (Pages 96-97).
Next week, we will learn more about the care of AIDS patients in Washington DC, where Jim Towey volunteered, saying, “If Mother Teresa and the MC’s weren’t afraid of getting AIDS, maybe I shouldn’t be either”. He ended up living and working in the AIDS home in Washington DC. “Those who were diagnosed with AIDS were often left with nowhere to go. People were afraid of these new lepers, and Mother came to fill the void. … Mother Teresa taught me that the deepest wounds of humanity could best be filled by love and compassion, one person at a time.” (Pages 96-97). Mother Teresa and her sisters had learned that the abandonment was worse than the disease, whatever it’s name, including leprosy, tuberculosis, and AIDS.
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Music of the week – Franz Liszt part 2:
Liszt lived with a married countess for five years and they had three children together. Strangely, this seemingly provoked only minimal scandal. Perhaps this was because divorce was extremely difficult in those days, requiring approval from the Pope, so people just separated long-term, and commonly made other arrangements. It is an example of how “prohibition” often makes things worse instead of better, just like prohibition of alcohol in the USA in the Roaring Twenties.
Here is a lively piece to listen to while you read th following: a quick thought on three political figures who share my wish that public health be returned to health promotion and away from exaggerated fears of infection.
Etudes de Concert No. 2 – Gnomenreigen – “Dance of the Gnomes”
Dr Matt’s Political Midsummer Night’s Dream: RFK and Ron DeSantis endorsing Joe Ladapo for president?
I usually avoid politics partly because I can never agree with more than about 59% of any political group’s views. However, RFK Jr, Joseph Ladapo, and Ron DeSantis are a bit different. Despite their very human flaws, human self-importance, human fear of illness, and human racist tendencies (see my newsletter from April 2nd for this discussion as well as Mother Teresa’s story, part 2), they might just work to heal our nation’s healthcare system, and help people see that tender loving care is the #1 priority.
They might also de-emphasize pharmaceutical drugs and shift us towards natural health approaches, including mind-body-spirit work, as well as plain old diet and exercise. They might help reduce people’s fears of infection, instead of fanning the flames the way our current “disease control” experts do, especially the World Health Organization with it’s extremely sadly misguided “pandemic treaties”.
Here’s another Crazy Dr Matt idea: Perhaps my patients can organize a joint rally for RFK Jr and Ron DeSantis, who are both almost certain to run for president in 2024. While we have them in the same room, we can pull a fast one and suggest that they throw all their votes to Florida’s surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo. Yes I am trying to be funny, but also at least partly serious 😊.
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Research of the Week: Masks Again: The largest, highest quality review on masks and other interventions such as “social distancing” fails to find any evidence that they reduce transmission of viral illnesses:
The most highly respected organization for evidence-based medicine is the Cochrane Collaboration, and a group of Cochrane researchers published a comprehensive review of all available research on masks and other interventions. They found no reliable evidence that masks prevent respiratory infections, including “N95 masks”. Another comprehensive review of 2,168 studies was published by a different set of researchers. They discussed in detail the many harms of masks, including decreased oxygen in the blood, increased CO2, shortness of breath ("dyspnoea") and many others. Both of these reviews were updates of their prior work, and so are not actually “new” even though they were just published.
Below is a link to an interview with the lead author of the Cochrane study, Tom Jefferson, and then a link to the study on adverse effects of masks.
But first some quotes from the interview with Tom Jefferson:
“JEFFERSON: There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop. My job, our job as a review team, was to look at the evidence, we have done that.
DEMASI: Your review also showed that n95 masks for healthcare workers did not make much difference.
JEFFERSON: That’s right, it makes no difference – none of it.
“The updated review titled “Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of acute respiratory viruses” found that wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to influenza-like or covid-19-like illness transmission.”
Article on adverse effects of wearing facemasks:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1125150/full
Thanks for the newsletter Matt!