Elder Wilson encourages the AMEN members to exercise the “right arm of the gospel” by blending medical missionary work with the gospel work.

AMEN 2020 Virtual Conference – Touch of Faith

<p>Elder Wilson encourages the AMEN members to exercise the “right arm of the gospel” by blending medical missionary work with the gospel work.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Plenary Session

Brian Schwartz

The Healing Touch of Faith

I'd again like to welcome our AMEN members who are tuned in from all around the world as well as the 3ABN audience.

As I mentioned earlier, we were a little disappointed that we're not able to meet in person, but really the Lord has worked things out and we've been able to join the 3ABN family and from the 3ABN studios we are having a virtual live conference.

And so just really want to especially thank Greg and Jill, We're so appreciative of you guys making us feel so at home.

Also John and Adelia Denzy for the 3ABN Latino that just actually opened up to also broadcast this to our Latin community, also in South America and around the world and we just believe that God is really blessed as he's opened up this door.

In a few minutes I will share with you some more details about the Adventist Medical Evangelism Network and how God called Amen into existence at this time.

But first let me set the stage of where we are today in history.

About 8 months ago on February 29, 2020, the United States received a wake up call.

Our world was about to undergo radical change.

You see, we were hearing reports of this virus that was happening over in China, but suddenly on February 29, 2020, the first United States death from COVID-19 occurred in a hospital in Seattle, Washington.

The patient had no knowledge of any contact with anybody who had been sick with COVID.

And in fact, they had been in a nursing home.

The alarm bells went off all over the medical community.

What we had learned and what the world learned from this experience is that COVID was not contracted just by direct spread, but it could be spread by community spread.

It could have people that are asymptomatic that are carrying it to unsuspected people.

Few would ever have predicted that in a matter of weeks the whole world economy would literally be shut off, turned off.

Churches were asked to stop having church.

We stopped having face-to-face medical visits.

And our hospitals were emptied of all but the very sickest of patients.

We hadn't really known much about telehealth, but all of a sudden telehealth became the way that we were doing visits with our patients.

Before this, it hadn't been even covered by insurance.

And I literally had physicians in our group that were afraid to come to the office to do a telehealth visit unless they were provided the full PPE in a gown to keep them safe.

That's how much fear was circulating in the medical community.

It's similar to what happened when the AIDS virus first broke out back in the 1980s.

We would be asked to stay home and isolate.

There wasn't any masks or personal protective equipment to be had.

Our governor talked to the president of our hospital and said, that's all you're gonna get.

We had about a 2 week supply and we had to make it stretch out for at least 6 weeks before we could get more medical care and more supplies.

And even if you got admitted to the hospital, there wasn't much that they could do.

Supportive measures, a few fluids, and maybe they'd put you on a ventilator, but the disease really had to run its natural course.

Sadly, we were not practicing medicine based on evidence-based medicine, but we were practicing based on the availability of resources.

Often, people died alone or on FaceTime with their families.

We all thought that this would be contained quickly, that it would be over soon and we'd get back to our lives by summertime as we hoped everything would settle down.

As with everyone else, I certainly did not think that we would be meeting here 8 months later in a virtual conference.

I had no idea that it would take this long.

And here we are having our face-to-face conference canceled and meeting virtually just through television and through our streaming sites.

In fact, it's accelerating in the United States and around the world.

It's now topped over 44 million cases so far.

And just yesterday, France, in Germany now, has gone back into lockdown.

But I was struck by the fact that once again, the Seventh Day Adventist health message was probably of more benefit than many of the modern therapies.

We've certainly learned a lot over the past 8 months.

Therapies are getting better, but simple lifestyle medicine modalities are still very effective.

They are a powerful tool for preventing and possibly a powerful adjunct for therapy for this disease.

It's still as effective today as when Ellen White gave this message of health over a hundred years ago.

Suddenly several of her quotes were ringing in my ears like, you should live outside the cities, you should learn how to grow a garden and provide your own food, and you should learn simple natural remedies.

Even the Bible, the ancient literature from thousands of years ago such as Numbers chapter 19, verse 11 had recommended the Old Testament quarantine laws that suggested that you should wash in water and you should quarantine for 7 days if you had been in contact with a dead person or a sick person to avoid the communicable diseases.

And all of a sudden this ancient advice started sounding like it was written today.

Hospitals had become overwhelmed, or our hospitals become overwhelmed just with the flu season.

And now COVID, which is 2 and a half times more contagious and possibly 1 to 5% higher or 1 to 5% mortality rate, which is at least 10 times more than the flu, you can see why our system is completely overwhelmed.

Our hospital systems, in fact, no hospital systems anywhere around the world were built to accommodate this kind of sudden increased demand.

Couple that with the fear that the first responders might also be affected and they might be knocked out for 10 to 14 days before they could come back even if they recovered quickly.

We can quickly have a complete catastrophe.

Rather, this is the beginning of sorrows that Jesus talked about.

It's a wake up call that this world is very fragile and that we are living in borrowed time.

Many of my patients as well as several of my church members started talking about the COVID experience in biblical proportions.

They were seeing in time scenarios, Everyone, everywhere is going to be affected somehow from knowing somebody who died from the virus.

And sadly, a colleague of mine in our town, A cardiologist just 2 weeks ago or a week ago on Sunday passed away from COVID.

After picking it up 6 months ago, being in the hospital with a trach and then to a vent facility and waiting for a lung transplant because of COVID, and he just suddenly passed away.

Right now, I have 1 of my colleagues, a cardiologist in my group, who's out for 10 days because he just came down with COVID.

You may have your children home from school because of having to quarantine.

You may not be able to find things like rice and flour and bread.

And who would have thought in the world's most prosperous country that toilet paper would become the face of the necessities that we were all looking for.

Our world has changed and it will probably never be the same again.

Add to that the unrest that is happening in our country and around the world.

There are race riots in the streets, people being shot, cities destroyed by looting and rampant theft of stores that are now boarded up in some of our biggest cities.

Chanting slogans like no justice, no peace.

Millions are out of work around the world.

Just this morning in Nice in the south of France, a knife attack occurred in a church that left 3 people dead.

There is now a genuine distrust of leaders and the hatred that is being expressed from the highest offices to the very lowest places is rampant throughout our whole society.

In Education, page 173, Ellen White had this observation.

In the annals of human history, the growth of nations and the rise and fall of empires appear as dependent on the will and prowess of man.

The shaping of events seems to a great degree to be determined by His power, ambition, or caprice.

But in the world of God the curtain is drawn aside, and we behold, behind, above, and through all the play and counterplay of human interests, in power and passions, the agencies of the All-Merciful 1, silently, patiently working out the counsels of His own will.

God is not surprised, and He has been at work preparing for this last great showdown.

On to the world stage, God has prepared a people who have the only solution to these insurmountable problems.

A people that have the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In Ministry of Healing, page 142, Ellen White states that we are living in the midst of an epidemic of crime at which thoughtful, God-fearing men everywhere stand aghast.

The corruption that prevails, it is beyond the power of the human pen to describe.

Every day brings fresh revelations of political strife, bribery, and fraud.

Every day brings its heart-sickening record of violence and lawlessness, of indifference to human suffering, of brutal, fiendish destruction of human life.

Zeno Charles-Marcel

Spirituality, Religion, and Health: Making Faith Touchable

As a plenary session, this is going to be a little bit more academic than some of the things that we saw yesterday.

And despite it being academic, There's something in it for everyone.

So without further ado, let me go through some of the things that we have to do, which is the first disclaimer.

This disclaimer is that there's no known conflict of interest, except of course the fact that I am a Bible-believing Seventh-day Adventist, and that of course influences all of my decisions and filters my thoughts.

There's another disclaimer, and this is a few things that we need to get straight before we move on, and that is that there's no salvation by works.

Okay, there's no salvation by health habits, there's no salvation by veggie burger, there's no salvation by exercise or sleep or any of those things, there's no salvation by any of those things.

There's only salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ our Savior, lest anyone should boast.

The question that we're going to try to answer is can we hear what he's saying.

And it's an experiment that I want you to engage in.

You happen to be at a function with people that you have never met before, and I am there too.

And I see you, I meet you, and I introduce you to somebody whom you have never spoken to before.

I take out $1, 000 in $100 bills and you can see from the screen that's the rendition of it.

Now I give it to the person who you just met.

I give it to John and I say, John, this is for the 2 of you.

You decide how you're going to divide these thousand dollars.

If you can't agree on how to distribute it, nobody gets anything.

Or he can split it any other way, even he keeps $500 and he gives you $500.

But you have to decide which 1 you're going to take And whether this is something that is going to be reasonable for you to do or not do, if you accept it, that's the end of the deal.

If you don't accept it, nobody gets anything.

We heard quite a bit yesterday when Brian was talking at the introduction of his talk about what's going on with COVID, and I just want to add a few items to that, to round things off.

COVID-19, the era of COVID-19 is an era of confusion.

We have thought about religious confusion and things like that, but it's an era of just plain old confusion.

Nobody knows what to believe when you're here.

You don't know whether information is good information, bad information, disinformation or what, okay?

It's a time of conflict, it's a time of concern, it's a time of certainty of uncertainty.

Most people have a problem with the fact that they don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

But mind you, no 1 knew what was going to happen tomorrow anyway, but we felt as if we knew what was going to happen tomorrow, but now we know for sure we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

It's also a time of conspiracy theories, they are bound.

It's also a time for conscious social reform and a community disruption.

We have seen this all around and just about every kind of community, every configuration of community, we have this issue.

But in the midst of this crisis, we need to understand that crisis actually means, on the 1 hand from the Chinese character, danger and opportunity.

And maybe there's some opportunities here in the midst of the danger that we are facing that might be of help to us.

Everybody in some way or another has been affected by it.

You don't have to be infected to be affected.

Healthcare workers on the forefront all over the world in the kind of work that we do at the General Conference, we talk to people from all around the world and the healthcare workers are at the forefront of the brunt of this problem with COVID-19.

We've had many physicians, Adventist physicians and other healthcare workers who have died because of exposure to COVID-19 in the line of duty, helping others.

And then of course, there are caregivers of another stripe, caregivers in families.

And there's research now looking at what happens to the caregivers in families and they are affected too in different ways.

Of course people who happen to be younger, female, who have smaller places, smaller dwellings, these people are more affected by the problem.

If you lose your job, you're more affected by the situation as well.

But this brings us to the idea of health and wellness and sickness.

We know that there are determinants of health and wellness and determinants of sickness.

And we know that there are social determinants.

But about 40% of the determinants of health and wellness happen to be related to the lifestyle and the choices that we make.

So while there are some things that we may not be able to change, there are certainly some things that we may be able to change.

I won't say that we always can change them, but we may be able to change them.

Of course, there are some that go up to 9 or 10 or 12 different dimensions.

This 1 is a simplified yet robust model looking at the body, the physical aspects of things, the mind or the thinking aspects of things, and of course the mind also looking at mood and feelings that we might have, the emotional part of things.

So we have the cognitive and we have the emotional.

We also have the issue of relationships and the social aspect of health and the social aspect of well-being that includes not just the relationship that we have with 1 another, but also the relationship that we have with things and the relationship that we have with the animate parts of creation, including of course the inanimate environment.

And then we have the part that is the spiritual aspect of things.

And this spiritual aspect has to do with the identity, who we are and whose we are.

It also has to do with worship, because this is a vertical relationship that we have with our creator.

And it is the aspect of us that regardless of who we read, who has been talking about religion and spirituality and things like that, from a medical or health standpoint, we talk about transcendence.

This transcends just what we can see and what we can experience in our physical selves.

We have this something extra in the transcendence.

From the research, investigations, looking, and the interviews that have been done in the United States, asking people what they want.

Now what's interesting is that people were complaining before COVID, but now we want to go back to that.

In other words, it was better before than it is now, and we want to go back to what we didn't like before anyway.

You know, human beings, we're interesting creatures, right?

They don't just want talk, they want solutions.

And you know, as we talked about before, the only certain thing is that we're uncertain, all right?

And of course, they don't want to be afraid.

They don't want to have fear about the unknown, they won't have fear about the known either.

And people have been clamoring for community, for connection and connectedness again.

And of course they want to have peace, peace of mind, and they want to have peace in the world.

These are things that people are clamoring for.

Now once we start talking about peace, we get into another realm of things and the Hebrew word that is usually translated peace in the Old Testament is the word shalom.

But shalom has much more to do with our total health and our total well-being than just peace.

Shalom is actually the best word, the best Hebrew word that encapsulates the idea of health.

It is, it means peace, yes, but it means total health.

It means that we're whole, we're made whole again.

Roger Seheult

COVID-19: The Role of the Medical Evangelist

As Norman said, I'm a pulmonary and critical care specialist that I practice in Southern California.

For the last 6 to 9 months, I've been taking care of COVID-19 patients.

Here's a typical scenario that you might see in a hospital like mine.

And as you dig down into the medical history, you find out that he was just there last week.

Except when he came in, he had a normal oxygen saturation and didn't really require to be hospitalized.

So he was sent home and now he's in a much worse situation and now he's being admitted to the intensive care unit.

He may even be placed on a ventilator in the next day or 2.

But that, it doesn't stop there because at home his wife is also having symptoms, although more mild, and she's worried not only about him but herself.

And it doesn't stop there too because maybe there's a daughter that's calling in from another part of the country and her parents are alone, her mom's alone, and what's gonna happen to her?

Is there some information we can give her mom or something that we could do to support them?

These are the questions that run through your mind as you're taking care of the situation in real time.

But Folks, by the end of today's lecture, I will have a call for you to make in terms of this.

This is a situation that is happening in terms of all over this country and all over the world.

We're seeing the same story repeat itself over and over again.

And so the question is, what do we do about this?

What is the call for the medical evangelist?

So we're gonna talk about the epidemiology and the pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2.

We're gonna discuss the latest information about the tools for learning about COVID-19 and ongoing interventions that are being studied.

And then most importantly, we're gonna challenge you, the participant, to combine the tools learned with what we can do as part of the body of Christ.

So as we know, we are in full pandemic mode here with COVID-19, but we learned early on in a number of articles that came out, this 1 particularly in the Lancet that showed that when people come down with COVID-19, there's really 2 phases to this illness.

There is the, of course, the five-day period of incubation, And then about 7 days of symptoms occur, fever, cough, and then those that progress to a worsening course, after 7 days will then be admitted to the hospital and from there it goes downhill in a number of these cases.

So there is an early at home phase of this virus, if you will, and then there's a late hospital phase to this virus.

So once again, we have the population and we try to prevent infection, then there's this early phase, if you will, and for those of you who are symptomatic in this phase, about 20% of these people will go on to get progressive disease and actually be admitted to the hospital.

And that can cause hospitalization, high flow oxygen, ventilator, intensive care unit, and unfortunately death in a number of these situations.

But here's the key, 80% of these patients, early in the course, the immune system has success and these patients don't go on to need hospitalization, but in fact, will do just fine and get better.

Now there are those patients that have long-haul symptoms, but for the most part, 80% of these patients early on will do fine and will not need to go to the hospital.

And the reason for that is their immune system.

So let's learn a little bit about their immune system.

There is the innate immune system, and this innate immune system goes around and scavenges particles that are not part of the body, and it's very, very strong when you're born.

This is why babies have fevers more than adults do, because they have a very strong innate immune system.

And the cells of that immune system, the innate immune system, are predominantly, I wanna focus in on the monocyte and the natural killer cells.

We'll be talking more about that as we go on.

The adaptive immune system is the part of the immune system that learns as you get older.

They see antigens, you get vaccines and antibodies.

This is what learns what's self and what is non-self.

And this gets better and better with age, whereas the innate immune system gets lower and lower with age typically.

The other thing that's very important to understand about the innate immune system is that it secretes something called interferon.

Now that's a great name for a cytokine because it interferes with infections.

Series

Plenary Session

The Touch of Faith: Take Up Your Bed and Walk

Transcript

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Parent Series

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Recorded

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