On the Covid period

For me, the Covid period is still a dark page in the medical history of the Netherlands. As a practicing Primary Care Doctor, I found it deeply distressing. With much pain, grief, isolation and loneliness. I saw many people get the flu. And sadly, I also saw some become seriously ill and die. But I certainly also saw how society slowly lost its soulfulness.

As if a silence fell that went beyond the virus itself. Older people became isolated from their families and were very lonely. Children lost their room to play and their carefreeness. Care became distant where closeness was needed.

What also touches me is that there was hardly any focus on lifestyle as a means of increasing resilience and the self-healing capacity. While it was clearly visible that this mattered for being resilient against this flu, and that complications occurred above all in people with reduced resistance, particularly those with metabolic syndrome or obesity.

Instead, we mainly chose isolation and vaccination, and it is still not clear whether the right balance was found in that. But what perhaps weighs even more heavily is that boundaries have shifted. Fundamental rights came under pressure. And what began as protection sometimes felt like a loss of soul. Not only of care, but of society as a whole.

And yet… we hardly evaluate it properly. I find that strange. This really is necessary to understand what happened. What does the Covid period say about how we look at health? And about what we are prepared to give up?

Without meaning, lifestyle becomes a duty.
Without soulfulness, health becomes a product.
And without humanity, care loses its soul.
In my book Doctor’s Orders: Partner with Your Soul I go into this more deeply.
On lifestyle as a means of increasing resilience.
On health that goes beyond what can be measured.
On the power of soulfulness and meaning.
And on what becomes possible when we dare to see the human being as a whole again.

What does it say about us as a society if we do not dare to truly feel the Covid period and learn from it?