Dr Matt’s Newsletter March 25th – “What would Mother Teresa do?”
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
I have been reading a biography of Mother Teresa, and I want to share it with my avid readers. My plan is to offer a snippet of her life each week, and this week it is the story of a profound spiritual experience she had as a young woman, similar to the near death experiences I have shared in prior newsletters such as November 2nd, September 14th, and March 11th.
I also offer the last reminder that Jonathan Emord is having a campaign event near Leesburg on Friday March 31st. I have known him for years, and he is running for US Senate on a “Health Freedom” platform, similar to Ron DeSantis and RFK Jr. Send me an email if you plan to attend as I will most likely also be there, and it would be nice to see some familiar faces.
As mentioned above, RFK Jr is planning to run for president. Below is a link to an interview where he expresses how unhappy he is with current Democratic leaders, which is one main reason he is running. If Ron DeSantis ends up representing the Republicans and RFK Jr the Democrats, I will be in quite a quandary: Who would I vote for? Thankfully it would be one of the happiest tough choices I ever had to make. Of course, if Joe Ladapo decides to run I may have only one choice…
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Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
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Today’s newsletter sections include:
Inspirational story from Mother Teresa’s biography, “To Love and Be Loved” by Jim Towey
Music of the week – Spring Celebration with 20th Century classical music: More from Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” which provoked a riot when it premiered in Paris. I prefer the quiet, contemplative sections, but Springtime also has some earthquakes and thunderstorms to get through every now and then.
“Politics Not As Usual”: Jonathan Emord for US Senate, Ron DeSantis and RFK Jr. for President – all against social isolation mandates and all for shrinking the power of the CDC. Yes, I know we can’t vote for both DeSantis and RFK Jr, and I also know I am mixing Republicans and Democrats :-).
Research of the week – A major evidence-based review from 9 years ago shows that antiviral medications Tamiflu and Relenza have more adverse effects than benefits. The review met with intense resistance despite being the highest quality review that can be performed, because governments had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars stockpiling the drugs. The old school recommendation for viral illnesses, “rest, healthy fluids, and tender loving care” is the best remedy 99.9% of the time, perhaps combined with “Grandma’s favorite soup” and some other natural remedies that are good for body, mind, and spirit.
Music of the Week (1): Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring: Very Slowly
The opening music to his ballet brings an image of ice melting, and flowers pushing up through the mountain snow, and, as usual, I prefer the quiet, contemplative, “ambient” parts. You can listen as you read through the opening story about Mother Teresa.
Inspirational story from Mother Teresa’s biography, “To Love and Be Loved” by Jim Towey.
Mother Teresa had a mystical experience in 1946 after emerging from years of social upheaval, famines and riots in war-ravaged Calcutta. This experience led her to devote her life to the “poorest of the poor” and also to outcasts such as people diagnosed with “super-germs”: tuberculosis, HIV, and Leprosy. These are much more common diagnoses in people living in poverty. However, with improved nutrition, quality healthcare, and loving kindness, people can actually handle all three of them quite well. Even people with fragile health can improve if their system has not been irreparably harmed by the hard life they led before Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity took them in.
In 1942, the Japanese army moved towards Calcutta where Mother Teresa, then just “Sister Teresa” was a teacher at a girl’s boarding school. Many people in the community fled, leaving disrupted healthcare systems, limited food production, poor distribution of goods, and economic havoc. Mother Teresa was one of only two nuns who stayed to look after hundreds students. She was under extreme stress, partly for fear of what might happen to the girls, partly due to the duties of teaching and providing basic needs, and partly out of compassion and helplessness in the face of the tragedy unfolding all around them.
If you think we have it difficult today, imagine a famine that “claimed the lives of at least 2 million people“ (page 32) and displaced even more who fled to seek survival. Or imagine the Chinese famine 20 years later, caused directly by the totalitarian communist policies of Mao, with over 40 million deaths. In Bengal in 1942 the famine spread like a tidal wave, and Mother Teresa felt helpless in the midst of the incredible human suffering.
“Mother Teresa and her students could do little to mitigate the suffering of the hungry masses as they struggled to survive, themselves.“ (page 32)
Finally the war ended in 1946, and people hoped for peace and a return to normal life. Instead, Hindus and Muslims rioted in Calcutta and a massacre called, “the day of great killing“, occurred, followed by rampages of gangs of Muslims and Hindus in “reciprocal acts of ethnic cleansing“ (page 32). Mother Teresa saw the results of this bloodshed herself because she had to regularly leave the school compound to get food and other supplies from military units that patrolled the neighborhood. When the riots finally stopped, the emotionally traumatized “Sister Teresa” had to travel to northern India to meet with her superiors, and on this trip she had a transformative experience that would change her life forever.
“Just a few weeks after the massacres of August 1946, Mother Teresa left Calcutta and headed north. On the train to Darjeeling she had a mystical experience. While in prayer she heard Christ cry from the Cross ‘I thirst’ ” (page 41).
But this was not all she heard and experienced that day on the train. What she referred to as, “The Voice“, explicitly told her to go into the “darkest“ of the slums “and bring love and dignity to the poor through the work of her own hands”. The Voice was extremely clear: “Your vocation is to love and suffer and save souls… You will dress in simple Indian clothes like my Mother dressed: simple and poor” (page 41).
The clarity of this event stayed with her for her entire life, and has remarkable similarities with near death experiences such as the one from Tricia Barker in my March 11th newsletter. Tricia was commanded to teach high school, something she had never considered before. She bonded with the students by telling them on her first day: “I did not plan to be here, or to be a teacher, and I know a lot of you also would choose to be somewhere else. However, I had little choice: I died during surgery and the Angels told me this was something I had to do”. If the students were sleepy and bored before she told them this bit of news, you can be guaranteed they were suddenly wide awake 😊.
After Mother Teresa’s experience she knew what her life’s purpose would be, just as Tricia Barker did, and she requested permission from the Catholic hierarchy to start her mission among the “poorest of the poor”. She received support from her immediate superiors but it took almost 2 years to receive official permission, and she immediately returned, alone, to the most destitute slums in Calcutta.
Next week I will describe how she learned to be a “hospice nurse”, and then left her beloved community of sisters to go alone into the slums of Calcutta.
Music of the week (2): Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring: Allegro Dance of the Bride.
In case you are sleepy after the last one here’s a little “wake-up” music… You can listen to this as you read through the “Politics not as Usual” section below.
“Politics Not As Usual”: Jonathan Emord for US Senate, Ron Desantis for president, and RFK Jr. for President.
As mentioned in the intro there is a rally this Friday March 31st for Jonathan Emord’s run for Senate in Leesburg Virginia. He is a staunch advocate for health freedom, and you can read more about him in my newsletter from last week and February 25th.
In other Big News, in a recent interview RFK Jr. discusses why he is planning to run for president in 2024. He and his interviewer also discuss what he is up against: all the powers that upheld the social isolation protocols and ideological mandates. This includes the media as well as most of the Democratic and Republican leaders. Here is the link to the interview.
Last but not least, it is clear Ron Desantis will be running for the Republican nomination. I featured him in prior newsletters, especially his surgeon General Joe Ladapo. There is an excellent extended interview with Dr Ladapo on October 12th.
Desantis and Ladapo have the good fortune of being in power when the social isolation mandates were in place, so they could end them in Florida as quickly as possible. RFK Jr has the advantage of been in court against the FDA for decades, just like Jonathan Emord, and he has deep insight into the influence of industry on regulatory agencies. He is particularly upset at the intense bias that prevents them from objectively evaluating benefits and harms of drugs and other regulated products. RFK Jr also investigated the problems with Fauci in detail, going back to HIV/AIDS, as outlined in my newsletter on October 26th. The fear, loneliness, and isolation of people diagnosed with HIV and/or AIDS is much worse than that encountered by people diagnosed with covid-19, since it lasts an entire lifetime, not just for 14 days.
I know that Jonathan Emord, RFK Jr, Joe Ladapo, and Ron DeSantis will disagree on many things, and maybe end up being directly against each other at times, but I hope they can be civil and acknowledge each other’s courage during the past few years. They have all been “lights in the darkness”.
Music of the Week (3): Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring: Meno Mosso “Less Movement”
A lullaby that ends during the transition into “Simple Gifts”. Hopefully it will keep your heart from racing dangerously fast while you read about how governments around the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “anti-flu” medicines that are more likely to cause harm than good. The study described below was the largest, most detailed evidenced-based review ever published, and yet these medicines are still commonly prescribed all over the world, including in every health clinic, urgent care, and hospital in the DC area, except in my office, of course :-).
Research of the week – A major evidence-based Cochrane review from 9 years ago shows that antiviral medications Tamiflu and Relenza have more adverse effects than benefits.
The article authors gave this simple quote in the introduction about “small nonspecific” beneficial effects and significant harms:
"In April 2014, the Cochrane review on neuraminidase inhibitors was published alongside BMJ summary reviews. The review found that while oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza) have small, non‐specific effects on reducing the time to alleviation of influenza symptoms, oseltamivir increases the risk of adverse effects, such as nausea, vomiting, psychiatric effects and renal events in adults and vomiting in children, and both drugs do not reduce the important outcomes such as pneumonia and hospitalisations."
The authors, of course, were open to scientific debate and criticism, but instead they were subjected to “anti-science” critiques from vested interests. Below are some more quotes from a recent discussion on their Substack where they discuss how they first thought Tamiflu’s benefits outweighed the harms before learning that there were many unpublished trials with poor results, known as “publication bias”. These results could not be easily obtained, needing a Freedom of Information Act request. When they tried to get data directly from study authors, they learned the data had been “lost” and they would have to go directly to the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the trial: good luck with that...
“We were unaware that the only major regulator who disagreed with the statements of benefits was the US regulator, the FDA. But in our folly, our eyes were fixed on journal publications, not on the long, complicated regulatory documents no one had ever heard of.”
They discovered that an agenda existed among government agencies and pharmaceutical corporations, working together to change the public’s behavior so they would stop relying on home remedies such as rest, fluids and over the counter remedies for symptom relief. There was a concerted effort to start getting people to take patented drugs like Tamiflu and Relenza. Here is a direct quote:
“Tamiflu was accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign that needed to change how we understood and reacted to the “flu”. One of the problems was that most people didn’t seek treatment. If they did, they might receive advice, suggested over-the-counter remedies and sometimes an antibiotic (which was cheap and readily available) to treat the complications. But this needed to change. As we shall see, the manufacturer needed to convince the public to change their behaviour radically.”
As we all know, fear-mongering is the way to “change behavior” by convincing people that “super-flu” strains are on the loose, regardless of the reality. Media companies love the attention they get when they spread these stories in as loud and shrill a voice as possible. People like Anthony Fauci love the limelight and get to look very calm and measured as they used calculated language designed to push the “red button” in people’s survival instinct.
Dr Matt’s Take: Remember the power of positive belief, also known as the “placebo effect”, that I reviewed in the research section on September 28th? My readers know there are much healthier ways to generate this effect than a drug. “Rest, healthy fluids, and tender loving care” are often all that we need, and it’s nice to add some natural remedies that are good for our mind, body, and spirit. Unfortunately, fear of infection often makes these more challenging, especially the “tender loving care” part. Mother Teresa gave this back to people with scary diagnoses like tuberculosis, leprosy, and HIV/AIDS, which brings us, finally, to the title of this newsletter, “What would Mother Teresa do? I think we all know the answer, we just need regular reminders throughout the day, especially yours truly :-).
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Music of the Week (4): And for “closing music”: Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” Part 1 -Adoration of the Earth, Introduction
As mentioned previously, a riot of cat-calling broke out in the middle of this wild ride of a Ballet, and if you listen to the whole thing you may feel like you went down white water rapids with no breaks. However, this opening is famously peaceful, just like Copland’s, with sun-melting ice and green shoots coming through the snow… forgive the abrupt ending, again…
Recent Substack post by Cochrane review authors: