COVID-19 - The Chopra Foundation

How the Reset Works in U.S. Healthcare

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Wayne Jonas, MD

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed so many fault lines in the U.S. that a call for a reset has sprung up. Years of reckless attacks on the government’s emergency response to a pandemic, and neglect of our public health infrastructure left us unprepared to handle COVID. Now that two vaccines offer hope, with a third or more on the way, the pandemic might become a disaster viewed in the rearview mirror. If it should fade, let’s not forget the important lessons it has taught us for what changes are needed in healthcare to prevent damage from future epidemics.

We can do much better. The CDC reported earlier this year that 90 percent of those hospitalized from coronavirus had underlying chronic health issues such as hypertension, obesity, diabetes, chronic lung and cardiovascular disease. Many are African-American. Many are old and poor. Their plight existed, and was getting worse, before the pandemic shone a glaring spotlight on the tragedies that are caused, in the final analysis, by the system itself.

Rife with political infighting, soaring costs in hospital care and even everyday outpatient care, U.S. health care is shielded behind its triumphs for the acute manifestations of disease, which are worth praising. We have the best ER care in the world, the best advanced medical research, top medical schools, and the best pharmaceutical companies – all focused on recue medicine once disease is advanced.

But behind this impressive shield there is a very real threat of declining wellness and shortened lifespan in this country. As always, following the money gets you to the centers of power. Those who make money from the system as it is, like big pharma and insurance companies, have no incentive to reduce health care costs or prevent disease. The trail also leads to Congress, which is conflicted by money that flows through lobbying to health-care legislation that further benefits the industry as is. What is good for the public often comes second, if at all.

The weakest fault line in the U.S. system is management of chronic or lifestyle disease like heart disease, hypertension, obesity and type 2 diabetes, to which should be added the epidemic of pain and opioid misuse. You cannot monetize prevention and wellness, which is why the system kicks in only when immediate action is called for, generally at the ER and in the hospital. If things had been any different, the death rates from COVID-19 would be much lower and intensive care units would not be as overwhelmed as they are now.

Let’s not make the same mistake we made with the opioid epidemic. In the 1990s, while some leaders at National Institutes of Health were advocating an increase in research on drug-free treatments for pain, including acupuncture, yoga and mind-body practices, mainstream medicine rejected such concepts and basically embraced the use of opioids as a blanket treatment for pain. The opioid epidemic began as a mindset before the first prescription for OxyContin was written.

Now we are scrambling to adopt what was sensible and safe to begin with. The American College of Physicians offers guidelines encouraging the use of acupuncture, yoga and mind-body practices in lieu of opioid prescriptions for chronic pain management. But our system was not built to deliver or pay for these approaches. Not only is it easier for a doctor to write a prescription, but we must face the grim realization that OxyContin was touted as non-addictive, shamefully suppressing research that showed it was.

The only change that will get us out of this morass is a reset of attitudes, beliefs, and outworn habits. In other words, a change in our consciousness. The U.S. military and Veterans Administration have already embraced a whole person, integrative health approach to care because they have a vested interest in reducing costs and having resilient, healthy military communities. That’s a start.

But a wholesale reset requires that we stop thinking in outmoded, inefficient ways and shift to concepts that will sink into the awareness of the whole country.

Prevention, which is risk-based, needs to shift to wellbeing, which is a positive lifelong goal.
Whole-person approaches need to replace the targeted treatment of symptoms.
People need to take an active role in their self-care and wellbeing with support and expert advice from health professionals.
Chronic illness needs to be understood as a process that takes years, even decades to develop. The earliest prevention is also the easiest and most effective way to manage disease.
Mainstream medicine must shift to a whole person, integrative health approach that promotes and produces health and lifelong wellbeing

Looking at this list, you can see that the reset is not difficult for anyone at the individual level. You don’t have to wait for government, lobbyists, big pharma, or even your local hospital to lead the way. Nothing changes until you are aware of it. Making yourself aware of healthy choices is so basic that millions of people already have taken. We need a medical system that supports this.

Wayne Jonas, MD, Executive Director of Samueli Integrative Health Programs, is a board-certified, practicing family physician, an expert in integrative health and health care delivery, a widely published scientific investigator and author of the book How Healing Works. Additionally, Dr. Jonas is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Corps of the United States Army. Dr. Jonas was the Director of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health from 1995-1999, and prior to that served as the Director of the Medical Research Fellowship at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians and clinical Professor of Family Medicine at Georgetown University and the Uniformed Services University. www.DrWayneJonas.com

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Future of Wellbeing and Technology

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Additional Research & Information

William Bushell, Ryan Castle, Michelle A. Williams, Kimberly C. Brouwer, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Deepak Chopra, and Paul J. Mills.

Meditation and Yoga Practices as Potential Adjunctive Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 Infection and COVID-19: A Brief Overview of Key Subjects

The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, June 2020

Editor’s Note: As an acute condition quickly associated with multiple chronic susceptibilities, COVID-19 has rekindled interest in, and controversy about, the potential role of the host in disease processes. While hundreds of millions of research dollars have been funneled into drug and vaccine solutions that target the external agent, integrative practitioners tuned to enhancing immunity faced a familiar mostly unfunded task. First, go to school on the virus. Then draw from the global array of natural therapies and practices with host-enhancing or anti-viral capabilities to suggest integrative treatment strategies. The near null-set of conventional treatment options propels this investigation. In this paper, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California-San Diego, Chopra Library for Integrative Studies, and Harvard University share one such exploration. Their conclusion, that ‘‘certain meditation, yoga asana (postures), and pranayama (breathing) practices may possibly be effective adjunctive means of treating and/or preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection’’ underscores the importance of this rekindling. At JACM, we are pleased to have the opportunity to publish this work. We hope that it might help diminish in medicine and health the polarization that, like so much in the broader culture, seems to be an obstacle to healing. —John Weeks, Editor-in-Chief, JACM

The Planetary Biome: A New Theory of Life and Survival

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

The global pandemic has disrupted everything we call normal life. The disruption has been so catastrophic that there is fear among experts that this is only a “starter pandemic.” COVID is less infectious than the measles and less fatal than SARS. Instead of using this fact to stoke fear, we can do a great deal to heed COVID’s wakeup call.

A new way of looking at life itself holds out hope and optimism, because the popular image of deadly viruses assaulting humans like microscopic aliens is incorrect. Microbes are the very basis of life. We interact with them constantly, and much more than 99% of the time life is enhanced. Every advanced life form, including us, has microbial DNA woven into its own genome. A vast colony of bacteria known as the microbiome together with viruses (the virome) and fungi (the mycobiome) that inhabit every animal’s digestive tract, and when it comes to mammals, the microbiome not only makes digestion possible, but it connects us to the planetary biome—the totality of viruses, bacteria, and fungi that truly rules the earth.

It is a very benign rule. Look around at the astonishing diversity of life that evolution has produced. Evolution in higher life forms is the visible outcome of activity in the planetary biome. To keep the creation of new life beneficial, as it has been for billions of years, the first lesson of the new model is to realize that we are life itself. Our actions affect Nature directly in ways that either enhance life or lead it into destructive patterns.

If we look at COVID as a response, or even a message from the planetary biome, what is the message about? It is about disruption and imbalance. The microbial world responds quickly, at times instantly, to aberrant conditions. Fortunately, it can also respond quickly to rebalance itself, since balance is the natural tendency of every level of life.

Human beings are responsible for imbalance and disruption in many ways, most of them the product of modern life. We can begin with viruses. The earth has a global virome, which is currently being mapped at Stanford. This Earth database, once completed, which also allow us to identity the viruses in the human virome.

As in the human virome (and the microbiome and mycobiome), there can be dysbiosis, when one microbe goes out of balance and becomes opportunistic, amplifying itself at the expense of others. On a larger scale, humans, among all mammalian species, are being opportunistic as we remove forests and wetlands and pollute the land and oceans, leading to an unprecedented rate of extinction of species.

The novel COVID virus was most likely introduced into humans from other mammals as we insist on eating food from species that are too close to our genetic makeup (a notorious example being China’s so-called wet markets). By design in our evolution, the human microbiome prefers plants (our teeth, stomach acid, colon structure, and our need for plant fiber to feed our gut microbiome all support this conclusion).

The consumption of animals, especially mammalian species that are genetically more similar to humans, leads to putrefaction and microbial dysbiosis. As we make ourselves sick, we also propagate the production of opportunistic bacteria that disrupt the earth’s microbiome. Through the same meat diet we also propagate viruses and fungi that disrupt the earth’s virome and mycobiome. Our disruption extends to inducing and accelerating new mutations across all species on Earth with increasing levels of pollution at the chemical, electromagnetic, and radioactive levels.

As essential as electricity is to modern life, our pollution-generating activities accelerate mutation in ourselves as well as in life forms below us. We, and the planet as a whole, are healthiest when we create maximal evolutionary and genetic distance in our food chains. “Genetic distancing” is now needed more than ever. Otherwise, our many activities that pollute the earth first accelerate the introduction of new mutations in viruses and bacteria in ourselves and in other mammals (we aren’t the only species susceptible to COVID, for example). Then we eat these other mammals and disrupt our own microbiomes with new infections, some of which are potentially fatal.

The message from the pandemic won’t be received immediately or completely understood and accepted. But hope arises because the planetary biome is the true foundation of life and the ecology that entangles all living things. Humans are the pivot point, now and in the future. We are the mirror of the earth and of life itself. A conscious alliance with the evolutionary gifts of the biome opens the way for a future free of pandemics and many disorders that can be treated from the microbial level on up to cells, tissues, and the whole person. The potential in medicine alone is enormous. What we need to do now is to take this new model seriously and to learn how best of live as part of the planetary biome.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi is the Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Vice-Chair of Neurology and Co-Director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi has discovered numerous Alzheimer’s disease genes, including the first one, and is developing new Alzheimer’s therapies using human mini-brains pioneered in his laboratory. Dr. Tanzi has published 600 research papers, received numerous awards and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. He has also co-authored several books, including “Decoding Darkness” and three bestsellers with Deepak Chopra: “Super Brain”, “Super Genes”, and “The Healing Self”. In his spare time, he plays keyboards with guitarist, Joe Perry of Aerosmith and other musicians.

The Surprising Connection between Well-Being and Living Indoors

By Deepak Chopra™ MD, and Paul Scialla

The lockdown that occurred in the face of COVID-19 brings to light something almost everyone overlooked in the past. We are now an indoor species. This was already true before the lockdown. Outdoor work has declined radically since the Industrial Revolution. In the West today we spend on average over 90% of our lives inside, whether in our homes, offices, schools, hotels or restaurants.

This development is contrary to most of human history, which was spent primarily outdoors. Unknown to most people, the boxes we now occupy have a profound impact on our health and well-being. Our physical and social environments conceivably have as much impact on our health as factors more widely recognized, such as genetics, lifestyle, and behavior patterns. Indoors the elements of air and water quality, lighting, temperature, and acoustics can all have a direct impact on such diverse things as respiration, sleep, immunity, and cardiovascular health.

While the notion of “wellness real estate” first emerged several years ago, COVID-19 has brought about a sudden awareness: What surrounds us matters. What we touch matters. It makes a difference how we gather indoors and share the same air. In a word, real estate is, and will remain, the largest “carrier” of a pathogen load such as the coronavirus or the next pathogen we face in the future.

The risks are primarily threefold: airborne (what we breathe), surface borne (what we touch), and behavioral borne (how we gather and how we care for our immune systems).

As society cautiously returns to normal, we should reconsider all three of these risks. Programs such as the WELL Health-Safety Rating from the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), which is evidence-based and third-party verified, focuses on strategies to protect people in a post-COVID environment. Drawing on insights from nearly 600 public health experts, virologists, government officials, academics, business leaders, architects, designers, building scientists, and real estate professionals, the rating provides a reliable means to measure how effectively all building types can be maintained for the health of the people inside them. The rating program is relevant for all building types – restaurants, schools, retail stores, offices, theatres – and is a review of policies and protocols that building operators put in place regarding cleaning and maintenance requirements, emergency response readiness, social distancing, and other factors that explicitly address the risk of pathogen transmission. The WELL Building Standard expands further into design interventions such as improved air filtration and ventilation to reduce the concentration of airborne viruses, pollutants and allergens, and circadian lighting to help balance 24-hour sleep-wake cycles.

Strategies to consider based on this research include:

Enhanced cleaning products and protocols: Maintaining thorough cleaning protocols on high-touch surfaces can help reduce the chance of infection.
Improved air quality: Opening windows to increase ventilation within a space or implementing air filtration technologies can help reduce the concentration of airborne viruses, along with other pollutants and allergens.
Elements of comfort: Working from home may lead to decreased physical activity and increased strain on our bodies. Active furnishings can help discourage prolonged sitting and sedentary behaviors.
Mental health support: Connecting with nature through plants, light and access to views can help improve mood and mitigate stress. This is particularly important since stress is known to weaken the immune system.
Circadian lighting design: Poor sleep quality can play a role in weakening the body’s immune function. Lighting that mimics the patterns of the sun can help promote a restful night’s sleep.

These strategies are an important step in responding to today’s public health challenge, but also to building a healthier future overall. One of the positive outcomes that has come to light over the past few months is a collective understanding that every facet of the indoor environment plays a role in our health outcomes. This is the next phase in promoting a holistic approach to well-being.