Dr Matt’s Newsletter January 11th 2023: “Trust the Evidence” and a "Taste of India"
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
“Trusting the Evidence” includes two seemingly different areas this week - Evidence from research, and evidence from our own senses.
1) Two prominent British researchers have provided comprehensive criticisms of covid-19 “viral containment” measures in their Substack newsletter. Today I introduce you to their withering critique of “virus tests”. This applies to covid-19 tests, but equally to all the other virus tests given in emergency rooms, hospitals and urgent care centers to my patients including several this week.
2) Hindu teacher Sadhguru teaches tuning into the “Evidence” from our own senses, and then carefully considering how we respond. He has a strong sense of humor and challenges us to think a bit more clearly. He also helped motivate people in India to plant 25 million trees. I covered many other spiritual paths with mindful present moment awareness as a focus, and it is about time a Hindu perspective was added to the mix.
Today’s newsletter sections include:
Humor of the Week - The challenges of staying “Centered”
Inspiration of the Week –Hindu teacher Sadhguru, and the planting of 25 million trees.
Music of the week – Music for Meditation by Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds
Research of the week – “Trust the Evidence” with Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan: A review of research on the poor results of “Virus tests” which are being offered to my patients every week in local urgent care centers and emergency rooms despite them being a waste of time and energy that can best be used elsewhere.
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Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
Humor of the Week - The challenges of staying “Centered”
Inspiration of the Week –Hindu teacher Sadhguru, and the planting of 25 million trees.
Sadhguru is a Hindu teacher who mainly focuses on reducing suffering through present-moment consciousness work, and through resulting improved interpersonal relations. Below is a link to a short talk on living in the present moment and a discussion of their tree planting initiative, Project Greenhands.
I previously covered how Catholic Trappist monks practice mindful living, Chrystal Rae on mindful awareness from her near death experience, Jon Kabat Zinn and Eckhart Tolle with their Buddhist style of mindfulness practice, and Sufi teacher Inayat Khan on learning from suffering; it is about time we had a Hindu perspective and a “Taste of India”.
Sadhguru and his organization started planting trees through Project Greenhands in 2005 in India, and today more than 25 million trees have been planted, providing food for humans and animals, shade, and improved quality of life. You can do the same in your backyard, especially if you “pledge to care for each tree for a minimum of 2 years” as they ask their volunteers to do. I personally planted 15 trees in the park behind my home this past summer, where invasive plants are dominant and choke off young trees. Maybe we will make tree planting a future “Community Building” activity.
In the video interview on the Project Greenhands website, global warming is raised as a motivation, but Sadhguru says immediately “No, no. We are not combating climate change. Yes, that can be a consequence, but we plant them because they are deeply connected with our lives. The relationship is far more than simple utility.” He then says with a laugh, “as you know most people in the past were sitting under a tree when they got enlightened”.
Here is his talk on “How to live in the moment”. The question is posed to Sadhguru: “How can I live in the present moment”. His humorous response: “I ask you, can you live anywhere else? Why such a question!”. My favorite part is near the end when he argues about us creating our own suffering: “This is the problem with the world. Your vision is blurry and you I think there is something wrong with everything in the universe … Somebody freaks over there, and you freak within yourself! Who’s business is it? It’s your business! If you do not take charge of this one here (of your own self), everything in the universe is a problem.”
Music of the week – Music for Meditation by Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds
Olafur Arnalds has a gentle, quiet, minimalist approach to music that is perfect example of “Musique D’Ameublement” as described by Erik Satie in my last newsletter on January 4th. It is also nice when sitting under a Bodhi Tree. He uses live performers with real instruments, not electronic ones, with himself on piano.
The last number features a singer who is also from Iceland, and much more famous that Olafur, Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir one of the lead singers from the group, Of Monsters and Men. For fun I will include their mega-hit, “Little Talks”, which to me sounds like an expression of love and nostalgia at the end of life - but maybe I am overly fixated on this subject :-)
Ólafur Arnalds - Tree
Ólafur Arnalds - Re:member
Ólafur Arnalds - Saman
Ólafur Arnalds - We Contain Multitudes
Ólafur Arnalds - Not Alone
Ólafur Arnalds with Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir - Particles
Of Monsters and Men - Little Talks
Research of the week – “Trust the Evidence” a Substack newsletter focused on Evidence based research, critical of covid-19 policies, including problems with my personal favorite, “virus tests”.
Many of my patients go to Urgent Care centers and Emergency Rooms and get excellent advice from experienced clinicians. However, they also often get a “virus test”. I recommend simply refusing all of these tests for a simple reason: they are inaccurate and cause more harm than good. The problems apply to all virus tests, including covid-19, influenza, RSV, HIV, etc. If you do seek advice from a health care practitioner who uses these tests, you can just ask them to use their expertise instead. Their clinical experience is a lot more valuable.
Here is my short summary of the problems with virus tests:
1) They have a high false positive rate and so cannot be trusted to tell you what you have or do not have
2) Even “true positives” are often useless because they occur in people after their illness is over and they are not infectious, making them meaningless.
3) It does not matter what virus you have because there is no effective antiviral treatment. Also, all viruses have a mix of presentations, from completely asymptomatic to being severely ill. People seeking care, working together with an experienced clinician, can best judge what treatment approach to use.
I am not alone in questioning the value of these tests, and perhaps my best company is two British researchers, Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan. Dr Jefferson is a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford and a former researcher at the Nordic Cochrane Centre for evidence-based medicine. Professor Heneghan is a clinical epidemiologist specializing in evidence-based medicine and research methodology with over 400 peer-reviewed publications, and is a Contact Editor in the Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infection Group.
They have covered the disaster of Tamiflu, an “antiviral” sometimes offered to my patients, in prior detailed reviews. They have also been very critical of covid-19 “viral containment” measures since the beginning due to their obvious harms and lack of benefit. If you like research and statistics, you will enjoy their Substack newsletter called, “Trust the Evidence”, and if not maybe you can just skim over a few to get the basic argument.
Below is description of their Substack report on November 24th criticizing the “covid tests” and the “track and trace” protocols all around the world that used them. They focus on the UK where £37 Billion (about 45 billion US dollars) were spent in a failed effort to “control” the virus. Unfortunately, these tests are still being used to bar people from travel, keep people away from seeing ill family members, and limit all kinds of healthy human interactions. However, it is nice to see that this is being done a lot less often today than it was just a few months ago.
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One for the Enquiry: Test and Trace to bankruptcy: How the Test and Trace policy based on shaky science has helped bankrupt the UK
By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan Nov 24, 2022
Jefferson and Heneghan previously covered serious flaws in polymerase chain reaction assays (PCR) including that “PCR on its own without recourse to clinical history and an estimate of viral burden cannot distinguish between contagious, convalescent and spurious cases (i.e. false positives).”
They elaborate here that this amplification of spurious “cases” causes “the lengthy isolation of those who never came into contact with SARS-CoV-2 or those who are convalescing.” People “convalescing” can still test positive for PCR due to viral debris and their own immune system RNA, even when they have had no infectious virus for weeks or months, or never were infectious.
“Given the scale of the outbreak and the nature of the SARs-COV-2 agent, it was clear early on that Test and Trace would be an expensive waste of resources. But at the outset, those in power extolled its virtues. Despite all the resources thrown at it, Test and Trace did not show one measurable difference in the outcomes of the pandemic - it did not avoid further lockdowns as promised.
Instead, the £37 Billion could have paid for roughly a million nurses for the year, or a year and a half of social care cost for everyone that needed it. The Prime Minister could have nearly rebuilt the whole National Health Service estate with £37 billion. We’ll leave you to consider what you may have better spent the money on.
Did anyone ask if there is evidence for such an approach that had never been tried before on such a scale worked or, once rolled out, evaluated its effectiveness?”
All Dr Matt can say is “Amen” :-)