Thank you, Heather! Your open-minded but sensible, scientific approach to emerging evidence over the last year and a half has been a true breath of fresh air in the metaphorical hospital ward of misinformation.
I am so glad for this written offering; it is clear from your prior essays that you have a wonderful way of bringing a nearly artistic flair to what would surely become dry academic language in the hands of most self-professed scientists. Yet, you do so without sacrificing the careful, rigorous clarity that logic and science demand. More to the point, I am excited to share this with some of the people in my life who don't "do" podcasts and still don't see some of the creeping dangers that you know all too well.
I can't wait for your book signing at the Boulder Bookstore this fall (or whenever Covid allows).
Thank you! I appreciate it. This is what I want most: to have ideas and words, brought forth in the spirit of inquiry and with a hope for the continued flourishing of both humanity and the (rest of the) natural world, shared as widely as possible.
Yes...still recovering from that boat accident, now 5+ years later, but I'm glad to have been able to write about it, and while I can't say I'm glad that it happened, it did provide clarity in many ways. Once, you know, I had survived.
Loved the article, hadn't read your boat story and it moved me to tears. I uuh, lost my mother (I'm 29) about two months ago due a cycling accident. She hit an oncoming car. Her front wheel had hit my dads rear wheel as he had hit his breaks to slow down for passing the upcoming car on a narrow road. She fell the wrong way. Might just be that in her last moments she heard her mantra: I am allowed to die. Raised three great kids.
I am so sorry for the loss of your mother. No mantra can save, or fail to save, a person, as trauma and other external forces all too often make decisions over which we have no control. But your confidence that she knew that she had raised three great kids--that is a gift, and one of the lasting gifts from her.
Thank you, Heather, for raising this extremely important issue! It’s so true what you say that modern inventions in the medicine should be added to existing treatments, not to replace them when they are in wisdom. The points you make, are probably the most important reasons, why modern hospital design have a lot of unfortunate consequences, but this is only a tip of an iceberg. There are many other reasons, why hospital design really matters, especially during epidemics. Here's an anecdote that shows another part of this iceberg:
In the middle of 2020 a friend of mine needed a hospitalization due to some mental health problems. Fortunately, this person was admitted to a hospital that was designed around 1914 and consist of a multiple separate buildings in the area that effectively is a park: lots of trees, a bit of open space, a flowerbed here and there. All buildings have gardens separated from the rest of the area, and patients are encouraged to spend there some time every day. This is a good thing in and of itself, but during a pandemic it was simply a blessing. Since beginning the pandemic entrance to hospital buildings were restricted making in most circumstances visits completely impossible. Thanks to the presence of the garden, we were able, however, to see and talk in person. Yes, it was through a fence, and, yes we still needed to keep c. 2 meters distance, but we could see each other’s facial expression. Even when we couldn’t get there when patients were in the garden, thanks to the small size of the building (it has only two floors), the conversations were possible through windows (admittedly they were much harder that way). Were it modern 15-floor hospital, none of this would be possible. This is the last hospital in our region that looks like that, and, ironically, this is partially due to chronic lack of funding.
The other obvious advantage of such a modular layout of the hospital is that it reduces the possibility of spreading of the infectious disease through all the patients.
Back in 2019 I read somewhere that even having nature-themed artwork in a hospital improved a patient’s recovery! Talk about crumbs from the table.
Along similar lines, the sad and silent epidemic of “nature deficit disorder” (as discussed in Last Child in the Woods) I think helps explain the immense confusion and alienation young people have today about their own mental and physical health. When one of my own teenagers was struggling with anxiety I went to no small effort to have them spend a several weeks in a rainforest without a phone. It was rather successful I am glad to say.
I am a nurse and when I first started my nursing career 30 years ago I used to open patient's windows to let in fresh air (and also let the cigarette smoke out!) and kept curtains open to let in sunlight. I no longer work at the bedside and I hope windows can still be opened in hospital rooms. I wish my doctor's office had windows that opened in treatment rooms. It is very relaxing to hear the sounds of nature and feel fresh air in stressful situations. The thought of going into a small enclosed room that a sick person just vacated and breathed out all of their germs gives me the willies now thanks to this pandemic.
"By comparison, when you are outside, the “space” that you are in is effectively infinite. For many kinds of pathogens, if you are yourself sick, not only are you less likely to get someone else sick if you are outside, but you are also more likely to experience a better outcome yourself. ... Thus, bathing in your own viral or bacterial stew can make you more sick than if you exhaled or otherwise shed pathogens, and then they blew away on the wind."
If this is true, then what about reversing the scale of things?
What if you started to shrink the walls of that room, all the way down to that person in the room, and then put those walls directly onto their faces, so that not only are their faces covered (and thus no longer exposed to the sunlight that produces nitric oxide and Vitamin D) but also have less volume of air to breathe from and exhale into, take in and remain in more of that viral or bacterial stew that no longer blows away on the wind but remains circulating into and out of their noses, mouths, throats, lungs?
Yes, I've been waiting and waiting for more information about the harms of masks. FWIW, I also get chest pain, to the point where I have difficulty walking or sleeping.
When I had my daughter in 2018 she came into the world with some jaundice. They wanted to put her under their machine, but she refused to be still. She came into the world with the wiggles and hasn't lost them. One nurse said they used to send people home with advice for sunshine, but had to quit because of people leaving their babies out too long and harming them. They kept us in the hospital a week before my patience was at an end and I broke down crying to my husband. He talked to the doctor and they finally agreed to let us go home as long as we came back to check her billy levels the next day.
Still to this day I wonder if the fact that I had good insurance (which I am thankful for) had anything to do with their keeping us so long. My sisters and sister-in-law did not have similar experiences. They got to go home after a day or two. None of them had insurance or not great insurance.
Great article, Heather! Thanks! Are you aware of Arthur Haines? You might very well be interested in what he is doing in relation to evolutionary novelty. Also Daniel Vitalis, too - check out TheRewildYourself Podcast!
There are a couple different inchoate communities that are all quite aware of the same phenomenon: there is the ancestral health crowd, which overlaps with the evolutionary medicine crowd, with some overlap with the Human Rewilding crowd, and then there are some isolated professors at various universities who study evolutionary mismatch in one form or the other, even if not always explicitly so.
I think it is time these groups all start connecting, and perhaps in the future we can start building real, responsible living communities that have an intentional regard for evolutionary norms.
I agree that many lines of thought, and many communities, are converging on similar kinds of conclusions. Here's to your goal "real, responsible, living communities that have an intentional regard for evolutionary norms."
I have to admit to imagining these kind of communities as well, plan-b, back to nature, intellectually rigorous and based on evolving science. There is someone on the discord who found a huge tract of land with a big lodge and a bunch of little cabins for sale in Montana, and my thoughts kept drifting back to how cool that could be for people. The Dark Horse Ranch…
Thank you, Heather! Your open-minded but sensible, scientific approach to emerging evidence over the last year and a half has been a true breath of fresh air in the metaphorical hospital ward of misinformation.
I am so glad for this written offering; it is clear from your prior essays that you have a wonderful way of bringing a nearly artistic flair to what would surely become dry academic language in the hands of most self-professed scientists. Yet, you do so without sacrificing the careful, rigorous clarity that logic and science demand. More to the point, I am excited to share this with some of the people in my life who don't "do" podcasts and still don't see some of the creeping dangers that you know all too well.
I can't wait for your book signing at the Boulder Bookstore this fall (or whenever Covid allows).
Thank you! And we will try to get to Boulder.
Brilliant. Thank you. Sharing far and wide.
Thank you! I appreciate it. This is what I want most: to have ideas and words, brought forth in the spirit of inquiry and with a hope for the continued flourishing of both humanity and the (rest of the) natural world, shared as widely as possible.
Wow - the link to the boat accident article - incredible. Oh, and this article was great too. :)
Yes...still recovering from that boat accident, now 5+ years later, but I'm glad to have been able to write about it, and while I can't say I'm glad that it happened, it did provide clarity in many ways. Once, you know, I had survived.
Loved the article, hadn't read your boat story and it moved me to tears. I uuh, lost my mother (I'm 29) about two months ago due a cycling accident. She hit an oncoming car. Her front wheel had hit my dads rear wheel as he had hit his breaks to slow down for passing the upcoming car on a narrow road. She fell the wrong way. Might just be that in her last moments she heard her mantra: I am allowed to die. Raised three great kids.
I am so sorry for the loss of your mother. No mantra can save, or fail to save, a person, as trauma and other external forces all too often make decisions over which we have no control. But your confidence that she knew that she had raised three great kids--that is a gift, and one of the lasting gifts from her.
Thank you
Thank you, Heather, for raising this extremely important issue! It’s so true what you say that modern inventions in the medicine should be added to existing treatments, not to replace them when they are in wisdom. The points you make, are probably the most important reasons, why modern hospital design have a lot of unfortunate consequences, but this is only a tip of an iceberg. There are many other reasons, why hospital design really matters, especially during epidemics. Here's an anecdote that shows another part of this iceberg:
In the middle of 2020 a friend of mine needed a hospitalization due to some mental health problems. Fortunately, this person was admitted to a hospital that was designed around 1914 and consist of a multiple separate buildings in the area that effectively is a park: lots of trees, a bit of open space, a flowerbed here and there. All buildings have gardens separated from the rest of the area, and patients are encouraged to spend there some time every day. This is a good thing in and of itself, but during a pandemic it was simply a blessing. Since beginning the pandemic entrance to hospital buildings were restricted making in most circumstances visits completely impossible. Thanks to the presence of the garden, we were able, however, to see and talk in person. Yes, it was through a fence, and, yes we still needed to keep c. 2 meters distance, but we could see each other’s facial expression. Even when we couldn’t get there when patients were in the garden, thanks to the small size of the building (it has only two floors), the conversations were possible through windows (admittedly they were much harder that way). Were it modern 15-floor hospital, none of this would be possible. This is the last hospital in our region that looks like that, and, ironically, this is partially due to chronic lack of funding.
The other obvious advantage of such a modular layout of the hospital is that it reduces the possibility of spreading of the infectious disease through all the patients.
Back in 2019 I read somewhere that even having nature-themed artwork in a hospital improved a patient’s recovery! Talk about crumbs from the table.
Along similar lines, the sad and silent epidemic of “nature deficit disorder” (as discussed in Last Child in the Woods) I think helps explain the immense confusion and alienation young people have today about their own mental and physical health. When one of my own teenagers was struggling with anxiety I went to no small effort to have them spend a several weeks in a rainforest without a phone. It was rather successful I am glad to say.
I am a nurse and when I first started my nursing career 30 years ago I used to open patient's windows to let in fresh air (and also let the cigarette smoke out!) and kept curtains open to let in sunlight. I no longer work at the bedside and I hope windows can still be opened in hospital rooms. I wish my doctor's office had windows that opened in treatment rooms. It is very relaxing to hear the sounds of nature and feel fresh air in stressful situations. The thought of going into a small enclosed room that a sick person just vacated and breathed out all of their germs gives me the willies now thanks to this pandemic.
"By comparison, when you are outside, the “space” that you are in is effectively infinite. For many kinds of pathogens, if you are yourself sick, not only are you less likely to get someone else sick if you are outside, but you are also more likely to experience a better outcome yourself. ... Thus, bathing in your own viral or bacterial stew can make you more sick than if you exhaled or otherwise shed pathogens, and then they blew away on the wind."
If this is true, then what about reversing the scale of things?
What if you started to shrink the walls of that room, all the way down to that person in the room, and then put those walls directly onto their faces, so that not only are their faces covered (and thus no longer exposed to the sunlight that produces nitric oxide and Vitamin D) but also have less volume of air to breathe from and exhale into, take in and remain in more of that viral or bacterial stew that no longer blows away on the wind but remains circulating into and out of their noses, mouths, throats, lungs?
What happens then?
Yes, I've been waiting and waiting for more information about the harms of masks. FWIW, I also get chest pain, to the point where I have difficulty walking or sleeping.
When I had my daughter in 2018 she came into the world with some jaundice. They wanted to put her under their machine, but she refused to be still. She came into the world with the wiggles and hasn't lost them. One nurse said they used to send people home with advice for sunshine, but had to quit because of people leaving their babies out too long and harming them. They kept us in the hospital a week before my patience was at an end and I broke down crying to my husband. He talked to the doctor and they finally agreed to let us go home as long as we came back to check her billy levels the next day.
Still to this day I wonder if the fact that I had good insurance (which I am thankful for) had anything to do with their keeping us so long. My sisters and sister-in-law did not have similar experiences. They got to go home after a day or two. None of them had insurance or not great insurance.
Anyways, thank you for your voice of reason. 💛
I would like to thank Al Gore for inventing the internet thereby allowing us to read the brilliant essays like this. Thank you Dr Heying.
Heather, one of the main reasons I do not trust hospital care is because of the lack of outdoor care.
Lovely. So grateful you survived that horror and are still with us to share your insights. Much love.
Wonderful, thank you so much for all you do!
Great article, Heather! Thanks! Are you aware of Arthur Haines? You might very well be interested in what he is doing in relation to evolutionary novelty. Also Daniel Vitalis, too - check out TheRewildYourself Podcast!
There are a couple different inchoate communities that are all quite aware of the same phenomenon: there is the ancestral health crowd, which overlaps with the evolutionary medicine crowd, with some overlap with the Human Rewilding crowd, and then there are some isolated professors at various universities who study evolutionary mismatch in one form or the other, even if not always explicitly so.
I think it is time these groups all start connecting, and perhaps in the future we can start building real, responsible living communities that have an intentional regard for evolutionary norms.
I agree that many lines of thought, and many communities, are converging on similar kinds of conclusions. Here's to your goal "real, responsible, living communities that have an intentional regard for evolutionary norms."
I have to admit to imagining these kind of communities as well, plan-b, back to nature, intellectually rigorous and based on evolving science. There is someone on the discord who found a huge tract of land with a big lodge and a bunch of little cabins for sale in Montana, and my thoughts kept drifting back to how cool that could be for people. The Dark Horse Ranch…
Yes, we were well aware of this during the 1918 Pandemic. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504358/ It's a shame that we've forgotten so much of what we once knew.
What a nice lyrical prose, I will stay tuned for more, in fact I wouldn't mind a prequal of the story leading up to the accident. Keep it up!