Oklahoma Doctor Mark Sherwood Shares Why He Believes There is No Coronavirus Cure, Gives Five Health Tips for Christians, and His Opinion on Masks and Gloves
Doctors – Michele L. Neil-Sherwood and Mark Sherwood
Mark Sherwood, a popular naturopathic doctor from Tulsa, Oklahoma, shared his thoughts on the COVID-19 spread and offered practical tips for believers to hold on to.
Dr. Sherwood’s mission is to help his patients achieve “wellness in every area of your life” as shared on his website. He works alongside his wife, Michele L. Neil-Sherwood, a doctor of osteopathic medicine. They run a successful medical practice, Functional Medical Institute, where they see patients from all across the United States.
Along with their work in natural health, the couple have their own television and radio program and an Amazon bestseller, The Quest for Wellness.
Dr. Sherwood’s passion for wellness follows his past career in professional baseball and a decade in the SWAT Team working in the Tulsa Police Department. He now teaches several health courses to law enforcement professionals, corporations, and churches worldwide.
The following is an edited transcript of The Christian Post’s interview with Dr. Sherwood where he shares what he believes about the current pandemic and offers advice for Christians while providing five specific things people can do right now to help better their health and wellness.
Christian Post: You’ve seen patients from all across the country in this season. Can you share some of the testimonies of what you’ve witnessed concerning the battle of COVID-19?
Sherwood: We’ve seen people, dealt with them, who have had symptoms that sort of gave us the indication they may have contracted COVID-19. We’ve also seen people and dealt with them that have had positive tests. In both of those scenarios, in all of the cases, we have seen the symptoms resolve, with little to no severity. [The person] may be out of work, necessarily for three … or six days, that’s very common. The high fever is certainly a potential sign that there is a contagion so just like any other common-sense maneuver when you have a high fever and something’s contagious, let the fever run its course and it will. Eventually, the fever will subside and then the person will be OK.
We’ve also had people that have tested positive from acute, with a nasal pharyngeal swab, but later tested negative for antibodies, which made us question the veracity or the accuracy of the original test. We’ve also had people on the other side that have not tested positive with the acute test with the nasal pharyngeal swab, and then later tested positive for antibodies. So I think the testing is still a little bit in question.
CP: Can you share with us a little about your own faith journey as a man of medicine?
Sherwood: I didn’t go to a conventional medical school. I was a naturopathic trained person. My wife did. I think that we have a great advantage because we can see both sides of the coin, we can see medicine, its proper use, we can see sciences — it’s the brilliance of it. We can see vaccines, even the brilliance of them, the lives they’ve saved. We can also see the wonderful, magnificent way the body is wired, the way it’s wired to fight and defend and kill and destroy things that try to destroy us.
It’s definitely been a journey with us. We believe wholeheartedly that if God wanted to destroy the earth with a virus, He would have done it a long time ago. We also understand that people need to do what they can right now with their own abilities, with their own giftings to strengthen the body. So it’s God’s will, His immune system and our putting those actions into work doing what we can. If we don’t put those three things into work, we’re not going to get the normal immune protection. That’s been something that’s really shaped our philosophy. People come to us and they want to know how to do this. We show them how to do this. We haven’t had any, thank the Lord, even close to fatalities with anybody we’ve dealt with COVID-19.
CP: How would you rank coronavirus and its severity in relation to the severity of other viruses, such as that common cold, HIV, Ebola or even malaria?
Sherwood: Ebola, of course, that thing had a 50 to 60, maybe even 70% mortality rate; that was terrible. It’s popped up and cropped up and it’s kept pretty isolated over the years. But ultimately, it’s hard to say, you just don’t know. That’s the thing about these viruses, they’re continuing to mutate. They use your own machinery RNA to sort of hijack your own system and when your cells replicate, they replicate.
I think the better question is how inferior our own immune systems [are] becoming over time. As we continue to wrestle with this, we can strengthen our immune system. Viruses are going to be around and I think we need to figure out how to live with them, instead of living with fear that we have them because they’ve been around and documented back in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece. We used to treat them differently. Let us not forget the Spanish Flu from back in 1917 that killed millions of people around the world, that was terrible! Yet we must let history teach us something — that [was] from when the population was smaller; now the population is more dense. Therefore, people living closer with the spread of these viruses getting bigger.
It’s not really an apples to apples comparison; it’s more like an apples to oranges. Every time we have a virus, it’s a new thing. That’s why we use the word novel in this case. With all that said, our strategies must be tempered with what we are doing as individual people to strengthen our immune system and that is not just physically but that is also emotionally and spiritually.
CP: What are your projections concerning America overcoming the coronavirus?
