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Adventist World Radio

1918 Flu & COVID-19: Medical Symposium

Angeline D. Brauer

Zeno Charles-Marcel

Mark Finley

Richard Hart

John Kelly

Peter Landless

Lela Lewis

Allen Lloyd

Duane McKey

Eric Nelson

Roger Seheult

1. Novel Lessons from the 1918 Flu: Could They Apply to COVID-19?

Leela Lewis and I am the host of Adventist World Radio 360 Health.

Today's topic is something that is exciting and very informational to all of us.

We're going to be looking at novel lessons learned from the 1918 flu and could those lessons possibly apply to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Everywhere we turn as medical professionals and as individuals within the community, COVID-19 has changed our world.

Many have come up with different ideas And today we want to look at what could possibly come out of the 1918 H1N1 influenza virus, and could some of that information help us?

As a Seventh-day Adventist organization and as a Christian, I think it is a beautiful opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Christ, providing holistic health, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing.

And the Seventh-day Adventist Church has done this for many years.

We are so excited to look at some of these principles today.

For our medical professionals, if you have not yet registered for your continuing medical education course, please go to, and the next slide will show us, awr.org forward slash health, where you can register.

Again, that's awr.org forward slash health.

Although this is for physicians by physicians, all are welcome to attend.

This is just an overall view of the program for this evening, just to give you an idea of where we'll be going.

Again, we look forward to a presentation that will hopefully help each and every 1 of us and give us encouragement at an otherwise difficult time.

I want to introduce to you someone who's very special to me.

Duane McKee is the president of Adventist World Radio.

He's going to give us an opening welcoming prayer.

Father in heaven, as we turn the clock back many, many years, back in 1918, I pray that as we look at the lessons learned there and we can Apply them to what is happening all around us now fathers We look at the the disaster that's happening around the world with the flu virus I just pray that you will give us wisdom as to how we can handle it better and how we can work together in This old world so that many people can their lives can be touched and changed and be healed We thank you for your love in Jesus name.

Director of Health Ministries for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the whole global network.

Lewis is also an ordained minister and he's going to be talking to us from a global perspective.

And this evening, we look at hydrothermal therapy, Bible study, and information channeled through Ellen White, a co founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, ensured that healthful living and caring for the health of the communities we serve are part of our belief system and in fact our DNA as it were.

1865 saw the founding of the Western Health Reform Institute, which later became the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

This work has grown into the largest Protestant faith based healthcare system in the world.

Our aim in healthcare is the blended ministry, Care of the whole person, body, mind, physical, social, relational, and emotional.

The system has grown into 211 hospitals and sanitariums, 440 clinics and dispensaries, and serves in 2018, the outpatients, 20 million of them, 1.5 million inpatients.

And charity dollars were donated to the communities we serve in excess of $1.2 billion.

In 2020, we still defer to the named pillars of healthcare, scripture, inspired councils, and evidence-based peer-reviewed health science.

The ravages and devastation of the global pandemic call for ongoing commitment to make every effort to heal whenever possible, always to comfort and always to care.

During this time, we need to continue with the very best practices, carefully balancing risk and benefit with integrity and explore opportunities that may bring relief and possible enhancement of human resilience through useful, proven, and reproducible interventions.

This is what we try and do on a worldwide level and we continue to do it today.

We also attempt to learn from history and place into perspective simple, helpful, healthy and safe practices.

Coming through the experience of history of pandemics, such as the Spanish flu, records emerge which demand careful evaluation and study, especially if in context, Florida illness may be allayed, prevented, ameliorated, or relieved, along with healthful lifestyle principles in daily living.

This evening, a group of leading health professionals will share their thoughts, inspired and motivated by the journey they themselves have made, with exposure to the influence of the Adventist health philosophy and practice going through some of its flagship institutions.

With 1.8 million confirmed cases at least, 115, 000 deaths, this demands that we search further.

And tonight, I'm excited that this symposium is taking place to explore where to from here.

I need to add, as all responsible leaders would do, The views expressed in this seminar are the views of each individual and do not represent necessarily the views of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

What a privilege it is for me to welcome you on behalf of our health systems, our church, and the work that we pray is going to make the difference in a very real way.

And along these lines of learning about the historical nature of some of the treatments that you're going to be hearing about with the 1918 H1N1 flu, We want to look at Loma Linda University.

It's where I was able to do my residency as well in obstetrics and gynecology, and they have a long, very long history of looking at the whole person.

At this point, I want to introduce my friend and my mentor, Dr.

Hart is an internist and he's also the chief executive officer and president of Loma Linda University Health.

Hart is going to be talking to us about the current state of COVID-19 and Loma Linda University as a historical perspective.

Thank you, Lila, and it's good to be with all of you.

Landa referenced, the health work of the Adventist Church began back in the 1800s, but really picked up steam in the late 1800s with somebody that many of us have heard of, Dr.

And it was certainly Kellogg that kind of refined the whole concept of fomentations, of hot and cold treatments, of physical therapy of various ways, the inventor of many ideas at that time that were patented, and became a national and even international figure in treating patients for various diseases before we had antibiotics in many of our modern medicines.

If you look back at the way healthcare was practiced at that time, it was pretty abysmal.

We were using things that were doing far more harm than good.

Kellogg started his own medical school in 1895 in Battle Creek, Michigan, and fomentations and these kinds of hot and cold treatments were a center part of that medical school.

That school only lasted for 15 years and closed in 1910.

Ironically, for those of you with the Adventist tradition, The Adventist Church actually had 2 medical schools from 1909 to 1910 because Loma Linda University began in 1905 but the medical school started in 1909 and many of our initial faculty came from the American Medical Missionary College which was the name of the school in Battle Creek that Dr.

And so when Loma Linda University started its long trajectory for 115 years now, fomentations, hot and cold treatments, and all the natural remedies were a natural part of what we offer to the public.

We quickly gained a reputation here in Southern California and that has been part of our wholeness tradition since that time.

So it's rather interesting now that another unseen enemy, the novel coronavirus, has come back to stalk this world, that we're going back and looking at some of these treatments that were so effective a hundred years ago.

So as we go through this seminar today, it's my privilege to watch our colleagues, many of them Loma Linda alumni, share their knowledge and skills as they bring forward the treatment options that we have in trying to deal with COVID-19.

We have been protected here in Southern California.

We only have a few patients in our hospital, but we are looking at these kinds of treatment modalities as a way to deal with this infection that really has no other effective treatment at this point in time.

So with that fascinating history, going back 100 plus years in our own history and even before that in the Adventist church, It's a privilege for me to be part of this and bring Loma Linda's interest and expertise to the table.

Fighting informational session that we're learning.

At this time we want to delve into the history closer.

Let's look closer at what happened in 1918.

What were some of these principles that Dr.

Hart have now talked about that were actually taking place?

What results actually happened when hydrothermal therapy was employed in the 1918 influenza virus.

At this point, I want to introduce you a good friend of mine, Dr.

Nedley is an internal medicine physician, hospitalist, and also the president of Weimar Institute.

Weimar is very well known for its holistic lifestyle medicine.

Nedley is going to be looking at us for the 1918 H1N1 influenza case study.

2. Urban and Rural Delivery: UV Radiation and Open Spaces on COVID-19

I'm your host and the medical director for Adventist World Radio.

I'm also a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and it is such a pleasure to have you back with us again tonight for part 2 of our medical symposium.

Last Sunday we investigated the relationship of novel lessons that were learned in the 1918 pandemic and sought to see if we could apply those to our current COVID-19 situation.

Well, tonight we continue that exploration and we continue to look and see other principles that might apply historically and currently.

Before we do that, I just wanted to take a couple minutes and describe to you a little bit about the host or the sponsoring entity.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church and Adventist World Radio is very happy and honored to be able to participate in sponsoring this medical symposium.

Since its origination, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has sought to provide holistic healing to the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health to those involved.

And that involves global church initiatives.

With that understanding, I want to invite Dr.

Duane McKee, President of Adventist World Radio, to have opening prayer for us right now.

Father in heaven, it is with joy that we come together to learn at this symposium.

I pray as we learn together on this medical symposium that you will bless each of our presenters, bless each 1 listening and help us to learn to know that we can trust in you and have faith and joy in you.

We have nothing to fear as you told us in Psalms 23, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shallow death, I will fear no evil.

Thank you, Father, for this joy, and thank you for your blessings in Christ's name, amen.

Now, before we get started on tonight's presentation, we just wanted to do a quick review again of what some of the amazing principles that we learned last week.

We began to investigate novel lessons learned at particular institutions and they were referred to as sanitariums, some of those principles in last week's presentation.

Now 1 thing that came out in the science was very interesting.

It was actually applied to our current situation to the Finnish people.

It was really interesting to find out that the people of Finland had not only better overall health as far as decreased risk with viral syndromes, but there seemed to be a relationship even with COVID-19.

What are those Finnish people doing that seems to be improving their overall decrease in mortality and morbidity?

I'm going to invite a very special friend, Dr.

Zeno is the current adjunct professor at Loma Linda University.

He's also served as the past dean of Montemarie University.

And we want to ask the question again, Dr.

Zeno, what interesting thing is happening or taking place in Finland right now that might be affecting in a beneficial way their health.

Thank you very much Leela and good evening to everyone.

Last week we talked about the hydrothermal therapy as part of the, what you may say, the treatment and the prevention of problems such as viral infections and so on.

So Just to recap, we need to remember that there was a historic issue with the pandemic of 1918.

And I have some data that will bear that out what happened with the Finns.

Things could be as simple as taking hot and cold showers, since we all don't have saunas.

But if you have a sauna at home or a tub or a jacuzzi you can immerse yourself and you can simulate some of the things that the Finns do.

You could even use hot packs to the chest and cold friction to follow up as another means of doing the same type of thing.

Now what happened was in Finland and also in Estonia they have the culturally ingrained practice of doing, of bathing in the sauna.

Just so that you see where where Finland and Estonia are, I have on the next slide a little map there that shows the Scandinavian countries, then Finland in green and Estonia right below it in a tan or light brown color.

Now, let's see what's happening with them right now as of today.

These are all maps, all graphs of what's going on all around the world.

But on this graph, you can see where Finland is and you see where Estonia is.

And they're at the bottom, if you will, if I can compare that with the others in Scandinavia.

You'll see where Denmark, Sweden, Norway.

Norway is not written there but it's right above Finland.

So you see they don't have the same practice of sauna as the way the Finns and the Estonians do.

If we go back to the pandemic back in 1918, this is a graph looking at a study of 14 European countries and seeing the excess mortality that was associated with the Spanish flu.

If you go along, I want to highlight a few things.

First of all, can you go, yeah, first of all, you will see that Finland had only 33% excess mortality.

If you compare that with Sweden, next, they had 74 percent excess mortality.

If you look at Norway, that had 65 percent excess mortality.

And then if you look at Denmark, they had 58%, 57, 58% excess mortality.

So again, even back in the Spanish flu time, Finland came out better than the other Scandinavian countries.

The reason for this, we believe, is related to the heat that is used in the sauna and the cold that locks in that heat.

So, we have fever range, thermal, immunomodulation.

This is what happens, and I'm sure Roger later on will talk some more about this.

But we have heat shock proteins that work, and they affect the innate immunity and also the adaptive immunity.

We can see here that fever or fever-range thermal therapies will affect the host cells, will affect macrophages, and these macrophages are part of the response of the innate immune system.

In this, we see that, again, by giving the heat treatment or by having fever, we can actually modulate some of these heat shock proteins.

In this case, we're looking at heat shock protein 60.

And you'll see on the top half of the graph, these are the innate effects, and the lower half of the graph is looking at the acquired immunity effects.

And on the left side in pink, we see what happens when we have a high concentration of heat shock protein 60.

And as the treatments go on and the disease progresses, and the amount of heat shock protein 60 decreases, then we have an anti-inflammatory response, which we believe will be helpful to decrease the cytokine storm.

It's based on historic evidence and a rational scientific set of postulates and therefore should be given serious consideration, part of a preventive regimen, part of a therapeutic regimen and warrants further scientific investigation.

It was not just hydrothermal therapy from the perspective of saunas.

There's different ways, as you mentioned, that you can actually accomplish HT or hydrothermal therapy.

And you mentioned some of those, but for our viewers, if you didn't have a chance to watch the original presentation, Please go to awr.org forward slash health and you will get a full review of that opportunity.

I have another question for another 1 of our guest speakers, Dr.

Nelson is the associate professor of surgery at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga.

Nelson, we don't have a lot of research on hydrothermal therapy across the board, in particular for COVID-19, as of course it's only been with us since November or December of last year.

Your study has you had just got approval specifically IRB approval for a particular study.

Can you tell us just a little bit about that maybe our viewers may be interested in joining you.

I've got a slide that very briefly describes the the protocol that we have.

As you heard in last week's symposium there are many different ways to apply hydrothermal therapy.

3. Nutrition, Exercise-induced Antioxidants and Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Death Rates

I'm a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and I'm the medical director for Adventist World Radio.

What a wonderful opportunity to be the host of the medical symposium.

This is part 3 of a series of 5 where we've been comparing the 1918 H1N1 pandemic to the current COVID-19 situation and we've been so surprised to find not only historically but scientific evidence that some of the principles utilized during that 1918 pandemic actually have applicability for just today.

Today's topic and title is Nutrition, Exercise, and racial disparity in COVID-19 death rates.

I am looking forward to hearing what our presenters have to tell us, but before we do that, I want to say a very special welcome to all of our visitors.

If this is your first time viewing us, again, we are so glad that you have joined us.

If you haven't had an opportunity of viewing the previous presentations, you can go to awr.org forward slash health and you can view the previous archived videos.

On behalf of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and Adventist World Radio, we want to again say thank you for taking the time out of your evening schedule to join us.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a long-standing history of supporting holistic health.

Of course, this is supported in the scientific community as well.

Physically, mentally, emotionally, and I dare say spiritually.

And with that, I'm going to invite my good friend, Dr.

Duane McKee, the president of Adventist World Radio to give us our opening prayer.

Father in heaven, we thank you for your love.

We invite you into each of our hearts and we pray that you'll bless each of the presenters and bless each 1 as we listen, that we may understand and know more about life, about healing, about health, and how to have a relationship with you.

You know, over the last 3 weeks, like I said, we've been looking at some very unusual principles.

The first week we looked at hydrothermal therapy.

And again, we were surprised to see that This principle utilized in the pandemic of 1918 actually had amazing results, even from science, particularly today, looking at heat and moist heat in particular.

We saw that it boosted the innate immune system.

Well, last week we investigated 2 additional principles.

We looked specifically at ultraviolet radiation and open space and again we were surprised to not only find that the virus itself for COVID-19 was denatured but again open space and ultraviolet radiation boost or another word would be to improve the immune system.

Well, I want to tell you about something very special.

For those of you who would like to know more, We have a very special gift for you right now for the very first 100 viewers that shares the Facebook or Twitter link.

Again, if you share the Facebook, the link right now on Facebook and Twitter, you will get a free copy of an amazing book.

Now, this book is very interesting as we've been comparing the historical nature from the 1918 pandemic to the current COVID-19 situation.

This was essentially the guidebook, if you will, for the 1918 H1N1 pandemic, the principles that we've been discussing.

It was also utilized by John Harvey Kellogg.

Many of the principles utilized in this book were again used by him.

So we are offering again the first 100 viewers right now, go and share the link on Twitter and Facebook and you will receive this amazing book called Ministry of Healing.

In addition to that, A very special note in the beginning of the book will be written by the panelists and myself to you.

And this is again for our live viewers right now.

Tonight's presentation, as I already mentioned, is when my opinion, the most important of all that we've presented thus far.

Tonight, we're gonna be looking at nutrition and moderate exercise and what effect they play on the immune system.

We're gonna start by looking again at the history of where these principles came about.

We're going to start by introducing a very good friend of mine, Dr.

Landlis is a cardiologist and he also serves as the director of health at Seventh-day Adventist Church.

We look forward to his presentation as he gives us the historical nature of these principles that we hold so dear.

I thank you for the privilege of participation.

This has been an exciting series, looking at, as you mentioned, hydrothermal therapy, possible effects in the immune system and response, great opportunities fostering research and practical applications.

Then last week, the importance, as you mentioned, of fresh air, open spaces, trees, forests, the benefits of sunlight and the benefits of controlled ultraviolet light, all of that, very important, Not only because these things can be very healthy to us, but they make us feel good.

And it's always good to use something that makes you feel better.

From my vantage point as Adventist Health Ministries overseer and nurturing health work around the world in education and health work, I'm blessed and excited to see how these different modalities we are discussing are applied in healthcare now and have been applied in health work ever since 1863.

As you mentioned that amazing book, Ministry of Healing, those very principles that we've been talking about, that we've been emphasizing the last 2 weeks, tonight and next week, are all related to the importance of what we should be doing on a regular basis.

In a time such as now with COVID-19, how do our hospitals and healthcare institutions respond?

But as we discuss nutrition and exercise, the Seventh-day Adventist Church draws on a rich tradition of health practices and health for living embraced by co-founders Ellen White and Joseph Bates many, many years ago.

At that time, and early in the 1800s, names like John Frank Newton and even across the pond, the great poet Percy Shelley, talked and wrote of the benefits of a vegetarian diet.

And then in the background of the closer time to 1863, people like Sylvester Graham, Russell Troll, William Alcott, names like Metcalfe and Jackson, were all talking about various aspects of health for living.

John Harvey Kellogg, influenced as strongly as he was by Ellen White, applied all these principles, as did our institutions later on, in a holistic way.

And that's the beauty of the Ministry of Healing, looking at all these things, particularly as tonight, we look at nutrition, the importance of exercise, and there is robust evidence of the role of a good, balanced, vegetarian diet in keeping us healthy, not only in prevention, but even during the treatment of conditions.

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Series

1918 Flu & COVID-19: Medical Symposium

3. Nutrition, Exercise-induced Antioxidants and Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Death Rates

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

1. Novel Lessons from the 1918 Flu: Could They Apply to COVID-19?

2h 4m

2. Urban and Rural Delivery: UV Radiation and Open Spaces on COVID-19

1h 58m

3. Nutrition, Exercise-induced Antioxidants and Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Death Rates

2h 2m

4. Self-Restraint and Sleep - Keys to Reopening the Globe

2h 13m

6. Medical Experts Answer Your COVID-19 Questions - Part 2

1h 9m

5. Medical Experts Answer Your COVID-19 Questions

1h 57m

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