Doctors from around the country give their Second Opinion on the dangers and unintended consequences of the Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions that are being implemented by governors and local leaders across America. Hear the tragic stories from these medical experts on the front lines about the dangers of letting the Covid-19 coronavirus paralyze us with fear and the medical consequences that are being overlooked by focusing solely on the coronavirus. It is time for our country to end the restrictions and the lockdowns. Clearly the lockdowns are contributing to civil unrest and people need to get back to normal, get back to work, so that they have productive objectives to accomplish. Please visit our website at www.secondopinionproject.com for more. And if you don’t believe these doctors, we encourage you to ask your own doctors for a second opinion on the consequences of the continued lockdown restrictions.
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
My name is Dr. Mark McDonald. I am a board certified child and adolescent psychiatrist. I run a private practice here in Los Angeles, in West LA. A lot of my patients are in AA, Al-Anon, Alateen. They're in these 12-step based support programs for various reasons, addictions, drugs, sex, gambling, families of people who are addicted to these other vices. And I noticed very quickly that my patients were quite agitated. They were calling me saying that they felt panicked. They felt depressed. They were really suffering. I would ask them what's changed for them. Many of them said, "I can't go to my meetings." And I said, "That's strange. Are you saying you're not able to go to your meetings anymore? Why is that?" "Well, they've all been shut down. We're not allowed to meet." And I said, "Well, what are you doing?"
"Well, there's Skype. There's Zoom. Some of them are trying to organize these check-ins." But the benefit, the core foundation, really, of the 12-step programs is not cognitive restructuring. It's not sharing education online and doing homework that you can get off of a Zoom site. It's the face-to-face physical sharing of space in a room with other people who are suffering the same problems that you are, to receive that real-time support and to be able to hear people's stories and comfort them. And that means being in the same space. Without that, the programs really don't have much to offer. Remote 12-step doesn't really make sense. It's almost a contradiction of terms. So that being pulled away means that these people are left isolated, and the isolation is what breeds the emotional symptoms of need, of dependency, of return of obsessions, compulsions, the desire to use. And then they don't have anywhere to go to help offset it, so they end up going back to their prior lifestyle. And often, those lifestyles lead to accidents, injury, self-harm, harm to others, or often, simply accidental death.
