Blog Post

In times of crisis such as these, it’s always a good idea to look to history for perspective to help us wrap our minds around certain issues. The COVID pandemic of 2020 is unlike anything we’ve seen for a hundred years; but it’s not unprecedented.  We’ve been here before.

I took my kids out for frozen yogurt this past weekend and, of course, we wore our masks and got our yogurt to go.  I thought the kids may want to eat outside, but they preferred to sit in our car and eat.  Quite a few families were eating in their cars.

The kids enjoyed their frozen yogurt then my daughter drove us home.  She’s got her learner’s permit and is always excited to get behind the wheel. When we got back home, I sat down to watch the Miami Heat play the Boston Celtics for the NBA Eastern Conference Finals (Miami won! Go Heat!), but the experience of getting our frozen yogurt was still on my mind.

The COVID stats, talking points, and misinformation I’ve been hearing over the past several months rushed through my mind and I decided to check to see if the daily death rates in the U.S. were actually being impacted by COVID-19. We all hear that about 1,000 people are dying of COVID every day. Did you know that over 8,800 people die in the U.S. on a DAILY basis?  It’s an unfortunate part of life that people die for many, many different reasons every day and get no attention at all.

In fact, 9 million people disappear from the face of the Earth from starvation every year and these deaths get almost no attention at all. That’s 25,000 people every day, but this gets no attention. Why?  Likely because we’re not inundated with these statistics daily and because we’re fortunate enough in the U.S. not to be direct witnesses to these 9 million deaths. But that doesn’t mean they don’t still happen. Like that timeless question:  If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does it still make a sound?  As kids we debated this question, but now the answer is crystal clear:  YES, the tree still makes a sound when it falls regardless of who’s there to hear it.  9 million people die annually of STARVATION and just because we’re not there to witness it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

So back to the question of whether the COVID crisis has increased the overall daily death rate in the U.S. beyond the average of 8,800 daily deaths. To answer this question, I went to the website Macrotrends.net, which is an international statistics website whose source is the United Nations. They track all kinds of morbidity and mortality data across the globe as well as economic trends.  It would be assumed that the overall death rates would be increased by COVID given the reported 1,000 deaths per day, but that’s not what I found.

The U.S. daily death rate statistic on Macrotrends.net went as far back as 1950, and for 2020, the daily death rate is 8,880, which represents a 1.2% increase over 2019 when 8,720 people died daily in the U.S. We would assume that this number would be considerably higher due to COVID-19, however, it’s not the case.  Why?  It’s becoming evident that those with significant pre-existing diseases are the ones likely to die once infected with COVID, but is COVID alone what’s actually killing them?  Or are they dying of the burden of diseases they already had such as diabetes, lung disease, obesity, or heart disease once infected with covid? Given that the daily death rate has not been statistically impacted despite COVID, we have to suspect that COVID is co-existing with other more deadly pre-existing conditions that are more likely to be causing these deaths.

The CDC recently released a report stating that COVID deaths are occurring mostly in those with more than two pre-existing “co-morbidities.”  What’s a co-morbidity?  It’s essentially a chronic disease such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, hypertension, or Alzheimer’s dementia, for example. Well, I would argue that just about all deaths due to any illness occur with co-morbidities. Thyroid cancer is an example: most people who have 3 or more other diseases before they get cancer usually die of those other diseases before thyroid cancer kills them. The flu is also more likely to kill those who were already really sick before they got the flu. Basically, unless someone dies as a result of an accident, suicide or murder, it’s very likely they will have more than one disease at the time of their death. That just makes sense.

In fact, when we look back at previous years, we see that the daily death rate has been on the rise since 2008 long before COVID-19!  In fact, according to the U.N., the U.S. daily death rate has increased by an average of about 1.0% per year each year since 2008.  When we see that the daily death rate has not significantly increased despite COVID-19, it’s important to make sure nothing is offsetting this statistic.  For example, I wondered if car accidents might have declined during COVID-19 given that many Americans are working from home and are engaged in remote learning, but car accidents account for approximately 100 deaths per day over the past several years, so that statistic wouldn’t offset the deaths from COVID. So, it appears that COVID simply is not increasing the overall death rate in U.S., which is astounding. How can we explain this?

I believe that although COVID-19 is a major pandemic and deserves to be brought responsibly under control using sound science through the use of FDA-accepted masks, social distancing and proper hand washing and sanitation, a more important issue is being brought to light…our society is just too damn sick!  We have too many chronic conditions that allow an otherwise average infection to wreak havoc on us and cost us untold billions of dollars and cause unprecedented mental illness from the sheer stress we’ve all been under for more than half a year.  While a pandemic brings certain things sharply into focus, something we haven’t been talking about enough is why we’ve allowed ourselves to become this sick and vulnerable as a society?  While we have 1/3 of the population of India which has 1 Billion residents, we have more cases and twice as many deaths related to covid-19.  These statistics are inexcusable.

My clients are often shocked to hear the abysmal health statistics we have here in the United States.  As the richest nation in the world, we are by far the sickest industrialized country on the globe.  We are the most obese and we spend the most on our healthcare while our life expectancy has been declining for the past 2 out of 3 years.  Of the top 10 richest countries in the world, we are last in life expectancy! Why have we tolerated such a toxic environment, artificial poisons in our water, soil, food and homes for this long without a public upheaval?

COVID-19 alone isn’t killing us. Our chronic diseases borne out of artificial and toxic substances, a poor diet of what can barely be called food, and unprecedented stress are killing us.

We’re exposed to 80,000 artificial chemicals in the United States and only 2,000 of them have been investigated for their safety. Out of the 2,000 chemicals that have been investigated, approximately 10% of these are known to cause cancer among other diseases. So, if we extrapolate this data across the other 78,000 chemicals we haven’t yet dared to investigate, we can assume that an additional 780 chemicals to which we’re exposed cause cancer and other diseases.  It’s estimated that the average American is exposed to over 200 household cancer-causing toxins almost daily. If a toxin causes cancer, it likely also leads to autism, Alzheimer’s dementia, neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and much more.

So, while I continue to practice COVID-19 safety, I will continue to stress that the real causes of death from this pandemic are the pre-existing chronic diseases caused by stress and toxins in our homes, soil, water, and food.  I explain these links in detail in my upcoming book FAITH: Fearlessly Affirming and Intending to Transform Health.

COVID-19 is a wakeup call that couldn’t be louder.  It’s time for us to demand a paradigm shift from a “sick-care” model to a health-care model that helps us to remove these toxic substances from our environment and bodies, and looks at the root causes of symptoms and conditions to treat them with natural and safe options. Only then will we begin to enjoy better health, more robust immunity, and reduce the financial and psychological burden of disease. There’s already a system of medicine that exists to do just this.  As a board-certified integrative medical doctor, I treat the root causes of symptoms and conditions with safe and natural alternatives while preventing diseases using these same strategies.  In 2014, the American Board of Physicians and Surgeons formally accepted the field of Integrative Medicine as a medical specialty.  Integrative medicine must become our primary point of contact for all patients in order to reverse this tsunami of illness and toxicity.  This will take consumer demand and more doctors practicing holistic, integrative medicine.  Our children and future generations deserve better.

I hope you’ll join me on the path to wholeness. I wish you continued health and wellness, and send you many blessings during this difficult time.