What are the similarities to COVID and Lyme? What tests can be done to monitor the effects of COVID disease and long haulers? Dr. Deb shares the testing that you can ask your doctor for and how to interpret these results. She also gives you common supplements that can help reverse the inflammation and microvessel clotting that occurs from the disease. 

Do not miss these highlights:

00:26 The common COVID Long Haulers symptoms that we see with other bacterias and viruses

01:18  COVID Long Haulers tend to mimic a lot of other diseases, but COVID can also activate or reactivate underlying viruses that have been laying dormant in your body for a very long time

02:41 Just because your symptoms resolve for a week or two, doesn’t mean that they’re going to completely resolve

03:53 In the UK,  they stopped some of the vaccination studies because it was causing people to have a false positive HIV result

04:32 Tips and recommendations to ask your healthcare practitioner to test for at least once a year, if not every six months, whether you’ve had the COVID vaccine or you’ve had the COVID illness

06:58 Functional Medicine interventions for people who test positive or have elevated numbers of D-dimer 

08:59 The whole concept of doing testing is to prevent disease and prevent further inflammatory conditions. We don’t want this to go on for so long, that it will be damaging and will be difficult to reverse 

10:13 If you’re still having a Long Haulers issue, it’s not going to be something that you fix overnight, it’s going to take time, so work with a practitioner that understands these protocols

Resources Mentioned

Whether you are recovering from an illness or just looking to maintain your current overall health, schedule a consult with us at Serenity Health Care  by calling  (262)522-8640 or visit https://www.serenityhealthcarecenter.com 

Transcript of Episode #163:

Debra Muth 0:02
Welcome to Let’s Talk Wellness Now. I’m your host, Dr. Deb. This is where we talk about everything wellness, and learn to defy aging, and live our lives on our own terms.

Hello, and welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness Now podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Deb. And today I want to talk to you about Lyme disease and COVID long haulers and what they have in common. So with COVID, long haulers, when we talk about those symptoms, brain fog, fatigue, muscle pain, joint pain, those are common symptoms that we see with other bacterias. And viruses, like Lyme disease, like HHV, six, like the herpes families, viruses, all of them tend to overlap, including Epstein Barr Virus, which is the virus that causes moto. And sometimes it can be difficult for us to figure out which bacteria or viruses causing the problem for you. And oftentimes, it’s more than one, it’s never just one thing. So there are tests available for us to determine whether or not you have viruses and bacteria, we can do that by blood testing, we can do that by something called a bio scan or biofeedback testing. And it gives us a little bit better idea of what we’re dealing with. Now, COVID and COVID long haulers tend to mimic a lot of these other diseases but what we’re also seeing is that COVID can activate or reactivate underlying viruses that have been laying dormant in your body for a very long time, especially the herpes family virus. We’ve seen a lot over the last six months of people who’ve had dormant herpes viruses in their body, get COVID and all of a sudden, here comes this herpes virus, again, more cold sores, more vaginal outbreaks, more shingle type activity. So all of these are part of the herpes family virus, and all of them can cause problems for you. And we want to get those under control as quickly as we can to keep you healthy, and to keep you strong, and to stop you from triggering other bacterias and viruses and decreasing the immune system. So I think it’s really important for us to understand what’s happening with this COVID virus. And I will tell you this, things are changing moment to moment, day to day. So the information that you have today may be different tomorrow. And you can’t be upset about that you have to remember that this is a brand new virus in our environment. We are learning new things every single day about it. Some of it is good, some of it is not so good. But nonetheless, we’re learning. And that’s what we do in medicine. That’s why we call it practicing medicine, because sometimes we don’t have all the answers to what’s going on. Now, there are a good amount of my lyme patients who’ve said, Hey, I got the vaccine. And all of my Lyme symptoms have gone away. What is this about?

Well, we’re not exactly sure why symptoms go away. But we do know that it has to do with the immune system. Our best guess is that most likely, these people will develop symptoms again down the road, it’s just a matter of time. So keep an eye out for that. Just because your symptoms resolve for a week or two doesn’t mean that they’re going to completely resolve and certainly would not be a reason to run out and take the vaccination. I don’t recommend that anyone take the COVID-19, quote unquote, vaccine, because in my opinion, it is a viral weapon. It is not a vaccine. It has four amino acids or four molecules of the HIV virus inserted into it. And in part, there’s been conversation about them trying to get another HIV vaccine, which was tried and failed in the 80s, early 90s. And they were looking to this vaccine to do something similar. However, in the UK, they actually stopped some of the vaccination studies because it was causing people to have a false positive HIV result. Now that’s concerning to me. If it’s positive now, why won’t it be positive a year from now? Could it be positive two years from now? Will it trigger AIDS? And the truth of the matter is we don’t know. And this is a scary thing, because we originally thought all of these problems and concerns would only show up in people who had taken the vaccine. But now we know that is not true. These things can happen to people who have experienced the infection itself. So here are a couple of tips that I want to give you whether you’ve had the COVID vaccine or you’ve had the COVID illness itself. Here are some things that I would recommend that you ask your healthcare practitioner to test for at least once a year, if not every six months. My preference would be every six months, so that we could see a timeline and we could catch something sooner than later.

The first thing is something called an ANA level and anti nuclear antibody It measures autoimmune disease, we know that there’s going to be a significant increased risk of autoimmune disease in the next 10 years because of COVID itself. So get an annual ANA, make sure that you’re not triggering an autoimmune disease. If you have joint pain and joint inflammation, I would ask for a set rate, and a C reactive protein, so a CRP highly sensitive. So it’s a CRP HS, or C reactive protein highly sensitive. These things will tell us how much inflammation is going on in your body. Any traditional doctor can run these tests, any doctor will understand what their meaning is when they come back, abnormal or normal.

Now, the other thing I would ask for is a CD count. So CD four, CD eight, CD 57. Some people call this a CD 57 cascade, this tells us how your immune system is actually functioning. And if your immune system is starting to decline, that means you can’t fight off bacteria and viruses like you should. And this will be able to see this early on instead of waiting until your CD levels are so low that the immune system is not functioning at all. This is what doctors Zelanco calls vaids vaccine induced aids, but I think it’s the wrong term at this point. Since we know this can happen with the vaccine or with the virus, I think it should probably be called viral induced AIDS. But that’s just my opinion.

Now some other things that you can test for, especially if you had taken the vaccine is something called a D dimer, enter troponin level, the D dimer measures micro vessel clotting, do you have this small clotting that’s occurring inside the vessel wall that can lead to blood clots lead to stroke and lead to heart attack. If these numbers are elevated, we can easily come in and treat them. One caveat, I will say we’ve had many people test positive for a D dimer over the last year. And when we send them off to cardiology, the cardiologist blows them off and just says, Hey, that number is not high enough for us to worry about. We’re not going to do anything, and we’re not going to repeat it. In my world of functional medicine. That is the worst thing that we could do is ignore something today. Because tomorrow, it could be worse and a week from now, it could be worse yet. So we would recommend intervening and using things that help to thin the blood. baby aspirin, there’s a product called vein light that works amazing. There’s something called natto kinase, or lumbo kinase. All of these things help to thin the blood. Now, I will tell you this, if you’re already on something to thin the blood, please do not add these things. Ask your healthcare practitioner, whether or not these are safe for you to take because not everybody can take these and not have a complication. So definitely look at that, that your opponent level actually measures what’s happening with the heart and is there heart damage going on there. So when we talk about something called myocarditis, what we’re looking at is that inflammation or infection of the heart, and the troponin level helps identify that. So those are two major things. Now I’ve seen said rates be elevated post illness, two to three weeks, and then eight to 10 weeks, they’re normal again. So I would encourage you if these are abnormal, go ahead work with a functional medicine practitioner. And you can work with any of the practitioners here at Serenity Health Care Center to manage these symptoms for you, or your own health care practitioners if they’re knowledgeable in this COVID world and do some things to decrease the inflammation and then retest them again, maybe six to eight weeks later, see if they’re still abnormal, and then implement more lifestyle changes, dietary changes, like the AIP diet LDN other things. skullcap is a great herb that we can use to help reduce inflammation and get this under control sooner than later. The whole concept of doing this kind of testing is to prevent disease and to prevent further inflammatory conditions, which is the root of all age related conditions. And we don’t want this to go on for so long, that it’s difficult to reverse or there’s already so much damage that we’re not going to be able to reverse this thing. Now you’ve heard me talk on this show before about Dr. Patterson. And I’ve had Dr. Patterson on my show. And if you’re interested in learning about his post COVID long haulers protocol, just hop over over and listen to that episode on letstalkwellnessnow.com. But Dr. Patterson has a protocol of using HIV medications. And then using other anti inflammatory medications like statin drugs, and antidepressants and a few other things we’ve added to this protocol from a natural perspective. We’ve added things like Ketotifen LDN, into histamines, other herbs and certainly dietary changes to reduce the inflammation in the body. At this point. It works wonderfully but I will tell you it is not an overnight fix for most people, most people are struggling, if they’ve been sick for a while, or had COVID 15 to 18 months ago, it’s going to take time to reverse this, if you’re still having a long Hollars issue, it’s not going to be something that you fix overnight, it’s not going to be something that’s going to be gone in two or three weeks, it’s going to take time. And I would encourage you to really work with a practitioner that understands these protocols, you can certainly reach out to Dr. Patterson’s group, the COVID long haulers group, and they have doctors that will work with you. However, when they give you the protocol, you’re still going to need a doctor that can prescribe locally for you. So you’re going to want to enlist your primary health care practitioner, or your functional medicine doctor to help you prescribe these medications. If not, please seek out somebody that can help you and really understands this COVID Long Haul or illness, and how it’s reactivating other illnesses and other bacterias at this time, because it is something that we’re going to live with for many, many years if we don’t get this under control now. And if we wait too long, we’re going to have problems. The sooner we can get on top of these things, the better off we’re going to be. So I hope this short video has helped you understand COVID, long haulers, reactivation of Epstein Barr Virus, and how to actually treat some of these COVID long collar symptoms, and how to ask an advocate for tests that you want, so that you can follow yourself, you can follow with somebody that understands what’s going on. And again, if they don’t understand or you, they tell you that it’s not a concern, because it’s just slightly over the normal range. Please reach out to a functional medicine practitioner who understands this, that can help you along the way, because any abnormality in a test is not normal. We have set our normal ranges so wide already that once it’s outside the normal range, it’s really abnormal. And we don’t want to have problems with that. We don’t want to see it continue. So again, I hope this was helpful. If you need a health care practitioner, please reach out to us at Serenity Health Care Center comm we’re happy to help you. I have a full team of practitioners that are used to working with all age groups from new birth to the elderly 100+, and we’re all here to help you live your life and have the happiest fulfilling healthiest life you possibly can.

Hey, it has been really great sharing this time with you guys on the Let’s Talk Wellness Now podcast. If this episode has helped you or you feel as though this episode would help someone else we’d love for you to leave us a review, share this podcast and if you don’t want to miss the most exciting episodes we have coming. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Google Play. Until next time, live every day to the fullest.