4/20
Greetings on the start of the new week!

Manic Monday

There’s chaos in the air. Do you feel it? We look for answers and all we get is information overload. Do we open the country and risk second waves of illness and death? or do we stay in quarantine and risk being run over by poverty and despair? There is more angst as time goes on and the steps become less straight forward. The honeymoon of the quarantine has ended, if there was one.

Chaos opens a door, however. We can’t leave what’s Safe and Comfortable and not experience Chaos.  And we can’t find New and Good things without leaving our comfort zone.
“Chaos is nothing more than beauty about to dance.”   

A.D. Posey

It helps to remember that discomfort and chaos are part of a bigger movement towards higher reordering.

Self-Reliance

You might know the story about Albert Einstein giving the same exact final exam to a group of students two years in a row.  When questioned about why that was done, Einstein said the questions were the same, but the answers had all changed. The answers we arrived at last year or last week are basically irrelevant to the answer available in this moment.  THIS moment. We need to learn how to find answers for ourselves as opposed to being told an answer because today’s answer might not be right tomorrow. Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance comes to mind. We have access to the lessons of the moment. Important steps are to believe in your innate power, practice honing your attention, and learn to recognize chaos and discomfort as harbingers.

Simplicity

I’ve talked to many people who describe less guilt in their lives now that society doesn’t put a constant demand on their lives to do so many things, to keep so many balls in the air. What was the point of some of that? Whose directives were those, anyway?  Simplicity is an important door too. When we emerge let’s make a pact to do more of what arises out of calmness and simplicity as authentic to us as free individuals in service of our truest purpose and decline all else!

Dogs vs Robots

Last week I told you Artificial Intelligence could reportedly distinguish a COVID cough from a non-COVID cough.  Well, I’ve heard reports from Great Britain that an effort is underway to train dogs to sniff out coronavirus. Canines are already used to detect malaria and Parkinson’s.  They also have the ability to detect seizures or heart attacks. We know we need COVID identification strategies as a part of the return from distancing.  Let’s get all the help we can.  It begs the question, though. What makes you more comfortable? Hearing you have the pandemic flu from a dog or a robot?

Another odd symptom

A leg rash should be added to your list of possible symptoms connected with COVID. Nurses and doctors are reporting a rash on the thighs that is accompanying COVID sometimes.  It can be itchy.  It often shows up in a lacy pattern across the skin.  Like anosmia and the toe blisters they are not always there, but offer a clue when they are.
 
 

More testing

Starting this week I have access to serology testing for previous exposure to COVID. This involves a blood test and is going to be an important tool. The CDC has rolled it out recently and is testing large numbers of people in DC and NYC to measure the rates of exposure and possible immunity in a large population.  We hope this will give us a good approximation of a true Case Fatality Rate. I hope the rate of infection is high! It would mean that it’s moving through. The test is not yet widely available but will be. To be clear, I have access to it effective immediately if we think it will help. We can review if you have questions. There is still much to learn about its performance characteristics. We know it has some inconsistencies, but that’s usually the case. I don’t think the issues will greatly interfere with our ability to extract very helpful information from using it. 
 
Convalescent plasma

One exciting thing the antibody test does is it expands the number of possible donors eligible to give convalescent plasma. The idea here is that the recovered patients can donate their blood to help the current critically ill patients. BMC is now accepting healthy donors who previously tested positive for COVID-19, who are 28 days symptom free and meet all the other blood donor requirements.  Blood donation is easy and only takes appropriately 35-40 minutes.  Those who are eligible can call (413) 447-2597 Option #2 to make an appointment to donate in one of their two locations.  They tell us that the donations always stay local.

Bruce Lipton

He’s a name many of you know, and all of you should.  He’s a biologist who left his post at a medical school decades ago when his research diverged from what the school was teaching.  The popular theory was that genes would tell your fate. His work shows that the environment around the cell, both from natural influences as well as from emotional and other internal stimuli are so vital that they can turn on or off the disease or healing potential of the cells. For example, he found that the same gene blueprint coding for a particular protein can make thousands of different versions of the same protein depending on the culture medium and other environmental factors. He found that the Mind controls the biology. Just a reminder to Be Strong! Don’t Fear! Ponder Your Great Potential!

Reach out if you need anything.
You know how to reach us.

Dr Cooney and staff