August 2020

Yoga and Meditation During COVID-19:
What the Data Says

Guest Speaker: William Bushell, PhD

FRIDAY, August 7th, 2020; 11AM – 12PM PT (2PM – 3PM ET)

Yoga and Meditation During COVID-19: What the Data Says

The combination of yoga and meditation have many wonderful benefits, but can they be used as adjunctive treatments for COVID-19?

As the pandemic washed over the globe, a team of researchers, headed up by our guest and noted biophysical anthropologist William Bushell, Ph.D. of MIT, formed to study and advocate for the practice of meditation and yoga as a potential adjunctive treatment for COVID-19.

The scientific model put forth by this team was just published in the peer-reviewed medical journal, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and the accompanying scientific evidence demonstrating that meditation and yoga practices could potentially protect multiple organ systems of the body generally, including the respiratory system.

In this Webinar:

William Bushell, Ph.D. will give us insight into his 20+ year scientific journey as a research medical/biophysical anthropologist. He is the developer of the model of the use of special forms of meditation and yoga for COVID-19. Dr Bushell has been developing this scientific model for over 10 years.

We’ll discuss the potential of yogically accessed innate human psychobiological capacities for combatting covid-19 and other virulent infectious diseases.

Bushell says that inflammation is the primary way COVID-19 kills. “Spread of the virus through the body leads to widespread and intensive activation of the inflammatory defenses throughout the body, though originally intended to combat the pathogen, but at this point instead resulting in widespread tissue damage, and fatally, to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).”

For this reason, these experts say, meditation and yoga can provide a needed edge. At a time when people are experiencing extra time in isolation, the modalities have never been more needed nor more easily done.

William C Bushell, PhD

The developer of the model of the use of special forms of meditation and yoga for COVID-19 is William C Bushell, PhD, a research medical/biophysical anthropologist affiliated with MIT from 1994-2020. Dr Bushell has been developing this scientific model for over 10 years, and also while previously affiliated with Columbia and Harvard Universities, and as a Fulbright Scholar. In the late 1990’s, Dr Bushell was in dialogue on the subject of the potential for meditational and yogic influence on certain inflammatory processes and infectious diseases (including Staph aureus) with the Nobel Prize-winning co-founder of the modern field of modern infectious disease medicine, Dr Joshua Lederberg, while the latter was President of Rockefeller University (part of this dialogue has been published at the National Library of Medicine of NIH, as part of Dr Lederberg’s site.

Dr Bushell then developed the pre-clinical model further, for the meditational and yogic treatment of severe diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and others, and this work was endorsed by two of the founders of the field of psychoimmunology, N Herbert Spector, PhD, of NIH, and MacArthur Awardee David L Felten, MD (originally affiliated with MIT and the University of Pennsylvania), among many other leading scientists. Dr Bushell published an authoritative version of the model in 2009 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, a journal in the top 2% of scientific journals worldwide; his co-author was Neil Theise, MD (then at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine).

Since then, Dr Bushell has further developed the model in dialogue with the UN Health Millennium Development Goals Division, and has become the Director of Research & Academic Liaison of the Chopra Research Library, Whole Health Institute, Bentonville, AR. At the Library Dr Bushell now works with a team of developers in partnership with Ryan Castle, the Executive Director, and a network of collaborating scientists affiliated with Harvard, UCSD, the CDC, and other leading scientific institutions, all of whom are in the process of advancing this crucial field for this pandemic.

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