sumac.carol
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Challenging times and no easy way out. My two cents: if for the foreseeable future we are relying on such blunt tools as masks (of any kind) and lockdowns, then plant-based medicines should be on the table. People have been using plants as medicine around the globe for a very long time, much longer than modern pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately Western physicians in the conventional world have essentially zero training on plant based medicine, although I understand that there are some herbal studies currently being conducted on covid in Asia. The benefits of herbs are, at minimum, they do not rely on big corporations (in fact once big corps get their hands on a herb, they isolate and concentrate the key ingredients and promptly destroy their effectiveness). Plant based medicines are relatively easy for people to gain access to at low cost (or free if they grow their own). Here’s a link describing some key pathogen destroyers used in the west.
Because different plants grow in different climates, pathogen destroyers found in different parts of the world will vary.
There are also immune stimulating plants the world over (echinacea, astragalus, Cordyceps etc).
One additional challenge to plant based medicine is that big pharma has done a great smear job on plant based – because of the potential competition. Then there are poorly conducted studies showing the ineffectiveness of herbs ( when you look at the studies for example you find that they used the least medicinal part of the plant).Boogaloo you apparently missed my sarcasm!!!!!
What is scarier for me than this virus is the incredible public acceptance of what I, and many others, consider to be a massive over-response.Greek economy going down due to success of lockdown – there you go — a win! You can’t have everything – it’s all about deciding what matters -staying safe or having money to buy food. Just make a decision. Quick.
Okay let’s change strategy. We need to keep everyone safe. No exceptions. That means closing down meat processing facilities – NOW. I don’t want to hear any complaints about lack of food – why should these workers be exposed while the rest of us get to stay safely in lockdown? Same for grocery store workers – a big “thank you” to those on the “front line” just doesn’t cut it. Shut down the grocery stores. No drive thru good either because you know those workers have to make contact with customers. Not fair to treat these people as expendable just so that the rest if us can eat. Everyone will need to just grow their own food. By themselves, in lockdown, in their apartment, indefinitely. Now there’s a solution. Stay safe, wear a mask while you grow your food.
Ilargi if you or anyone else could explain what the exit strategy is from a lockdown I’d be interested in hearing it. As it is, this lockdown I repeat is no different than financial QE – everyone comes out weaker than they were before treatment. Financial QE covers up her problem just like lockdown does, but makes it worse in the long run. The only exit strategy I can see is to keep lockdown until a vaccine or effective treatment, neither of which are on the horizon. If you are arguing that even healthy economies can survive indefinite closure, with intermittent re-openings I don’t know what to tell you. The suggestion is made that Sweden has a huge vested interest in understating fatalities. It is also certainly true that the rest of the world has an even greater vested interest in criticizing the Swedish approach because it demonstrates how useless the total lockdowns are. BTW the reported differences in fatalities between Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia are not statistically significant. Playing with numbers and not understanding how things may not be as they seem.
University of Toronto psychiatrist says it is possible our attempts to control covid, thru social isolation, will cause more deaths (thru suicide etc) than will be caused by c-19.
https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/finlay-so-far-canadas-answer-to-covid-19-mental-health-crisis-doesnt-measure-upEverything you wanted to know about covi-19 but we’re afraid to ask.
https://www.jonbarron.org/immunity/covid-19-how-a-virus-works/Looking forward to the day when we get back to talking about something other than c19.
The numbers of c19 fatalities in the UK are completely unreliable. Read on to find out that total number of deaths from all causes in the UK for this flu season is well within the normal range compared to previous years. Also, as in the US report by whistle blower doctors, UK doctors reportedly have instructions to report c19 on death certificates if there are c19 like symptoms (without a positive test).
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/lokin-20-uk-quarantine-sparks-increasing-health-concerns
If you are still thinking that lockdowns emotional impact is a nothing burger, please think again. The ACE study of childhood trauma is unparalleled in the quality of data on the subject of childhood trauma. According to this report, childhood trauma can reduce life expectancy by decades. How can one not consider this impact?
https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2009/oct/06/traumatic-childhood-takes-20-years-life-expectancy/
Okay here’s another one-Japan has three times the population of Canada and one third the number of covid cases, in spite of a much laxer lockdown.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/photos-japan-state-of-emergency-1.5546072Here’s one more for the road (sorry for it being do long -it was a comment on an article on covid:
I’m an ER doc and do some admin work so have been VERY busy preparing for COVID.
I have a vested interest in flattening the curve as I don’t want to have a Bergamo or NYC situation in my ER’s.
That said, it is now VERY clear that this virus is not an indiscriminate killer of random healthy young folks. Rather, it’s emptying out nursing homes and knocking off people who have serious medical problems. In Italy, average age of death was 78. If you understand demographic curves, and mean vs. median, you’ll realize this means the majority are over 78. In Ontario, only 40 of 550 deaths so far were under 60, and almost certainly few or none were healthy people pre-COVID.
The other thing I have seen is young healthy people with lots of potentially productive and happy years ahead of them coming to bad ends because of delayed care due to COVID fears and hospital program shutdowns, and definitely some deaths of young folks in our province have been caused by COVID lockdown.
So what we are seeing is a trade-off. We are sacrificing younger people by COVID lockdown, to save people (or delay death, because it’s not clear we can prevent COVID in the long term) to save older, more unwell people.
The head of the UN world food program estimates that 30million may die from starvation due to the lockdown’s effect on food production and the economy.
We need to open our eyes and realize that we cause suffering if we don’t lock down, but we cause suffering if we do. We need to do a step-wise rollback of the lockdown in a way that keeps our ER’s and ICU’s functional and not completely overwhelmed. But right now Canada’s problem in most provinces is empty hospitals and a lack of care for the average patient in need.Zerosum glad to hear no pain and seeds growing! Glad to hear you got seeds especially now when they are so hard to find.
So here’s the conundrum: locking everyone up means no opportunity for the immune system to develop any kind of resistance. All locking folks up does is slow the rate of transmission to enable the health care system to keep up. If the health care system is not overwhelmed, then it makes no sense to quarantine anyone other than those who are symptomatically ill, fagile or elderly.
With no opportunity to build resistance through exposure, the present full lockdown has no feasible exit strategy – we will all come out of lockdown no stronger, and probably weaker, than when we went into lockdown. Are you all prepared to stay in lockdown until they have a vaccine or treatment??? It strikes me that if you look at how TPTB handle financial stuff, it gives some insight into how they are handling the virus -kick the can down the road and help your buddies as much as possible. They no more have an exit strategy for the virus than they do for QE.
Saying the virus kills some kids too does nothing to change the underlying reality that disease, any disease, will find and wreak the greatest havoc in the weakest, whether that be the result of age, pre-existing health conditions, poor diet, exhaustion (that could be health care workers or high performance athletes who over-exert), stress, exposure to toxic chemicals. To argue exceptions, in a venue like this, is really missing the point – we are not virulogists here equipped to argue the fine points of medicine.Sorry zerosum – now I get what you were saying about only dying once – I guess we’ll see what happens.
Presumably most of you read Zerohedge but here’s an article providing the perspective of several ER doctors in California
Highlights
– lockdown weakens immune system against all infections -get ready for a surge in all infections diseases as soon as you open up
-large increase in do domestic violence cases in ER
– they are being told to report Covid as cause of death
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/2-whisteblowing-cali-er-doctors-urge-open-society-now-because-lockdowns-are-weakening-ourZerosum you demonstrate a shocking lack of understanding of statistics.
V.Arnold if you can’t see that the young are paying the price for protecting the old from covid, I don’t know what to tell you. Who is losing their jobs-the elderly? When it comes time to pay for all the covid bailouts, which tax payers are going to shoulder the costs-the elderly? Healthy young people are suffering the emotional and social consequences of a lockdown which for the most part their health does not require-they are essentially being asked to do this for the extremely vulnerable elderly.We now have achieved the stage of rising domestic violence enabled by lockdowns:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/domestic-violence-rates-rising-due-to-covid19-1.5545851
We also have significant mental health issues related to lockdowns:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadians-angus-reid-pandemic-survey-1.5545594We have substantial portions of meat processing plants being closed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2020/04/27/as-coronavirus-hobbles-meat-processors-tough-decisions-loom-for-beef-chicken-pork-exports/In Quebec Canada 97 percent of mortality from covid was in people over 70. This is shaping up to look like a generational attack on young people who predominantly pay the price (job loss, future payment for handouts) to save the older generation.
I’d like to replay a comment I made about oh a month ago. That is, we are constantly looking for a vaccine, the way we look for magical solutions to problems. It has been pretty clearly demonstrated that having a healthy immune system is key and there is a vast body of information on this in the alternative health world. Plant-based general pathogen destroyers are also well known in the alternative health world. Something to do in the meantime.
I find this frustrating because we on this site tend to pride ourselves in thinking beyond the mainstream experts but in this case we don’t seem to be doing this.Art in all forms continues to open up our worlds and lives to so many ideas. Just watched Who Killed Malcolm X and the movie about Rachel Dolezal. Both such thought provoking movies highlighting human behaviors in all their glory and not-so-glory. Nothing is as clear as it seems.
Thanks for what you do Ilargy.Happy Earth Day! Any lockdowns planned to stop pollution and climate-related extinction of all life on Earth? Will we save humans the fate of dying from covid so that they can catch the wave of every-species extinction?
What I ‘think’ they are referring to is that you do not consider that locking down the economy for extended periods of time, with all of the economic hardship and resulting social ills, is the right thing to do, and that there is no reasonable argument to counter this position. For my part I am not at all convinced that locking down everyone and everything is the right answer.
From my observation of the photos shown at the top of TAE daily blog posts, those pictures of people wandering across the country homeless and with only the clothes on their backs – I would assume do not represent the ones whose health improved?
If you are going to say that crashing the economy is going to make everyone healthier, I guess we can stop worrying about when the big crash is coming…. Sorry but I don’t buy it. Riddle me this:why do poverty and poor health so often go together? It may be that circumstances have changed since the 1930’s when a greater chunk of people lived a subsistence existence. (My dad, whose family lived a subsistence life, has spoken of looking at the poverty line income levels in his youth and whistfully thinking how great it would be if only they had that much money. ). Unfortunately our current economic policies make everyone into wage slaves, and that translates into much greater vulnerability in an economic downturn because we don’t have capacity or access to resources to look after our needs without money.Well said Dr. D. – policy makers and politicians make these kinds of decisions all the time. Policy makers cutting health budgets, food policies that permit the use of toxic chemicals, policy makers who allow substandard wage levels and on it goes. Unfortunately the human toll of these decisions is invisible to many people.
On another front, in Quebec Canada there is a significant move back to intentional relocalisation of various necessary items -a good offshoot to the virus.It will be interesting to see if, when big meat suppliers run out, people rush to the small guys. A challenge for small abatoires is that many of them too have closed due to economic pressures. Then what?
I had the opportunity to tour a small local abatoire run by a proud second generation owner -saw the whole place starting from where the animals are kept waiting for “their turn”. Gut wrenching and it would be good for all of us meat-eaters to see this. Of course dairy relies on endless supply of babies, so it is tied into this process too. We don’t seem to have a way in many cultures to acknowledge the life that has been sacrificed in order for us to eat these foods.
On the fruit front, over several years we have tried pretty much every angle to get people to come help on our organic (real organic as in no nasty chemicals) small mixed fruit farm. We decided not to host WWoofers anymore because on an environmental front it seemed to make no sense to hire people jetting around the world to work on farms that are trying to be environmentally conscious. However, without them, no one up to now was willing to work in exchange for fruit and we are too small to pay straight wages. I am guessing this might change a bit this year…Here is a summary of the research connecting glyphosate to vulnerability to covid-19
esearch scientist at MIT has been studying the role of toxic chemicals in the deterioration of human health. Current focus is covid-19 and its tendency to launch cytokine storms. Of note is that, for most people, covid-19 is barely noticeable, whereas for others it is a serious crisis.
Author believes the answer is the state of the person’s “innate immune system” which is the normal portion of the immune system, versus the “adaptive immune system” which launches a cytokine storm when the innate system is broken, and the cytokine storm can cause sufficient collateral damage to be lethal.
The researcher’s hypothesis is that the biofuel industry is inadvertently introducing glyphosate into transportation fuels (for cars, buses, airplanes, ships). Glyphosate is used extensively on the crops and biomass that are the basis for biofuels. The plant material destined for use in biofuels is often transported by barge in major waterways, polluting these waterways with glyphosate also.
Studies show that aerosol glyphosate causes damage to lungs in such a way as to induce a very strong response (ie cytokine storm) to a new cold virus, leading to extensive damage to lungs, breathing difficulties, and inability to clear the virus from the body. Glyphosate has also been found to cause a number of serious chronic diseases, due to its impact on the immune system.
Geographical distribution of biofuels maps well to covid-19 hot spots:
– The 3 leading US cities using biodiesel in vehicles (and for home heating oil) are New York, New Orleans, and Washington DC. These cities are also at the mouths of major waterways used to transport the biomass destined for biofuel production.
– The US consumes more glyphosate per capita than any other country.
– Covid-19 hot spot cities in the US are served by airlines that use biofuels.
– Italy has developed a technology for producing biodiesel from used olive oil, and glyphosate is routinely used to control weeds around olive trees. Lombardy has a serious issue with air pollution, particularly from diesel fuel. 99% of the people in Lombardy who died of covid-19 had at least one chronic disease (heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, copd, liver or kidney disease) while nearly half had three or more (remember chronic diseases are connected to glyphosate)
– Europe increasingly relies on imported biodiesel from Argentina to meet demand, and Argentinian biodiesel is produced from Roundup-Ready soybeans.
– KLM, the Dutch airline, was the first airline in the world to use biofuel, and the Netherlands has been hard hit by covid-19.
Russia has been very slow to adopt biofuels because of their strong oil and gas lobby, and Russia has a much lower rate of infection and mortality from covid-19.Boogaloo do check the link I sent -it offers an explanation for the distribution of covid in the US and elsewhere including Netherlands.
Perhaps one less mysteryBoogaloo did you take a look at the link I provided? It provides a good explanation for the distribution of cases around the globe.
MIT scientist makes connection between vulnerability to Covid and exposure to glyphosate in biofuels used in transportation. Geographical spread of covid deaths tracks exposure to glyphosate.
Oh one other point: if you don’t have a healthy immune system, your body will not be able to generate an effective response to a vaccine anyway. That may be part of the reason (the other part may be related to underlting health conditions or poor diet) why they are seeing deficient numbers of antibodies in some people. This is also why it is not a good idea to focus so much on vaccinating old people for everything- their immune systems are not strong enough to generate an effective response.
I promised myself I would not wade in again but here I am.
Open-ended (not knowing when it will end, with prognosticators signalling this could go on for months) stay-at-home rules, combined with stopping most economic activity can reasonably be expected to cause serious material and emotional hardship, and part of the package is domestic violence, self-destructive behavior. Severe stress does not bring out the best in anyone and, while we will save some people from the virus, some people will be thrown under the bus in the process. I agree that there are many dysfunctional families and household before the virus, but this fact needs to be a consideration, just as we acknowledge some people have weaker immune systems and are therefore more prone to catch diseases.On the virus front and us knowing very little, I find it very frustrating that, other than me, no one seems to value the deep knowledge of the alternative health experts in the area of building the immune system and using broad-based natural pathogen killers. Cytokine storm situations are described as if we have not seen these before. I have provided links to alternative health experts (of which there are many, in addition to the ones I know of) but the conversation immediately switches back to impatience about the lack of a pill or shot we can take. If the argument is that alternative health folks don’t all sing from the same song sheets, I suggest you take another look at the conventional health experts.
As has been mentioned by many, a healthy immune system is one necessary component to fighting the virus. However, a healthy immune system does not come in a pill or a shot, but lots of pills and shots do a serious number on your immune system, not to mention eating conventionally raised meat full of antibiotics and conventionally grown grains that are dessicated with Roundup, both of which do a serious number on your intestinal flora, your first line of defence in your immune system.Ah yes Ilargi you can ask (not demand) that people with compromised health or symptomatically ill stay isolated while continuing to allow those in good health to circulate freely. While it is a nice idea to think that everyone has equal ability to survive this illness this would fly in the face of common knowledge about health – some have good health and good immunity while others do not for various reasons.
Back when TB was on the rise in Canada that is exactly what was done (my mother in law was isolated due to TB in hospital for 1.5 years, as was her daughter, until they got well.
As I pointed out about a month ago, there are leading health experts advocating exactly this approach now – isolating only those who need it.
BTW: I gather you are okay with subjecting people to poverty due to job loss (a known detriment to good health) and all the social ills (domestic violence) and illness (cardiovascular disease) associated with loneliness?
Sorry but we are not on the same page. I might as well just stick with mainstream media at this point.Dr. D keep on with bringing perspective. It seems to be as if they want to close the world to stop this. There is no perfect solution – either way (close everything or leave stuff open) lots of people will die and suffer, just from different causes.
If people are not developing immunity as per China study that means lock everyone up forever until…??
Just saw that Vermont now prohibits selling seeds to anyone except commercial growers – even online seed sellers can only sell to commercial growers. Our govt policy wonks working to keep us safe….
John Prine — he leaves a hole in our hearts. Tears.
Small organic farmers in Canada are being absolutely devastated by covid-19 – many farmer’s markets have been closed or have very stringent conditions for remaining
open. Of course this is in addition to ongoing challenges related to roller coaster weather over the past few years, high input costs and squeezed margins. At the end of this it is questionable how many will still be around.I think we need to shut down agriculture – seems to be the last loophole left for covid
Seriously it seems incredible for Kunstler to be accusing people of conspiracy theories. What our elites do in so many cases (and as Kunstler himself points out many times) is murderous. Think invasion of Iraq for non-existent WMD. Think of the work of the Fed central bank. Think of chemical attack in Syria. People start to get scared and there is enough evidence of such sociopathy in our leaders to feed all sorts of crazy stories. But the key is that the reality is so crazy and evil that it is hard to take anything off the table -I empathize with people in this state.
