I don’t like being contraversial unless I have to…. So I’m happy when I can quote something from the CDC. This link has been updated periodically on their website: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/evidence-table.html
Essentially it’s a table collating evidence of how pre-existing medical conditions correlate with a bad covid-19 experience.
Right at the top of the list stating ‘Strongest and Most Consistent Evidence’ of a link are Cancer, COPD, Chronic Kidney Disease, Heart Conditions, Obesity…. I could go on. It’s a pretty long list.
What our governments (overwhelmingly) do with this information is use it to identify those who are at risk. These people will be the first to self isolate and probably the first in line for a vaccine. There is nothing wrong with this in itself. But I believe we are missing the most important conclusions to draw from this information.
What I would do is to ask ‘What can we do to prevent and reverse these conditions?’.
Sadly at this point I have to get contraversial.
Back in the 1980s, before the internet, your doctor would tell you you had a chronic disease and needed this or that treatment… or maybe to take drugs for the rest of your life. And that was really that – after all your doctor knows best right?
The problem is doctors were trained to use a particular tool set – drugs, surgery etc. And while these are incredibly effective in some contexts, they’re not the best solution for many chronic diseases.
Fast forward to 2020 and we now have many thousands of people who have cured and managed conditions such as auto-immune conditions, diabetes and even cancer with diet and lifestyle changes.
It’s not always easy, there isn’t often ‘one’ solution and nothing is 100% effective – we all die in the end after all.
But if you take a look at https://drgundry.com/published-studies/ or https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15364185/ or https://chriskresser.com/bibliography/#paleo-rcts or https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1557657/ you’ll see there’s an incredible and growing body of evidence from people who have recovered from some really nasty conditions. Some have merely managed these conditions, not fully recovering, and others have used nutritional changes alongside conventional treaments and increased their chances of survival.
You’ll also note that some very different approaches have achieved equally spectacular results. This is not an area of science that has definitive answers. Still, these without-drugs-or-surgery options are incredibly effective when compared to medical treatments.
At this point we need to be strongly encouraging patients of these serious conditions to be exploring these options. By ‘we’ I initially mean those of us as individuals who have experienced cures that should not be possible according to our doctor. Ultimately this will have to mean a change in mainstream media coverage and government policy.
AND we need to be learning from those who have succeeded in reversing those conditions in order to modify our preventative care. After all, if a diet has reversed cancer or diabetes in one patient, it almost certainly points to understanding how we could have prevented that disease in the first place.
The UK governments’ small measures to try to help cut obesity from 2020 are a drop in the ocean compared to what we need to do to prevent and reverse these conditions in our population.
We need to admit that drugs and surgery are a last line of defence against Cancer, Heart Disease etc. Not a first.
And we need to look at how people have recovered from these conditions and use that information to improve our understanding of what a healthy lifestyle truly is. Hopefully thereby we can prevent a lot of these conditions in the first place.
In this way when these patients run into infectious diseases like covid, their chances of successfully overcoming them will be significantly higher.
My husband was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma back in 2005 and with the help of an amazing team of doctors especially a truly caring haematologist he pulled through and now in 2021 is healthy albeit frail at the age of 83. I have never allowed junk food in my kitchen and have cooked him a healthy meal with fresh vegetables and little meat every day. We have a good routine and eat breakfast and fruit every day. Our coffee intake is only one cup a day at 11 in the morning, We take a teaspoon of honey in our afternoon tea and drink a glass of wine with our dinner. So far so good. Oh, one more thing, my husband is on zero medication! We take supplements like vitamin D, Zinc, green tea and Quercertin (the two last ones only once or twice a week. When we develop a cold we take some paracetamol and up our honey intake with lemons.
Hi Celia, Thankyou for taking the time to comment. It sounds like you’ve really put some effort into yours and your husband’s health. I want to emphasize I’m not in any way denigrating the efforts of medical doctors – or implying that there are health practices that can 100% shield you from any pain or disease… Just that the line in our society past which we call a doctor to take responsibility for our problems is in the wrong place and both individually and as a society we need to put far more love, time and effort into the art of being healthy. We all have to be willing to keep learning and do more than our doctor or newspapers etc tell us – and make mistakes… if we want to improve our health and become resistant enough to disease that we can avoid the hell of the past year.