Grounding – a Fathers’ Day Tribute

This Fathers’ Day, we’re celebrating our dad, Cardiologist Dr. Stephen Sinatra, and his life’s work…in part because he died (ironically enough) on Fathers’ Day in 2022.

Dr. Sinatra was a father figure - not just to us, but to hundreds of thousands of people via his newsletters, books, websites, medical textbooks, TV appearances and peer-reviewed journal articles. He was a prolific writer and ultimately wanted to empower people to take control of their health and rely less on their doctors to “fix” them.

Our dad wanted people to be able to maintain or improve their quality of life through healthy lifestyle practices, which he called the Pillars of Health. These Pillars included, among other things, grounding, eating an anti-inflammatory diet, supplementing that diet with targeted nutritional supports, avoiding toxins and effectively managing stress.  

As children, we didn’t see our dad as much as we wanted to. He was Chief of Cardiology at Manchester Memorial Hospital in Connecticut and was fiercely dedicated to his patients. When he wasn’t in the hospital, Dr. Sinatra was educating himself and later writing books, articles, etc. to share his knowledge.

Our dad was truly on a mission and he had to make sacrifices. Eventually we became a part of that mission, and for all of it, we are grateful…proud, too.

Sure, we had to share him with the world, but knowing that he helped so many other people now resonates as an honor, not as a child’s loss. We are better adults for it, and - if given the choice - would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

This Father’s Day, we also want to highlight a 9-minute video Dr. Sinatra made about 13 years ago. It’s called “Nature’s Simple Cures” and we just recently added it to our You Tube channel. He preferred to make videos like this “off the cuff,” without any script, and most often only did one take. It took us a while to realize how good this particular video is….we hope it resonates with you too.

“An Allopathic Physician In Recovery” – Dr. Sinatra’s Integrative Road to Health

As a physician, our dad was decades ahead of his time. He marched to the beat of his own drum. Although he continually dove into all available medical science, he balanced what he learned with intuition, an open mind, and trust in God - even when the rest of the medical community wasn’t going near it. He believed that anyone could be “a messenger” and gleaned as much from his patients about health and wellness as he did through his medical education and training.

After one or two years of relying on the pharmaceuticals and invasive procedures he had been taught, Dr. Sinatra started seeing conventional medicine as a revolving door – one that people kept people alive but didn’t fix the underlying problems that brought them to the hospital in the first place. Patching people up bought them time, but it didn’t make them healthier. Medications, for example, could “bring down risky numbers,” but often resulted in side effects which compromised quality of life. This frustrating realization led him to pursue alternative solutions that were more in tune with human physiology – solutions which did not manipulate the body’s biochemical pathways to achieve certain results, but which helped the body heal pursuant to its own innate intelligence.

One of his greatest discoveries was that heart disease could be prevented and even reversed by optimizing the heart’s energy metabolism through targeted nutritional supports. He called this non-invasive strategy “metabolic cardiology.” As early as 1992, he made Coenzyme Q10, his top nutritional support for heart health, available on formulary at the hospital.

Dr. Sinatra was also one of the first medical doctors to dispel the myth that saturated fat and high cholesterol cause heart disease and speak out against unnecessary statin use. His 2012 book, The Great Cholesterol Myth, coauthored with Jonny Bowden, PhD, rocked the charts and its 2020 revised edition is still a bestseller.

Of course, he still regularly utilized conventional interventions and often praised them for saving lives during acute health crises and emergency situations. But he started integrating natural solutions into his medical repertoire. An “allopathic physician in recovery” (as he liked to say), he began utilizing the best conventional and alternative therapies to do what worked with the least amount of side effects. 

Grounding: the most important health discovery ever?

After a few decades in cardiology practice, Dr. Sinatra came across a true game changer. He met Clint Ober at an electromedicine conference in 2001, and learned about a promising new therapy that was simple, yet profound… It was grounding, or earthing - the process of absorbing the Earth’s natural 7.83 Hz electron flow through direct skin contact with a natural earth surface or an indoor connected grounding device. How could it be that simply placing your bare feet on the grass or walking along the shoreline of a sandy beach could be so healing?

This discovery rocked Dr. Sinatra’s world. “What an ‘aha!’” as he was known to say. Having written numerous books centered on chronic inflammation as the root cause of cardiovascular disease (“CVD”) and educating people about anti-inflammatory lifestyle solutions that could help prevent, and even reverse, heart disease, grounding made perfect sense. Absorbing the Earth’s electrons was like “taking a handful of antioxidants” and had anti-inflammatory effects in the body.

Dr. Sinatra also happened to have been studying “electro-medicine,” which is utilizing specific frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum to promote healing and wellness. Grounding, or absorbing the Earth’s natural electron flow, was another promising electroceutical…especially because it could be done for free!

After meeting Clint Ober, Dr. Sinatra began grounding daily and dove into the existing science to learn as much as he could. Several years later, he teamed up with Ober and Martin Zucker to co-write Earthing: the most important discovery ever? First published in 2010,  this book is considered the seminal book on grounding and was a 2011 Nautilus Award-winner.

But writing the book wasn’t enough. Dr. Sinatra wanted to learn more as much about grounding and heart health as he possibly could. He started conducting his own research to test grounding’s impact on specific markers of cardiovascular health.

Having trained as a bioenergetic psychotherapist, Dr. Sinatra understood that trapped emotions and too much stress were powerful CVD risk factors; thus he took a keen interest in grounding’s known balancing effect on the autonomic nervous system. He was particularly fascinated with how grounding could impact heart rate variability (HRV), and co-conducted a pilot study with Gaetan Chevalier, PhD to test it. Through that study, published in 2011, they determined that grounding improved HRV “beyond simple relaxation,” making it an exciting tool for maintaining and improving cardiovascular health.

Soon after, Dr. Sinatra designed and participated in another pilot study that tested grounding’s impact on blood. Specifically, this groundbreaking study examined the impact of grounding on blood viscosity, or thickness.

The results discovered were profound: two hours of continuous grounding significantly increased the surface electrical charge, or zeta potential, of red blood cells (RBCs) in all the subjects. Such increased charge meant less clumping together of RBCs, and thus thinner, healthier blood.

Dr. Sinatra and his co-authors thus concluded, "By increasing RBC surface charge, grounding “reduces blood viscosity and clumping,” making it “one of the simplest and yet most profound interventions for helping reduce cardiovascular risk and cardiovascular events.”

As a cardiologist, Dr. Sinatra was so excited – after all, thick, sludgy blood is a deadly cardiovascular risk factor because it leads to heart attacks and strokes. Something that could help reduce that risk without compromising quality of life was too important to brush off as “new age nonsense,” as those in the conventional medicine lane might say about grounding.

Now this was back in 2013...Since then, we’ve seen the blood viscosity study referenced in numerous publications and its images used in videos and blogs all around the internet. People are also starting to similarly test their own blood. The momentum is promising!

Grounding as a Key Lifestyle Practice for TODAY’s Health Challenges

Fast forward to today…four years after a “novel” virus swept the globe and “experts” developed means of combatting it at warp speed, a large number of people unfortunately now have blood clotting issues which can lead to acute cardiac events.

In Dr. Sinatra’s last research paper, published online in December 2022, he wrote, “Increased blood viscosity in the general population may be perhaps the newest risk factor in cardiovascular events because of its negative impact on blood pressure, thrombogenesis, ischemia, and atherogenesis. Any intervention that reduces blood viscosity and RBC aggregation, are especially important in reducing complications in the now chronic viral pandemic of the 21st Century.”

What if grounding could help them reduce their risk? The abovementioned paper, coauthored with Step Sinatra, Dr. Drew Sinatra and Gaetan Chevalier, was dedicated to driving that point home, as implied in this summary:

“When…grounding, electrons flood throughout the body, reducing inflammation and oxidative stress while also reinforcing the body's own defense mechanisms. Electron transfers are the basis of virtually all antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity. And the earth may very well be the ultimate supplier! When the supply is restored, humans have the potential to thrive. Touching our skin to the earth, is perhaps the perfect natural anti-inflammatory, supporting biochemical and physiological effects that enhance healing.”

We believe this study is among the most important ever conducted to assess grounding’s health benefits, and that the medical community will gradually come to realize its implications and ultimately view grounding as a valuable adjunct therapy.

Step credits grounding with facilitating his recovery after a life-threatening health crisis in 2007. His health journey and Dr. Sinatra’s twenty-plus years studying grounding led them to co-write their first and last book together -Get Grounded Get Well. It was published in 2023, a few months after Dr. Sinatra passed away.

Happy Fathers’ Day, Dad – we miss you. To all you dads out there…you touch your children’s lives more than you know.  Follow your heart and divine purpose and don’t be afraid to share your wisdom with all you encounter– you never know who it will benefit.

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Affiliate disclosure: this page contains links to Dr. Sinatra’s books at Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, Grounded.com earns from qualifying purchases.