Expert Opinions in COVID-19 and Our Immune System Dysregulation

Great to be with everybody once again. The purpose of this video is just to talk about some of the concepts in integrative functional medicine. How we find points, how we connect the points or the dots. And one of those particular points has to do with mast cells and COVID 19. So what I want to do is briefly talk about that and talk about how we do this. Integrative functional methods and how we find these. These points to connect. How do we connect them and how do we apply therapies for people? So let's talk about mast cells briefly. What are mast cells? They're something that most physicians don't even know what they are. It's a part of your body's immune system, but also it's a cell that actually connects with cytokines or signaling molecules to your nervous system. So it's a really cool part of your immune system. Mast cells are found in large amounts around your GI tract and they're also found around your kidneys, in your skin and your gums and your brain. GI tract. A lot of different organs, these mast cells exist and these mast cells can be activated in different ways in different organs. So you can actually have the mast cells kind of activated in your GI tract with an infection, say a food poisoning or a GI tract infection of some sort. You can get them activated in your skin and get traumatic hives, you get scratch or stress induced hives, or sometimes what's called idiopathic urticaria, where people get hives and they have no idea why. Sometimes with a concussion, hit your brain and all of a sudden these cells become activated. And now we're seeing with COVID 19 in the lungs, with this acute lung infection, we're seeing these cells being activated. So because these cells are found in different parts of your body, a lot of your symptoms can be quite different. People can have symptoms of neurological issues, so memory issues, word finding issues, mood swings, lung problems, shortness of breath, GI tract issues, diarrhea, ibs, bowel kind of problems, skin issues, a whole myriad of things, fatiguing illnesses. And so what we're seeing is these mast cells are actually found throughout our body and can be interlinked with different chronic illnesses. And so the paper that kind of led me to talk about this was actually an Expert opinion in COVID 19 about Mast Cell activation syndrome. And so in the chronic fatigue and the mold, Lyme and the MCAS world, we've known about mast cells for a while, but now this information is bleeding into common knowledge, so to speak, with post Covid or long Haulers. It's also some information. Now, people that have this, this thing, when you get, you get admitted to the ICU and you stay sick for a long time, may have mast cells as well as the base. And so this expert opinion, which is not a randomized trial, it's a bunch of experts who have an expertise in a certain area, come together and wrote this paper talking about, hey, maybe these mast cells are part of this COVID 19 long hauler immune dysregulation. So why is this important for us right now? Well, one of the things we do in integrative and functional medicine is we try to connect the dots, right? So we try to see how your brain symptoms are related to your gut symptoms, are related to your skin and GI tract symptoms. Well, the problem is with that is you actually have to have dots to connect. So if you don't know what the dot is with mast cells or immune dysregulation or inflammation, if you don't realize that living in that moldy building, inhaling all of those toxins for years and years and years sets you up for asthma, for example, so that 23% of all nuanced onset asthma in our country is related to environmental mold in a moldy building. And you don't realize that might also set you up for bad lung infection, chronic lung diseases, or potentially maybe this mast cell thing related to COVID 19. You have to know the dot is there and then connect the dot. And that's one of the things we routinely do in integrative functional medicine. And these long haulers are long Covid. And Covid itself is actually a new field where it's pushing this idea into the common knowledge. Waste. Again, there's this translational medicine, this is translational time frame where we get data and how we connect the data. We have to connect the data and we have to create therapeutics. Well, the interesting thing about this mast cell concept is we already have therapeutics already. We're using a medication called Singulair, which is a mast cell stabilizer to treat asthma and allergies. We use H1 and H2 blockers like Pepcid, Zantac, Benadryl. In the greater functional world, we use things like Quercetin, which is a mast cell stabilizer. So all of a sudden now we have data points. If you have gut issues, diarrhea, bloating after COVID 19 and some brain fog, you know, would mast cells be a potential therapeutic intervention to help with some of your symptoms? And this is what we do routinely in the integrative and functional mass in the world. It's just really kind of interesting to see expert opinion articles being published being put out there talking about the same kind of idea. How do we look at this novel disease with our science base and connect the dots, or in this case create the dots for other practitioners to connect. And so we're doing that right now. Interestingly enough, with post COVID 19 long haulers, I'm starting to see these patients in my clinic and dealing with a lot of these antecedents, what set people up for this thing. And I'm seeing hypermobility, I'm seeing people living in moldy buildings, people who had bowel issues before they were IBS or sibo or chronic diarrhea, people with chronic urticaria. Hives. They had hives, no one knew why they had hives or stress induced hives. And now being ill, they have all these other complications or they had mold related problems or chronic Lyme or post Lyme syndrome. And now all of a sudden the illness they overcame is kind of coming back after getting this virus. And so this, this wave of these individuals is something that we're going to be dealing with more and more as the year goes on. As we go after the second wave of this illness, if there's a second wave, we'll have to see how the vaccine stuff works out. But these are things that we'll be dealing with in all the clinics across our country, particularly in those people who practice this kind of integrative functional medicine, how we deal with these patients. So I posted this article out there. I just want to start the conversation of how we think about this entity because it's being forced or thrust upon us. The whole world is not. This infection is novel for the whole world. And now we're seeing this group of people after getting infected, especially those who are hospitalized. About 30 to 40% of them will have heart issues. After hospitalization, we're seeing more and more people are having residual fatigue, brain issues, lung issues, all kinds of issues. After this infection. We need to start developing a paradigm, a new paradigm. How do we treat these people? Watchful waiting may not be the best way. Maybe we have other options and other modalities to our hands. Like vitamin D, for example, like vitamin C, like quercetin, like other things we can use to help modulate the immune system. So this is a really exciting time to be practicing medicine, just to see these therapeutics, to see how things are playing out. And I want to continue to share those with you if you feel like this is helpful, please continue to share this. I most likely will probably be running rolling out of class here in the next two to four weeks just to talk about how people can start doing this for themselves, how they can start finding their own triggers, antecedents, mediators, things that kind of might be triggering their own chronic illnesses related to Covid or not. Or on the other hand, how do you kind of see what might be an anesthesiology or might be a trigger and you modify that to maintain your wellness and health? I think this is an important topic for all of us, and I hope to continue this conversation in the preceding weeks and months. You have a great day, take care and be well.