As i start this post, many thoughts come up in response to all the time I have spent working on these updates, all the things i have read, the personal stories i have heard, the friends and acquaintances who have died. I have to admit i am pretty shocked that the herbal community is not stepping up on this. Most of the material i have seen on treating or preventing Covid-19 is essentially herbalism 101 and merely a repeat of things that have been going around for the past 40 years. There is very little that is specific or which possesses any depth of analysis.
The main exception seems to be some of the practitioners that have been treating chronic lyme (i think due to the overlap in symptoms); some of them are very good at what they do. Still, there is little being published online that is very sophisticated which i think is letting down scores of thousands of people in need. It seems to be more a failure of character than anything else. Most herbalists are terrified to deal directly with death or severe damage to the body and mind and merely engage in the time honored abrogation of responsibility so common in our time: “If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911.”Unfortunately, the medical community is not really any better.
The pandemic has made clear the terrible nature of technological medicine in America — that it is not really set up to treat the sick but to make money. If you are poor you are SOL for the most part; something i consider a violation of the healer’s duty. But most MDs and hospitals (many of whom are considered nonprofit religious institutions) no longer see this as their job. And while a great many medical professionals have stepped up, many losing their lives in the process of treating those infected by SARS-CoV-2, the reality of the inadequacy of the medical paradigm these physicians are trained in is becoming more obvious as well . . . something that the lyme community and those of us who have worked with chronic conditions have long known.
Like scientists, most MDs look at their work in isolation from the rest of the world. They go into countries and decrease infant death rates without giving any thought to what increased population will do once they are gone, culturally or ecologically. And of course the idea that the world wide increase in population that they take much of the credit for and the link between that and emerging infections is also ignored, as is the damage that pharmaceuticals are doing to the microbiome of the planet, which also drives viral and bacterial pandemic emergence. And that dissociation extends as well to their patients. Most MDs are not present with those of us who go to them in need. We are simply pathologies being carried by a human body which has the unfortunate capacity to talk. As the dead bodies piled up, the medical training failed to help, it finally began to break through that carefully erected barrier between their humanity and the people in front of them.
They became not MDs treating an interesting gall bladder in room 202 but fellow human beings facing each other at last. In response some of them became finally what they should have been all along. Others said, “I didn’t sign up for this.” If we cannot be simply fellow human beings helping each other find our way home then we truly are in deep trouble as a species. During the several hundred hours of research i have been spending, working to understand the virus and what it does in the body, to find the best herbs and interventions to reduce its impacts and to help prevent, alleviate, or reverse post-infection damage and symptoms, I have been, many times, frustrated to the point of tears by the politics underlying healing in this country. Spending hours reading journal studies i find there are hundreds of them talking about the dangers of herbal medicines and very few that acknowledge the millions of people harmed by pharmaceuticals every year in this country. (And of course every study says that nothing can be certain about the usefulness of plants in the treatment of this or that disease without further study, which the newspapers repeat endlessly without understanding that every journal study says that simply because what all journal studies are are very sophisticated forms of a grant proposal.)There are continual calls for more studies on the safety or efficacy of plants but none on pharmaceuticals. And all the while the people that the medical industry is supposed to help suffer and often die when it is not necessary.
As time goes by, I am finding it harder and harder to remain unemotional about this. And of course to become emotional is a sign of an inability to reason and so lends impetus to the discounting of anything being said. Still, i have to agree, if you aren’t angry you aren’t paying attention (still a good slogan after all these years). I read one long article today, probably in the Washington Post, discussing post-coronavirus syndrome and “long haulers” which went on to say that, well of course all these reports are anecdotal and so have to be verified by long term study. This same sort of thing has gone on for decades in the chronic Lyme community, and i still see articles insisting that chronic Lyme does not exist (despite the journals being full of contrary data). There are around 100,000 people on the various “long haul” sites in the U.S. so far and many more in countries around the world.
They are clear about their problems, the deep and continuing fatigue, brain fog, and all the rest of it. (So why keep denying its pervasive reality?) Still, there is little the medical community can do for them; pharmaceuticals are just not very good at treating long term chronic conditions or repairing damaged organ systems or shutting down continual low-level inflammatory processes. And of course the drugs they use to try and deal with some of these things often have very serious side effects (but we need more study on plants before we can recommend their use). As herbalists, and as healers, we have a duty to do better. The medical system is often very good for acute conditions; it is very poor for nearly all chronic conditions. Herbal medicine, and not some distorted medicalized version of it as many phytorationalists want to make it, is what is necessary and should be taking its rightful place. The times are demanding it.
This is not the last pandemic we will see . . . and it is not the worst. We are in difficult times and the world needs something other than what we have been doing. Those things we have been doing are a big part of what has got us into this mess to begin with. So, in the coronavirus protocol that i will get up for you late this week, you will find not only a protocol to help prevent infection, but one to treat active infection (which will also include interventions to protect both heart and kidneys from long term damage), and a very extensive repertory to help reduce or eliminate long haul symptoms as well as interventions to repair damaged organs.
Safety Analysis for the Acute Treatment Protocol of ‘CV’ when pregnant
