FLCCC Educational Conference - Fort Worth, TX

Introductory Comments and Personal Reflections

As I re-read this for the last time before posting, it is striking how personal this piece is. When I began to write this morning my intention was to produce summaries of the various presentations from this amazing conference (I still plan to do so). What I find is that this article became intensely personal as reflected in how often ‘I’ appears throughout, the direction it went, and the personal reflections that I have shared. I truly hope that it resonates with my readers, and that you will spread this far and wide. There is a ‘connectional’ element that is vital. We are ALL TOO ISOLATED from one another. Looking back on the authoritarian dictates put in place over 3 years ago, that should not surprise anyone, but I feel like a man living in near darkness for so long that I am literally ‘blinded by the light’ because of my experiences in Ft Worth last week. Follow along with me, take a glimpse through my eyes & heart, reflect on your own experiences, and let this conversation grow.

FRIDAY MORNING – APRIL 28, 2023

Registration opened at 7:30 and a buffet breakfast was served until the meeting began at 9am. As I walked about it was delightful to see a number of people whom I feel as though I already knew, having seen and heard them on many interviews, podcasts, recorded testimonies, & webinars over the past three years. As I loaded a plate with food I had a conversation with FLCCC founder, Dr. Paul Marik, commenting on my breaking my normal pattern of not eating until noon. Holding fast (pun intended) to his statements about curing his own diabetes with intermittent fasting, Dr Marik was drinking a cup of coffee with cream, explaining that coffee was not enough intake to halt the process of autophagy to others who were listening in, and spoke of how much better he felt since making this change. Theory in practice on display before the formal presentations began!

Such interactions with our heroes - and I do not use that word lightly, he and others have acted in truly heroic fashion, saving lives & treating the sick at great harm to their careers, finances, and reputations – were casual & comfortable throughout the meeting, as were my numerous conversations with like-minded colleagues. The sense of community was apparent, growing deeper throughout the meeting. I exchanged contact information with a number of professionals over the two days and had many conversations, some quite personal and revealing as well. My awareness of connection, of truly being with kindred spirits, like-minded people swimming against the current of our medical system was profound.

The Strange World of Medicine

Being a physician is an odd occupation. I have planned to write about my own personal journey and hopefully I will get there one day. There is a sense of separateness that developed during my training, some of which happens simply because of the time demands. Going from college where the average student has 15-18-20 hrs of classes per week accompanied by a lab or two, to literally 32-40 hrs per week of classes with the expectation of a similar amount of time studying or working in the the lab was a shock to me. Moving on to clinical rotations where one might routinely put in 12-hour days with on-call duties on top further separates the medical student from other ‘twenty-somethings’. But beyond that is the identity of a healer, of a person whose life was ‘set apart’ for the needs of others. Most physicians work longer hours than other professions and often associate with other doctors who have been similarly shaped (I confess these relationships were never my preference).

While those experiences impact the professional interactions of physicians, it always seemed to me that the personal interactions between other docs was more akin to that of fellow trauma survivors! The demanding, and at times literally abusive, aspects of medical training in people who are developmentally in late adolescence (there are exceptions, I had classmates who were in their late 20s to mid 30s) impacts personality formation. It can significantly alter one’s outlook on life. I remember a conversation as a student with a surgical attending (he knew my wife as her secretarial desk was down the hall from his office where she worked while pursuing her MBA). I told him about how poorly my garden was doing during my Spring rotation on surgery and how I hadn’t been able to put in any time on a personal project. His response was telling: “you have to give up some of these outside interests if you want to be a surgeon.” It surprised me as my wife and I knew him personally, and I saw him as so different from the obsessive, narcissistic general surgeons I worked with as a student. He was one of the ‘nice guys’ yet I realized that we saw life quite differently, these were not ‘outside interests’ but were integral parts of a well-rounded life!

Relational Impact of COVID Policies

As so many physicians hold views similar to this attending, interactions with other docs have tended to be mostly professional, with a few exceptions along the way. Over time I had less and less sense of connection to the medical profession at a personal level as my own values & ideas diverged from ‘the norm’. As years past my distrust of Pharma & the ‘medical establishment’ had grown as I learned of widespread corruption. As the COVID insanity began I was forced to see how dramatically things had changed. I have not had much sense of connection or community in medicine for a long time. All of this isolation, this lack of community was completely undone last week! While the ‘medical’ content of the conference was outstanding, THE PEOPLE were the true gift to me. My own isolation has been fed by several different factors, but I have not felt so ALIVE and ENGAGED in years as I did during this meeting. I was genuinely sad when it came to an end. I was intellectually exhausted from listening, taking notes, asking questions, and processing it all, but personally invigorated.

Talking with Joel Wallskog, MD and Brianne Dressen of REACT19.org was important in making it ‘personal’ for me, as these people have been outspoken publicly but it became more real when interacting with them. A new organization was introduced, Fish Out of Water (FOWUS.org) founded by Tim Husereau (a survivor of severe Long Haul COVID) and his friend Rick Reed who seek to connect other Long Haulers with resources & treatment. Ernest Ramirez was there sharing the story of his 16 y/o son who died FIVE DAYS after receiving the Pfizer mRNA injection (jrsguardianvoice.com is his website concerning his son & vaxx injuries) and is driving around with his ‘memorial trailer’ to further commemorate his son. Many other stories were shared, both of healthcare professionals and vaccine injured (and some who fit in both categories), which added the ‘personal & human’ component to the technical presentations. The conference ended with a musical performance by Five Times August, the solo act of Brad Skistimas who writes and sings of these issues. He sang ‘Sad Little Man’ which is his tribute to Anthony Fauci, and closed with “I Won’t Be Leaving Quietly.” Brad announced that all revenue from digital downloads of his album “Silent War” in the month of April was being donated to REACT19. I am listening to this music as I type these words. If you are not familiar with his music, BUY THIS ALBUM, you will not hear a better musical presentation of the insanity we have been living through.

Yesterday I had a voicemail from a psychiatrist who had seen my name attached to a question during a Q & A. She had written it down, and then looked me up online & left a message. When I called her back, we had a conversation well over an hour long, two people who had never spoken before. She talked of her own ‘awakening’ as a physician and increasing sense of alienation from our profession. The connection was palpable, organic, REAL. She described feeling a little uncomfortable initially contacting me, but the mutual need for dialogue was obvious to us both. If two professionals who are skilled at understanding communication can have such a sense of professional isolation & estrangement, what does it say about other physicians & healthcare professionals? What does it say about our society at large?

My goal to present summaries of the presentations has been put off for the moment, this change happening as I type these words on my laptop. I had no intention of going here, but as I share my thoughts, TRUTH (refer to the title of my blog!) has a way of seeping out anyway. It is a central principal of ‘depth’ psychotherapy: as the patient is comfortable in open dialogue with the psychotherapist, underlying material that is lurking in the background, the unconscious mind, pushes its way to the surface. I know that in my own life personal isolation has been too common for some time, beginning with losing my wife to cancer some years ago. The insanity of our world the past 4 years has only increased this (I often remark that I woke up one day and found I had been transported to an alternate universe!).

I went to the FLCCC conference to continue to learn state-of-the-art knowledge around spike protein pathology and to connect with other professionals, as I am ready to more openly jump into the treatment of long COVID and vaccine injured people. I was not nearly optimistic enough to appreciate how deeply I would be impacted at a personal level. I do realize with regret that I had several conversations with people I would like to continue, but do not have personal contact information. Then again as I mentioned above, I was contacted by someone who merely wrote down my name. I don’t want to let this sense of community start to fade. It will take work to nurture the seeds of relationships planted at this meeting but it is absolutely vital that I do so. Those harmed by the spike protein, as well as those harmed more by the psychological than biological elements, need help. We ALL need more connection, more community. The goal of authoritarians is always to divide and conquer. We simply MUST resist this. PLEASE share this post, PLEASE reach out to me personally if you wish, and PLEASE connect with others. We are intensely relational beings, and while technology has been used to isolate us, it can obviously connect us as well. Let us work to restore our humanity via relationships, through meaningful communication as we collaborate to undue the damage we have all experienced.

ADDENDUM: I just finished listening to the FLCCC Webinar from last night. I did not see any notification for the webinar last night, so I did not realize that there was one taking place. While listening I had a deja vu experience, as they repeatedly spoke of community & connections at the conference. As someone whose work is by nature very relational & ‘connected’ I tend to see these dynamics when they are in play. That my colleagues in other disciplines were so aware of this is most encouraging!

They also discussed the need to address the emotional & spiritual elements in people suffering from spike protein disease at the next conference. I know that these issues are prevalent regardless of the specific underlying pathological manifestations that any given person may show from the spike. Our entire society has been ‘run through the ringer’ by all of the authoritarian interventions as reflected in rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Children have been impacted both intellectually and emotionally due to multiple factorfs. So as we move forward, a view to support and care for the whole person is essential. I look forward to contributing to these efforts however I can, and encourage all of my readers to ask themselves if they may play a role as well. Our society, and in particular the government, has abandoned these people and repeatedly told them that it cannot have anything to do with having taking an mRNA injection. We must vow to do better, or we are no different than the authoritarians who have brought this nightmare about.