Blog

May 9, 2020

The Path to a Virginia Medical Center’s COVID-19 Integrative Protocol Using Multiple Natural Agents: Interview with Paul Marik, MD

The polarization in US medicine has never been so front and center as it is with COVID-19. Natural agents are off the table. Despite early clarity that the state of the host matters big time in susceptibility to the virus, natural strategies focusing on host susceptibility are routinely denigrated and dismissed.  So it was remarkable that within the course of 24 hours in late April, two colleagues independently sent news of a formal medical center protocol associated with a medical school that includes multiple natural agents. These are inlaid with conventional measures into a series of stages that the institution’s medical staff is following. Who are these people and how did this come to be? I was able to reach the primary author of the institution’s Critical Care COVID-19 Protocol, a South Africa educated internist, Paul Marik, MD, FCCP, FCCM.  Marik is a professor of medicine and chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) who has previously stirred controversy for unorthodox approaches. The non-conventional reasoning that drove the COVID-19 protocol Marik calls “uncommon common sense.”
April 25, 2020

My Op-Ed Rejected by the Seattle Times on COVID-19 Researchers Graduated from Bastyr University

While I never attended Bastyr University, I did work an intense and heady 6-year span there from 1983-1989 as John Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine transitioned to Bastyr College on its way to its present stature. We fought to make it the first broad-scope education in natural health sciences to gain accreditation via a United States Department of  Education approved agency. That winning campaign – an overt battle against antagonistic cultural political forces – was for me a sort of Marine Corp experience resulting in a Semper Fi! that, while its had its ups and downs, has at minimum left me paying attention to Bastyr’s work and that of its graduates. So when the Seattle Times published an article on the COVID-19 research at local conventional medical institutions, I recalled two significant action of Bastyr graduates relative to COVID-19 that merited mention. I drafted an Op-Ed that was rejected. They noted that they are seeing “an unprecedented number of Op-Ed submissions on the coronavirus” and finished with a kind (if routine) door-closing statement: “Respectfully, I am going to pass on it, but I hope you find a publication able to take it.” I decided to visit it on you.
April 24, 2020

Mapping a Healthcare Frontier: CHI Illuminates Science and Action in $2.8-Billion Energy Medicine Industry

In the minds of many in the dominant school of medicine, all of integrative medicine is frontier science. That bias often holds that the integrative frontier toward which one may sail is a chimera. Yet new continents have been found. Witness findings supporting acupuncture effectiveness and telomere lengthening through meditation. For integrative health, the frontier of that frontier is subtle energy and biofield healing. Spearheading efforts to quantify and advance science and action in this $2.8-billion industry is a self-styled “collaboration accelerator,” the Consciousness and Healing Initiative (CHI).  CHI posits that the world they are mapping in their just published resources positions energy medicine as “the new mindfulness.” The multi-year CHI mapping project offers fascinating interactive journeys to 6,200 studies, 74,000 US practitioners, 250 energy devices, and a literal map that takes one to the location of 400 researchers globally who are examining these subtle therapies. Their goal is nothing less that systems change. They believe their work can be a model for all in the integrative health field who favor dramatic shifts in the health and medicine landscape.
April 10, 2020

COVID-19: NCCIH Director Helene Langevin on the NIH Integrative Center’s Response

The push for evidence to assist in formulating more effective clinical response to the COVID-19 pandemic is awakening scores of research projects and multipliers more of recommended directions. In the integrative sphere, a team led by Lise Alschuler, ND from the University of Arizona Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine published a paper on “considerations” for natural practices and agents. The Chinese government claims the use of traditional Chinese medicine is in part responsible for its apparently relatively rapid turn-around there. TCM researcher John Chen, PhD, PharmD, OMD, LAc and others have brought that work to the United States. Ryan Bradley, ND, MPH at Helfgott Research Institute led a global team to create a Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Health and Medicine COVID-19 Support Registry. I helped promote it with this JACM editorial. Yet the US government has been quiet, when not frankly antagonistic to supportive COVID-19 strategies. I connected with the NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) to see what they are up to related to COVI-19. This column reports the exchange with Helene Langevin, MD, NCCIH’s director.