Dr Matt’s Newsletter February 11th – “Appalachian Spring”
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
This week’s newsletter will have two themes very familiar to my avid readers:
1: Another “Near Death Experience” that happened when a prominent anesthesiologist was near death. His experience dramatically changed his priorities, and he wrote an excellent book which is a humble and inspiring example of truth-telling. A link to his book and to a short interview is provided below.
2: A large research study by Canadian researchers shows that social isolation and “anti-covid” policies were most likely the main cause of increases in mortality in 2020. Amazingly, most states in the US did not have any increase in peak mortality in 2020 over prior years, and the ones with the worst outcomes had extremely strict lockdown policies. Last, but not least, the pattern of excess deaths appearing simultaneously in cities thousands of miles apart does not fit a viral spread. However, living fully may be a better plan than trying to avoid death, and do we really die anyway? Perhaps not…
Today’s newsletter sections include:
Music of the Week: Spring is right around the corner, and “Appalachian Spring” is the music theme this week. Aaron Copland’s classic work plus some of his other celebrations of American music are featured today.
Inspiration of the Week – Dying to Wake Up, a book and interview from anesthesiologist Rajiv Parti about his spiritual experience that occurred when he was very close to end of life.
Research of the week – All cause mortality shows that all seven US states that never had a stay-at-home order avoided increases in mortality in 2020, and that side-by-side states with strict social isolation protocols did have increased mortality.
Thanks for reading Dr. Matt’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive weekly posts and feel free to recommend it to like-minded family and friends.
Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
Music of the Week: Spring is right around the corner, and “Appalachian Spring” is the music theme this week. Aaron Copland’s classic work is a celebration of spring in the Pennsylvania hills.
Copland’s most celebrated works came after he shifted musically, away from complex harmonies and intricate twelve-tone structures to a simpler, more melodic style, with inspiration from American culture and landscapes. He was born in Brooklyn to a Lithuanian Jewish family, but his music embraced all of North America, from the Appalachian mountains to the Great Plains to “Salon Mexico”. Like many of my favorite musicians, he celebrated the “simple things” of life, as reflected in the subjects and titles of the works featured below. This emphasis in simplicity may remind people of my November 23rd newsletter and Eckhart Tolle’s talk on experiencing gratitude through appreciation of the seemingly insignificant details of each present moment.
1: Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring - Simple Gifts
This Shaker melody was largely unknown outside Shaker communities until Copland took it up in his Ballet, Appalachian Spring. Now it is as American as apple pie.
2: Aaron Copland: Rodeo – Hoedown
Another of Copland’s classics celebrating American culture is his Ballet, Rodeo. This piece, Hoedown, is based on a much more lively American folk melody. I am not sure of Copland was much of a dancer, but it is almost impossible not to dance along with this one...
3: Aaron Copland: Billy the Kid – Prairie Card Game at Night
One would think that a Ballet about Billy the Kid would be a wild one, and there are some wilder parts. However, most of it celebrates quiet places, like open prairies of the West, and quiet nights under the stars as in this “prairie card game”. Most people do not realize that after “Billy the Kid” was orphaned and abandoned by his step-father, his first crime was stealing food.
4: Aaron Copland – Billy the Kid – Mexican Dance
Copland loved Mexico and visited the country throughout his life. He had close musical ties to several Mexican composers, and in addition to his larger symphonic work, “El Salón México”, he dedicated this piece to the blended experiences and cultures of Mexico and the United States. I travelled in Mexico a number of times and I also love the country. However, I would recommend avoiding heavily touristed areas. Although tourists are targets for scams and “tourist traps” everywhere, including Washington DC and New York City, quieter cities are less prone to this. I visited Oaxaca in the 1990’s and I have heard that Puebla is also a great experience. If you like big cities, I have heard that Monterrey and Guadalajara have a little of everything, at a slightly slower pace than Mexico City. Maybe those would be good options for our next “Dr. Matt Family Picnic”?
5: Aaron Copland – Rodeo – Saturday Night Waltz
My avid readers and listeners know I love waltzes, so I let’s finish this homage to Copland with this quiet waltz, appropriate for a classy first dance at any wedding.
Inspiration of the Week – Dying to Wake Up by Rajiv Parti
Rajiv was the chief of Anesthesiology at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital in California when his own health spiraled out of control. He is humble, almost self-denigrating, when he talks about who he was prior to his spiritual experience that happened while he was near death on an operating table.
Before his experience he wanted to have the biggest house on the most expensive street in the most expensive neighborhood! He also drove his son mercilessly to become a physician, a career that did not actually inspire his son at all. However, after his experience he realized that he did not want the extra-large expensive house any longer. He also realized that his son’s own inspiration should guide him instead of forcing him into a preplanned version of “success”.
Below is a link to a review of his book, which I highly recommend, and a short video interview. In the interview he sums things up nicely, saying “My main message is that you do not need a ‘near death experience’ to change your life. Transformation is available right now with forgiveness, love, and spiritual healing.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27274405-dying-to-wake-up
Research of the week – All cause mortality shows that all seven US states that never had a stay-at-home order avoided increased peak mortality in 2020. However, states side-by-side with much stricter social isolation protocols did have this peak. A simple analysis of the data also shows that the pattern of excess deaths does not fit a viral illness.
Last week’s newsletter featured a Canadian palliative care physician, Crystal Luchkiw, who stood up for her extremely fragile patients in Canada because they needed some TLC and more than a few hugs. Hugs were practically illegal for over a year, something that boggles the mind, especially for people with extremely fragile health who need them the most.
This week, Canadian researchers Denis Rancourt and his colleagues are featured. They showed that the excess “deaths” in the US in 2020 occurred almost exclusively in these people with extremely fragile underlying health, and that they did not follow a pattern consistent with a viral infection. I put the word “death” in quotes to emphasize the perspective of people who have been there, that it is a spiritual transition. Although this does not free us from feelings of grief and loss, it may allow us to heal from the experience a bit more smoothly.
The researchers conclude that the excess deaths were much more likely to be caused by the fears of the illness and by the “counter-measures”, rather than by any virus. While nearly everyone suffered from these measures, the most fragile people in society suffered the most and were more likely to die faster than expected. This includes people with drug and alcohol addictions, people living in poverty. as well as people with serious underlying health conditions.
The researchers emphasize that the very elderly did not die faster unless they had such conditions, and I saw this in my hospice patients. In one two-week period we had two 100 year-olds (a husband and wife), a 99 year-old, and a 91 year-old who all tested positive and had only mild symptoms. However, even people with very severe underlying health conditions usually have mild symptoms when testing positive for covid-19, something that people have trouble believing unless they see it over and over again as I have.
At the end of this post is a link and reference for their study which found that states with harsh isolation policies had more “excess mortality” than states with limited measures. There is also a link to a recent interview of Denis Rancourt by RFK Jr that just occurred this week. In the interview they also discuss the vaccine rollout which was correlated with increased deaths, particularly in India. However, this rollout in India was also accompanied by increased positive tests, disruption of health care, and the tsunami of fear that accompanies such events, something they fail to mention. Patients also did poorly because hospitals were understaffed and were forced to prevent families from coming in. Patient’s families are normally an intrinsic part of hospital care in India.
Here are some extended quotes from the interview with RFK Jr:
Rancourt: “It’s impossible to have a sudden surge in deaths in cities around the world thousands of miles apart simultaneously. The model of Viral spread simply does not work that way.”
“We did a study where we looked at lockdown states that were right beside non-lockdown states. In that first peak (of mortality), all the lockdown states have this peak and have it very large. Whereas the non-lockdown states that are right beside of them, there are seven of them, with comparable connecting states, and you can look at all the pairs, they do not have this peak. [...] We wrote an article on this with a collaborator from Harvard university and said ‘this is stunning’. They’re side-by-side!“ […] “When you look at the statistics none of the non-lockdown states have this peak, and all of the lockdown states do. That leads us to conclude that it is about the measures. About what treatment was being done or not being done.”
“In Italy they all had three, four, or more comorbidities, and they were all very elderly. It was that kind of a situation with people had a high likelihood of dying anyway. So if you’re applying a new protocol, diagnosing something new, with a new protocol on people very fragile in a hospital setting it’s not surprising that you will kill very many of them.“ RFK Junior replies “The average age of death in Italy was I think 86 years old. And the CDC data for the first year show that the average Covid death had 3.8 potentially fatal comorbidities that were not Covid“.
I previously wrote a paper summarizing this exact same data from various high quality sources including an earlier paper by Rancourt et al. However, it is a paper I left unfinished - like a painting that after hundred hours of work is left in the corner of the studio with a sheet draped over it. Here is a link to my unfinished summary of all-cause mortality data, complete with links to mortality graphs for various states. Amazingly, most states in the US did not have any increase in peak mortality in 2020, and all seven of the states that never issued any stay-at-home orders were among those with no increase. Rancourt et al cite 10 states with no lockdown orders, and compare them more carefully to neighboring states than I did. Many of these states were attacked by public health “experts” like Anthony Fauci and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb for not locking down harshly enough. In an Orwellian twist, the same “experts” praised areas with extremely poor outcomes like Michigan and New York City.
New York City and New Jersey’s results were incredibly poor because of an institutionalized policy to empty hospitals, forcing people with very fragile health into unprepared and severely understaffed long-term care facilities as well as into unprepared private homes that did not have the support of home health or home hospice care. When New York City and the surrounding suburbs in New Jersey are excluded from US data, there was only a very mild increase in peak deaths in 2020 in the US which is not much different from prior years, similar to what happened in Canada.
Dr Matt’s Take: We can all work on better supporting people around us, no matter what physical or psycho-spiritual illness they have. Since I have similar human flaws as those who made so many questionable decisions, it is best to be compassionate with them, just like I hope they will be with me. This is one reason when I meet a hospice patient who is open to discussing their approaching end of life, I like to ask them to “please put in a good word for me when you get there, because I need all the help I can get!” :-).
References:
1: Interview of Denis Rancourt by RFK Jr
2:Article documenting that US states with stricter social isolation policies had higher mortality.
John A. Johnson and Denis G. Rancourt (2022-07-09). Evaluating the Effect of Lockdowns On All-Cause Mortality During the COVID Era: Lockdowns Did Not Save Lives
Abstract: The USA and its 50 state jurisdictions provide a natural experiment to test whether excess all-cause deaths can be directly attributed to implementing the social and economic structural large-scale changes induced by ordering general-population lockdowns. Ten states had no lockdown impositions and there are 38 pairs of lockdown/non-lockdown states that share a land border. We find that the regulatory imposition and enforcement of state-wide shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders conclusively correlates with larger health-status-corrected, per capita, all-cause mortality by state. This result is inconsistent with the hypothesis that lockdowns saved lives.