Dr Ron Ehrlich – Public Health, Polarisation and the Ultimate Story of Reconciliation

Today I am going to talk about 3 different stories. The first is about COVID and the hope around Vitamin C, the second is about the polarisation that has been front and centre of our minds and the third is about reconciliation between two seemingly different people whom we found out are quite the same and both ultimately human (as we all are).

NB. Please note I do mention statistics around suicide and said 800million suicides per year but what I meant to say is 800,000 globally.


Dr Ron Ehrlich – Public Health, Polarisation and the Ultimate Story of Reconciliation

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:05] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Today’s episode is a little different. We are going to be experimenting with all sorts of different formats in the coming weeks and months after the summer break. 

But to finish off this year before we enter our summer series, which will look at pull out the favorites of the last two or three years of podcasting, I wanted to try this as a different format where we are going to deal with where I’m going to deal with a few different stories and share with you. If you’re listening to this on audio, it will work, of course. But we are moving onto the video format as well and our YouTube channel is gaining a lot of views. So I’d really invite you to join us there. 

But the first part of today’s episode, I wanted to talk about a story related to COVID. What a surprise. What a year it’s been. And to say it’s been an unusual and exceptional year is an understatement if ever there was one. So the first story is one about COVID and that the title of this particular section. And I’ll give you the link to the news story on the ABC News. It was called “COVID Patient with Sepsis Makes a Remarkable Recovery following a megadose of vitamin C”. Now this story. I’ll go through it. I think it’s fascinating. 

And I think there are just some so many interesting insights here as to how we approach chronic disease in our community and how so-called experts deal with the complexities of the disease. 

The second story, I think it’s fair to say the word polarization has come been front and center of our minds, particularly in these last few years, and particularly in this last year, where we’ve all been exposed to the American election. And it’s interesting to note how much calmer I feel that I don’t have the noise of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, in my ear every single day. But in this period of polarization, I’ve picked a story which is all about reconciliation, and you couldn’t get two more extremes.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:02:30] It is the meeting of two fathers, one who was the father of a victim of a bombing at a concert in Paris, and the other the father of the perpetrator who blew himself up and how they met and what they learned from that meeting. And I think you couldn’t get a more extreme example of polarisation. And there was just such important lessons to be learned from that. 

And the third story is one that I think we’ve all come to learn about in this pandemic is certainly one that I have. I’m sure almost everybody else has to and that is the importance of connection, the importance of connection, and that is face-to-face, real-life connection. This is a story about loneliness. 

It can be countered by how many neighbors you actually just interact with. And it opens up that whole story about isolation, mental health, and how we can overcome that. So I’m going to deal with those three stories. And as I said, you can look at this on YouTube, or if you’re listening to it, will work fine.

COVID patient with sepsis makes ‘remarkable’ recovery following megadose of vitamin C

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:03:45] The first story “COVID patient with sepsis makes a remarkable recovery, following megadose of vitamin C”, a young Australian man who was critically ill with COVID-19 and suffered early stages of sepsis made a remarkable recovery after being given massive doses, doses of vitamin C, according to his doctor Professor Rinaldo Bellomo, director of intensive care at Melbourne’s Austin Health, said the 40-year-old’s health had started to deteriorate significantly from COVID-19, with the man losing kidney function and his blood pressure plummeting. 

Sepsis, a life-threatening condition occurs when the body damages its own organs while responding to an infection. It was the starting to take hold of his body, and time was running out. We were dealing with somebody who was very unwell. We felt we were in a tough situation and the patient’s life was under serious threat, he said. 

Now it’s worth noting that many, many people have died in ICU through this global pandemic and many, many drugs have been tried to save them. But I read on Professor Bellomo knew researchers at the Florey Institute, who had some promising experimental findings using mega doses of vitamin C to treat sepsis with the patient’s consent, with the family’s consent. Doctors gave the patient the same treatment the Florey researchers had trialed in animals. And there is a photo of Professor Rinaldo Bellomo, who hoped the researcher’s promising laboratory results would translate into a good outcome for his patients. 

The man was given an initial dose of 30 grams of sodium ascorbic that’s given intravenously over 30 minutes, then a maintenance dose of 30 grams over six and a half hours. This is the equivalent of 5000 oranges pumping through his veins, Professor Bellomo said. Oh, yeah, a lot of sugar in 5000 oranges.

But another story, an over-the-counter vitamin C supplement is 500 milligrams, meaning this megadose was 60 times the normal dose. It’s worth mentioning that the recommended daily dose of vitamin C is, I think, around 200 milligrams of vitamin C. It’s incredibly low. So that is milligrams. This dose that was given is 30 grams, which is 30000 milligrams. So it’s a very high dose. Sepsis is a life-threatening condition. That occurs when the body’s response to an infection damages its own organs and tissues, and organs started to fail. 

The patient goes into septic shock. It’s the common cause of death in intensive care units and a common cause of death for people gravely ill with COVID-19. Often patients need to have limbs amputated to survive and there is actually a photo of a fellow by the name of Mick O’Dowd who went from being a healthy, sport-loving father to a quadruple amputee. And because he suffered from sepsis, Professor Bellomo said that the patient had this was the 40-year-old patient in ICU had a megadose of vitamin C. The changes were, in inverted commas, remarkable. 

In a short period of time, we saw improved regulation of blood pressure, arterial blood, oxygen levels, and kidney functions returning to normal, he said. His temperature also improved. The patient was able to be taken off machine ventilation 12 days after starting sodium ascorbic and discharged from the hospital without any complications 22 days later. This can’t be true. Is the heading of the next paragraph? The Florey Institute’s Professor Clive May had collaborated with Professor Bellomo for many years keeping him up to date with the promising results they saw in the lab with sepsis treatment. He didn’t believe us. He said this couldn’t be true. 

Professor May said colleague Yogeesh Lankadeva sent the intensive care doctors videos of what was happening in the lab. Professor Bellomo literally rocked up at the lab door the next day because he was just like, I need to see this from my own eyes. When he came, and when he saw it, they were all very amazed at how quickly the disease just reversed by doing this treatment.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:08:43] Now, bear in mind the Florey Institute, the Austin Health ICU professor here, professor there, these are two professors with a lot of experience. Okay, so Professor May has been studying sepsis for almost two decades. 

His research, which has been published in the Journal of Critical Care Medicines, showed giving megadose vitamin C to animals with sepsis could reverse the effects of the disease. This has been going on for 20 years. I’ve never seen any treatment before this being able to do that, he said. Given this dose of vitamin C is totally revolutionary. I pause there because I’m incredulous and I’ll come back to why I’m incredulous, but there it is. 

This is a professor in a leading research institute in Australia in 2020 at the end of hopefully a pandemic, making this extraordinary statement. Giving this dose of vitamin C is totally revolutionary; the response was quite remarkable. 

He said the function of the animal’s heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, and brain began to significantly improve just three hours after getting the megadose of the vitamin. If the treatment works well in patients, as it does in our animal studies, I think it’s going to totally revolutionize the treatment of septic patients in intensive care units all over the world, Professor May said. And there is a photo of the two professors and the doctor thrilled when the treatment was successful. That’s really encouraging. But he stressed, and this is important. 

Now, people with COVID-19 or any other illness should not try the same treatment at home. I mean, to take 30 grams of vitamin C in powder form is… Well, I don’t think that’s particularly good for you. It does need to be done under supervision, and the intravenous is the best way to do it. But I digress. 

We don’t want people going out and buying 10 bottles of vitamin C and think it’s going to solve their problems. That would just make them feel very sick. Here’s the next paragraph. Experts urge caution while the results seem promising for the seriously ill Melbourne patient. And the animal studies expert said previous studies using large doses of vitamin C to treat sepsis had been mixed. 

Now, I just want to pick apart that sentence there. While the results seem promising, I think saving someone’s life is rather promising. I think it’s more than promising, and particularly after 20 years of this professor doing studies in animals, which would have done the same, experts said. Previous studies using large doses of vitamin C to treat sepsis have been mixed. I would like to see those studies, and I’d like to see what they called large doses of vitamin C, because to some doctors, 500 milligrams or 1000 milligrams are large doses and two others five, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 60 grams is not. 

Professor Simon Finfer from the George Institute of Global Health has been researching sepsis for more than 25 years. So he’s another professor. We have seen so many treatments that seem to work in animal models and case reports, but haven’t proven effective in big studies, he said. The pharmaceutical and here is the kicker. 

The pharmaceutical industry has spent 10 billion dollars trying to find a magic bullet for sepsis, and they haven’t done it yet. But also, he said it was important to keep an open mind if something is proving useful. We need to conduct trials to determine if there is a benefit or not. 

A 2020 review of scientific evidence published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found high dose vitamin C, given on its own with or without steroids, did not improve significant survival benefit for patients with sepsis or septic shock. 

Again, I would like to see the doses that we used because as I said to some doctors, particularly when the recommended Daily Dose, I have to check on that the recommended daily dose of vitamin C might even be less it might be something like 60 milligrams or even up to 200 milligrams.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:13:05] So for if that’s the recommended Daily Dose, then giving one gram of vitamin C is a high dose. And that then goes into a paper looking at the high dose in inverted commas, vitamin C, which is actually not a high dose at all. 

But anyway, the review found giving both giving high dose vitamin C just in case or as a measure of last resort could have negative consequences, such as delaying proven therapies such as prompt use of antibiotics. This is an interesting statement. A new trial could bring answers. 

Professor Bellomo said many of the previous trials use a low dose of vitamin C used a lower dose. There we go. Use the lower dose of vitamin C than the researchers did in both the animal study and the author and the Austin and that Austin did in the COVID-19 patient.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:13:58] The amount of vitamin C given in this trial was 50 times greater than any other tried for sepsis. So there you have it. 

What is a high, supposedly high dose of 30, 30 grams? Well, so what they considered what was giving mixed results, according to the professor who was urging caution, was talking about when they talked about high dose, they were talking about one or two grams a day. And that didn’t seem to have an impact.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:14:29] This dose was 50 times higher. Doctors at Melbourne’s Austin Health have now begun a randomized control study, giving some patients with septic shock a megadose of vitamin C and some a placebo. 

God help those placebo blood samples will be collected to gauge the patient’s immune response. Researcher Dr Yugeesh Lankadeva said the trial would help establish an optimal dose and treatment that could be used by intensive care doctors in treating sepsis as a potentially life-saving option, just like the life that was saved for patients with multiple organ failure. 

As for the Melbourne man who was able to walk out of the hospital after the experimental treatment, his doctor, Professor Bellomo, said it’s an incentive to keep trialing this approach. We were encouraged, of course, he said. This has provided us with further ammunition to investigate this intervention, to understand what the mechanisms might be and the extent of the achievement that might come from it. 

While Australia is doing well keeping COVID-19 under control, he said, doctors from around the world have already been in touch to find out more about this, megadose treatment. 

Now, this makes it all sound like this was an absolutely breakthrough procedure. And three professors, one urging caution because the previous studies that have been published on high dose vitamin C, which as I’ve said again, it needs repeating, those studies were not really high dose studies because they were probably in the order of 500 to 1500 milligrams, which is not a high dose of vitamin C, particularly when faced with this is really significant. So this is not a breakthrough treatment. Linus Pauling, 40, 50, or more years ago received a Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin C.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:16:29] Many doctors I’m associated with the Australasian College of Nutritional Environmental Medicine. I have the honor this year of being president of that group. I know many doctors who are well trained. Under careful supervision, that’s important, to have administered I.V. Vitamin C to many patients over the last 30 or 40 years with similarly remarkable breakthrough results that were achieved here in December 2020. 

And here is the most important aspect of this, because remember, we’ve seen three professors who collectively have spent 50 years or more researching to find the magic bullet, which the pharmaceutical industry has spent 10 billion dollars trying to find the magic bullet for sepsis. And what if you were a researcher in a research institution looking for funding to do research, not just for sepsis, but for any disease? If you discovered as a professor with 20 or 30 years of experience that actually the answer lay in your undergraduate study in second-year university when you studied biochemistry and physiology. And then in the third year went on to study immunology. 

What if the answer was actually something you had studied at undergraduate level but had just thought was totally irrelevant? Because what you really wanted to do was get involved in some serious research that could be funded by the pharmaceutical industry spending 10 billion dollars looking for a magic bullet for which we already knew the answer, you know, 50 years ago.

So this is a really interesting story on so many different levels. Part of my message and this is what I cover in my book [A Life Less Stressed: the five pillars of health and wellness] is that the food and pharmaceutical industry have had an incredible impact on health and well-being in our community. And there are some great things in the pharmaceutical industry. I’m not disputing that. 

But here is I think what we need to be doing is getting back to some real basics, understanding biochemistry, physiology, immunology, while the world we live in is becoming increasingly more complex. I’ve said this many times. I believe the solutions are remarkably simple, accessible, and cheap. And this is a good example of that. Now, I’ve written letters in my capacity at the Australasian College of Nutritional Environmental Medicine, together with its founder, Professor Ian Brighthope.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:19:18] And I’ve co-written letters with him co-signed them to the health ministers, both federal and state, and to the TGA and the emergency, the ICU Doctors Association. And we have been sending letters since the beginning of this pandemic about vitamin C. And vitamin D, there’s a whole other story about vitamin D as well and encouraging the government just to use these simple interventions. And what I’ve got back in response has been thank you very much, but there’s no evidence to show that vitamin C affects COVID-19. Thank you. 

And then the next day, I might read in the paper that we’re going to try the BCG vaccine, the tuberculosis vaccine because it improves immune function. No proof to show that. It’s no proof to show that it affects COVID-19. But just like vitamin C, that we’re going to spend 10 million dollars trialing the BCG vaccine or Remdesivir an antiviral or hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or and so it goes on looking for these pharmaceutical products, which potentially could be the magic bullet that generates billions of dollars of research, money, and funds for selling that medication.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:20:44] But, hey, why not make you know, I work in a practice where we call where we say we are a patient-centered practice, which means the patient is the most important person in that equation. 

Well, I would love to see a public-centered health care system, a health care system based on not conventional medicine and alternative medicine, but just good medicine to find out what is the best in all areas, right through from undergraduate training to postgraduate training. And the key the bottom line is what is good for the patient, not what is good for the practitioner, not what is good for the research institution, not what is good for publishing research for professors seeking the magic bullet when if they paid attention in undergraduate university, they would have known the answer to this problem.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:21:43] Or if they just listened, then many more people would have been saved. If you get a feeling that I’m getting a little bit upset, a little bit passionate about this, hey, I make no apology for it. But this is the first part of today’s episode. I wanted to share that with you. Thank you. We’ll move on to the second in a moment.

Importance of Human Connection

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:22:05] Now, one of the challenges in this pandemic, and there have been obviously many, is isolation. And obviously, if you are fortunate enough to have a close-knit group of family around you, friends that you could connect with during this time physically, that certainly made life a lot easier to navigate through this challenging time. 

But it kind of highlighted for us all that connection is important and that loneliness and isolation, particularly for people living on their own, was or, you know, feeling isolated in a community is a really challenging thing to mental health. And this story was all about loneliness can be countered by knowing just six neighbors. 

Study finds a global study spearheaded by an Australian loneliness expert has revealed knowing just six neighbors reduces the likelihood of feeling alone and is directly linked to reducing stresses incurred by the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:23:11] The report is the first study that’s quantified loneliness across three countries Australia, the United States, and England. And it examined the impact of a four-week kindness initiative by Social Media Platform Network, a social media platform next door where participants were encouraged to conduct small acts of kindness in their local community. 

Dr Michelle Lim of Swinburne University Melbourne conducted the study through a randomized control trial in conjunction with Brigham Young University in the US and the University of Manchester in England.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:23:50] And the results indicated small acts of kindness between neighbors have a positive effect on perceptions of connectedness. Shannon Gunstone moved to Sydney’s western suburbs with her husband at the end of March, just as we were going into lockdown. She arrived in Schofields with no family or friends in the area. 

Mrs Gunstone had taken a break from work to undergo IVF treatments, and the timing of the move coincided with the introduction of the coronavirus restrictions, which obstructed her from interacting with new people. Miss Gunstone joined next door in a desperate attempt for social connection, was surprised with the impact making friends had on her self-worth. 

Since meeting some of my local community online, I feel much better about myself, and I realized it’s perfectly normal to feel a bit left out. But there are things you can do to fix it, she said. When the restrictions eased, Mrs Gunstone set up a weekly lunch club with some women in the community, as well as a local support group for people undergoing IVF.

I finally have people I can invite to my baby shower when I get pregnant. I now consider some of my neighbors, my closest friends, what a great story. Before the pandemic, Melbournian Joey Aboud spent half his life in Bali, the base of his newly wedded wife and one of his businesses. 

He has not seen his wife since they wed in February as she is running their Balinese business from Indonesia. It wasn’t until the coronavirus hit that he realized splitting his time from Richmond and Bali had meant he had sacrificed a sense of community. It was extremely hard. 

Mr Aboud found the sense of isolation beginning to dominate his interactions with staff at work. I had to open up. I had to open up to them and say, I’m struggling. And that’s so important is, and I feel like I’ve given up on who I am. It was liberating to hear them say, So am I.  You know, so am I boss, the reality is everyone struggles with loneliness, finding new friends in his neighborhood massively boosted Mr Aboud’s mood. I was overwhelmed, he said, by people reaching out in the same boat for strangers to take the time out of their day just because they happen to live nearby was absolutely special. 

According to the Australian Psychological Society, one in four Australian adults are lonely and experienced high levels of social interaction, anxiety. I think we used to call that shyness, but it’s now called social interaction anxiety. At the beginning of the observation period for the study, one in 10 participants said they were experiencing loneliness. 

By the end, this was reduced to one in 20. The Kindness initiated initiative encouraged random interactions and, as demonstrated by the results, mitigated the participant’s loneliness globally. Something as simple as having regular contact with six neighbors where they show care and concern has a big effect on perceptions of connection, Dr Lim said the study indicates the interactions most effective in decreasing loneliness are not actually meaningful experiences with a close friend or family member, but incidental moments with relative strangers made on a repeated basis like a local barista or a babysitter. 

These interactions, known as weak ties, suffered the most during the pandemic. The head of Next Door Australia, Jenny Sager, credits the erosion of weak ties as the reason why next-door memberships increased by over 100 percent during the lockdowns.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:27:39] When suddenly you’re home alone, and you don’t have your normal monthly chat with your hairdresser or daily interactions with the owner of your local café, the depression and anxiety kick in and you seek out connections, Miss Sager’s said. 

So this is again a reminder of something so fundamental, and that is the importance of human connection. And it’s been so interesting in this pandemic where we have all been moving to be totally preoccupied with our we are connected with the world, but we’re not connected with the person next to us. And that was a trend that was escalating at an exponential rate, I believe, in our community.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:28:23] And this pandemic has come and reminded us of how important actual social connections are and how connecting with our local community is so important. And I think that’s a really important message for us all to take out of this coronavirus. 

And also how random acts of kindness as simple as saying hello, looking someone in the eye and say hello and genuinely asking them, how are you, how are you doing? Can have such an incredible impact on their lives and yours as well. So I wanted to just touch on that topic today as well.

It’s All about Reconciliation

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:29:10] Now, another issue that I think a word that we’ve become all familiar with is polarisation, and we’ve seemed to have become more polarised in our world. We create our own world.

We surround ourselves with our own opinions, and we’re incredulous that anyone could have a different opinion to ourselves. And I just thought this story just it’s an extreme example of what I guess is the polarisation of what could be more extreme.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:29:39] “Talking it over a powerful conversation between a man who lost his daughter in the Bataclan terror attack in France and the father of one of the killers”. This was a story in The Guardian that I just read today, and I wanted to share it with you. 

The story basically is that Georges Salines and Azdyne Amimour both lost a child in the Paris attack on 15th of November 2015, Saline’s daughter Lola and Amimour’s son Samy were at the Bataclan concert hall that night. One was killed. The other one was one of the killers who blew himself up at the scene. Both were 28 years old. 

And then there is a rather somber photo of the girl, Lola’s father Saline, and looking at the father of the perpetrator of the terrorist attack, Azdyne. And it says before and what they did was they got together. The father of the terrorists wrote to the father of the victim and wanted to meet before that first meeting. 

Saline’s the father of the victim, was a doctor who works in public health and asked Amimour what he wanted to discuss. He replied I want to speak with you about this tragic event as I feel that I’m a victim, too, because of my son. Others would have been shocked. 

But thankfully, Saline had attended a conference at the Quilliam Foundation in London a few months earlier. So this was an important breakthrough. And the two of them met and found some comfort in that. We still have words, which is the book that was about those conversations. Conversations are at its most powerful when both fathers tell each other their family stories.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:31:50] And this is where I think it gets really interesting because when we start talking to people who are seemingly so different to ourselves, we learn that maybe they’re not how they met their wives, how they became a family, each with three children, both men are Mediterranean. Saline from Set on the land at Languedoc Coast in France and Amimour from Ann Arbor in Algeria, both are warm and share a very French fraternity.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:32:19] Despite the circumstances, Amimour, the father of the terrorist, worked hard all his life, first in the film industry on certain films in the 1970s and ran bars in central Paris and clothes shops in Belgium. Always traveling an absent father, he concludes to Saline. 

The book ends with letters from Amimour, the terrorist’s father to Lola, the victim, and from Saline the victim’s father, to the terrorist, Samy. “Our life down here was the one that mattered because it’s the only one there is, I feel sorry that you didn’t know this. Sorry for you and sorry that you did so much harm chasing after an illusion,” Saline writes. 

While Amimour tells Lola the victim, “your life was stolen from you by a murderous ideology. Did I fail in my job as a father? I thought I was giving my son a good upbringing. I am so, so sorry, Lola. We must fight to make sure that this can never happen again.” This is pretty extreme.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:33:24] And one could certainly look at whether an absent father had an impact on a son being radicalized. But that’s not what this why I wanted to draw attention to this story. 

The reason I wanted to draw attention to it is that even in this extreme instance, the fact that people sit down and talk to each other and found common ground on which their lives exist in, you know because I am I’m an eternal optimist. And I believe although we are bombarded by bad news all the time, it’s a constant barrage of bad news that is so easy to think that the world is going to is going a really bad direction.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:34:10] And one could argue that environmental and environmentally, I would have no problem with arguing that and health as well, although that’s a whole other story. 

But my point here is that I truly believe that the vast majority of people I would even put the figure at 95 percent plus are good people. And the people that make the headlines, that make the violence, that the perpetrate the violence and make the headlines and give us this illusion that we are living in a very dangerous world is wrong, you know, and I think we need to see the brighter side of people, the good side of people. 

And it’s interesting to know that there was a study done just well a few years back which looked at the number of people that died globally each year and the number of people that died globally each year is around 50 to 55 million. I think the last official figure was about 53 million.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:09] And in that 53 million, 120000 died of violent clashes, violent violence. Be it in war or through gunshot or violence, accidents, whatever. But 120,000 die of that, interestingly, 800,000 people die of suicide.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:33] So one could argue that you are actually a bigger risk to yourself than any terrorist. And even more sobering than that, something like four and a half million people a year dies of diabetes. And one could then argue that sugar is an even bigger risk than killing yourself or a terrorist attack. 

So I think we just need to put the world into perspective. And I found this story really inspiring, that such an extreme of losing a child, a 28-year-old and whose son blew himself up to do that. And yet these two men met, talked, shared their stories, and in some way found peace. I’m not pretending they’d be the best of friends after this, but it somehow made peace with that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:36:26] So I just thought that was a really interesting story.

Conclusion

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:36:30] Look, it’s been an incredible year and that year has raised all sorts of challenges for us. I think we have a global community focussed on health like never before. And I think that’s an incredible opportunity. We’ve heard the word comorbidities. And if you go back and listen to my Elephant in the Room podcast or watch it on YouTube, I’d recommend that you’ll know more about what I covered in that. 

But I basically see this pandemic as an incredible opportunity to reset, to rethink the way we live our lives, and a great opportunity to reduce comorbidities or chronic disease and future proof us for this pandemic and any future pandemics, which are inevitable.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:17] So coming up in this summer break, which is going to go over January and February, December and December and January, rather, we’re going to be revisiting some of our highlights in the podcast.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:30] I really enjoy doing it. I know I’ve said this to you before that I get each week to ask people that know much more than me about particular subject questions. And incredibly, they answer them. And I learn so much from that. 

I hope you do, too. I’d also love you to go on to iTunes and leave us a review because we’re learning the nuances of how this digital world works. And my message is one of personal empowerment. And I would like to get that message out to the world. So how about getting on iTunes and putting in some good reviews? Because if I can get up to a couple of hundred reviews, I’d love this podcast to be reaching a much wider audience, which is our goal for 2021, and in 2021 we have got some really interesting, exciting things happening.

Online courses, lots of books coming out. It’s going to be a very busy and exciting time. I hope it’s going to be a great year. And environmentally, this period has allowed us also to have a bit of a rest and see how much cleaner the air can be, how much less we need to travel, how much more our local environment means to us and the people that surround us, how important they are. 

So it’s a real back-to-basics story, I think, which I’m learning myself, and I hope to build on in the coming years. So thank you for joining me on this podcast. Thank you for following me on Instagram and all those other platforms. And I hope 2021 is a happy and healthy one for you. Until then, this is Dr Ron Ehrlich, be well.

 

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.