Why Long COVID Clinics Are Closing (And What It Means If You’re Still Sick)

Welcome back once again to another exciting episode of Made for Health. It's myself, Dr. Aaron Hartman, and my partner in crime, Dr. Christian Jinsky.

Hello.

Hello, yes. And on a side note, real quick, some housekeeping. If this information is helpful, it'd be great if you could share it, subscribe below. This is how we get information like this out there. It's also how we learn what you're interested in. We also appreciate any feedback. We're going to be doing some additional series later on. This summer based on your feedback, based on things people have asked us about on social media and on this site right here. So your input and thoughts are valued. And on that note, we're going to hop on into today's episode. Over the next couple of series, we're going to dive a little bit into long COVID a bit. We've got so much things going here between SIRS and mold and Lyme and POTS and dysautonomia. You know, you might ask, well, why are we talking about long COVID now? It's a couple years into it. Well, about a month or two ago, the funding for a lot of the long COVID clinics has basically dried up. Most of it was from NIH, was from the government. And evidently, they finished the research on long COVID and a lot of the places are now losing funding and closing down, which I thought very interesting because we're still seeing those patients who've had it. Who are still dealing, suffering with it, or having other post-viral-like symptoms, syndromes. And Long COVID is not new. The idea of a post-infectious, post-event innate immune system inflammatory disorder, that's what, you know, it's a version of chronic inflammatory response syndrome or CIRS. That's what chronic Lyme disease is, post-concussive syndrome. There's a whole host of things that this fits within the rubric of. So I felt like giving some time to this concept of what is, what are these post-infectious inflammatory syndromes? Are they new? A little bit, they have a little history. Can be helpful because we're at a stage now where this has basically blown up people's interest in integrative and functional medicine because they see how the traditional system did not serve them. And the fact that now these research places are losing funding and shutting down is just another example of how our current system is not serving the people we see on a daily basis. So I'm kind of excited to talk about this and just get people's feedback as well. Because people are asking me about this. My patients are asking me about it. People on social media and literally we are starting to shut down these research centers that have been collecting data.

But that's it. I mean, it's not like they came up with some sort of diagnostic algorithm, right? Like nothing's set in stone. It's not like, okay, long COVID is clearly defined as. And these are the parameters that we check subjectively and objectively, and then you make a case definition and here are your treatment options. Like it never even got to that point. And, and how can you then say we're done and shut it down if we're not even at the point where we know fully thoroughly how to maybe diagnose it and what to do about it? I think that's the big issue is that as you mentioned, a lot of people are still suffering from this. A lot of people are maybe slightly better, but not all the way better. And there's a lot of individuals that suspect that they have this, but aren't really sure how to even go about figuring out if they have it or not. Who do I see? And those resources just got even more limited. And so the, I think the main goal of today is to try to delineate the who do you see component, how it's worked up and what we see, the lens through which we see it. And then maybe a little bit about what the treatment options are. And I think that's huge. Just it, if there's not a lot of resources out there, at least we can provide a starting point for individuals.

And the reality is it's going back to do-it-yourself, like with the Pullback, there are a couple sites that we'll probably talk about on episode 3 or 4 that literally are putting information out there. It's kind of like do-it-yourself. Here you go. Here's a list of therapies. Start at the top and start doing things. And that's kind of where it's. Going back to that. Yeah.

Which up into the point where it becomes prescriptions and then you're stuck unless you have somebody who's going to do that for you.

You know, like— What's interesting because looking at the list, I was actually, we'll get to that in episode 3.

The list fits prescriptions.

Yeah. And it's most stuff that we do routinely, but that's cutting edge like out there. So it's really kind of interesting. So I want to first start with the idea of historically, is this a new thing? Is it not new? You know, the Russian flu, of 1889 to 1892 was like, you know, that was the most recent post-viral pandemic type thing where we saw the Russian flu, you know, flu starting Russia, went around the world. And then about 8 years later, we started seeing a lot of these weird neurological issues. People were getting like a Parkinson's, Parkinson's-like kind of thing. And it's really interesting because I guess I kind of dove into this a little bit during during COVID because it's like, how do we treat these people? What do you do? Are there examples of post-viral things going on that we can look back to while waiting for data to pop out? And the answer was yes. And it's really interesting. 80% of what I do for my patients now is what I was doing in March, April, May of 2020, because I was looking back to what had worked in the past.

Yeah.

Some nuances and cool things like methylene blue and, you know, and, you know, HIV antivirals and peptides and some other things that we're doing that Loter-Schnell tracks some things they weren't doing in, you know, Russian flu time.

Yeah.

But probably 80, I'm not sure what your numbers are, but 78% of what I'm doing now is what I was doing at the very beginning.

Yeah. Same.

Same. Cool. You know, one of the interesting things was about the Russian flu is that we saw roughly 8 years after the fact, an increased incidence of death, unexplainable deaths. Neurological issues. And it's really funny 'cause back then they called things differently than we call 'em now. You know, they had different names for 'em.

Yeah.

But we saw that, you know, there's another episode that encephalitis lethargica actually, which I forget what I was reading a book about this not too long ago. And that was actually after the Spanish flu where roughly say in the 8 to 9 years later, you started seeing these weird neurological issues that weren't quite like what we call Alzheimer's or Parkinson's now, but people having really bizarre neurological symptoms. And it was— and the way you think, people were really smart back then. They kind of suspected this is probably a post-viral thing because it's happening in large swaths. And it ran for, you know, 4 to 6, up to 8 years afterwards. And it kind of puckered out because obviously the people had that. But my question is, are we going to see something like that? Um, 6 or 8 years later, and we're actually in that window. We're getting close to it. Yeah, we're getting close to it. Um, I am working with someone right now close in my family who's just started having dementia. And some of the conversation is, is this somehow related to the pandemic? Yeah.

Something infectious.

Yeah. 'Cause we're coming in that, that one was a big hit.

I mean, statistically here, a third of those people died. A third were permanently disabled. Only one-third recovered. 33% of the half a million people worldwide that were affected by that, that, that Spanish flu.

Yeah.

Like, that's crazy to me.

Well, one of the interesting things is when I read a couple books about the Spanish flu, and it's interesting, a lot of the data we got about Spanish flu, um, we projected it. We said, you know, all these hundreds of millions, whatever, died. We took European numbers and projected it to Africa and India and Asia. Even though we didn't have data. So it was like, look at what happened in Europe. And what, when did Spanish flu happen in Europe and America? It was at the end of, you know, World War I. Started in a bunch of military recruits, which were chronically malnourished, horrible situations. That's where it started and spread. And we assumed that it was happening in the rest of the world. But we, there's some history that suggests that actually wasn't that bad. And which is similar to the whole COVID story. Like, why was it so bad in America, Mexico, but it wasn't that bad in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Yeah.

You know, place. So the question is—

Comorbidities.

Yeah. Is there something else going on that made it worse in America or the Spanish flu? And it's really interesting because at the same time, this was interesting. When you look at the pathology of people who did really bad with Spanish flu, What was the one, the newest drug on the market at that point in time that was being used like candy? Aspirin. Now we know about Reye's syndrome now, but seriously, some of the pathology on people's lungs and livers, what, what kind of story that you, they had this hepatocellular breakdown. So part of the question is how horrible the Spanish flu was in younger people. Was there an aspirin toxicity component to that? I don't know.

Yeah.

But reading like some of the history stuff behind, you're like, huh, makes you kind of wonder. And then it's kind of, how, what does that mean for now? Like, well, how people, you know, I don't know about, you know, I, to this day, none of my patients died from COVID during the type thing. And one of the things I was doing the most starting in 2003 and 2004 was checking people's vitamin D levels and giving them vitamin D. Yeah. And we now know that's the most single most important nutrient. For preventing death from COVID And so all of a sudden, how can we take this information and put it together and give people actionable things that we can do going forward now that the government funding's kind of pulling back in some of these places? Yeah.

And that is the lowest hanging fruit, right? It's a nutrient that everybody should be optimizing anyway because beyond COVID, beyond long COVID, beyond post-infectious sequelae, there's data for days on vitamin D, serum vitamin D levels above 50 or 60 that decrease your cardiovascular and cancer risk. And so, it's not just about, am I immunocompetent to fight off a virus or recover from a virus, but rather, are my bones going to be healthy? Is my blood pressure going to be appropriate? Am I going to have less cardiovascular risk? Am I going to have less cancer risk? And it's just a nutrient, but it's a nutrient that's so important and that everybody should be taking to get to a serum level above 60, in my opinion.

Yeah. I mean, and It's funny how there's a cancer care, Dr. Merrick, Paul Merrick wrote a book, Cancer Care. I don't know if you've read that, but it's really interesting. He uses a lot of alternative medications for cancer patients. And then he, he was trained in South Africa and where they have to use a lot of cheaper things. And so the whole idea of using metformin to treat PCOS as well as a weight loss drug, as well as to help with your gut issues, cuz it increases akromancia in your gut tenfold like that. Those, that's a repurposed drug. GLP-1s for MCAS, for chronic fatigue and fiber, for POTS, for inflammation that we, that we're now, everybody knows about now.

Autoimmunity.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a repurposed drug. And so that's kind of, he did that for like a bazillion things. And point is vitamin D. And it's really funny, his book has about some 1,500 or 1,600 citations. It's like 50 pages of citations. So it's, it's, it's kind of sort of well cited. Yeah. And if your vitamin D level in a female is over about 120, which scares most of us, that reduces your risk for breast cancer recurrence or metastasis similar to, and in some cases better than an aromatase inhibitor.

That's pretty impressive.

That's so, so, so all my cancer pa— breast cancer patients or epithelial cell, breast, colon, lung, prostate, I want their D levels as close to 100 as I can get.

Yeah.

And I'm, I'm checking PTHs and calcium. Yeah. Because, you know, I'm making sure I don't make them hypercalcemic, get kidney stones. But it's like, if you do that, it's pretty safe.

Yeah. And it, but again, like the cutoff at 100, it's arbitrary in my opinion. Like that, that, that is a truncated range. It should go to at least 150. Well, and so I have patients that, you know, as we are getting their D levels elevated to where I want them to be, they might overcompensate and sometimes we shoot above 100. And again, I have yet to see a patient with toxicity. We, we scale back because of. Medical legal liability. But the reality is, is like, I personally have a vitamin D level of 117 and I don't care because that's where I feel best. And so I leave it there. You know, it's, that's my personal decision. But with a patient, it's a little bit different. Those ranges are established for different reasons, not for the stuff we're talking about, not for optimization. It is based on a population average, which is sick and overweight, and it is to prevent a deficiency state, not to produce the best benefit of that individual.

And to your point, there've been these population studies looking at African kids in Sub-Saharan Africa, D levels in the summertime down there, which is super bright, 200 to 300.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, with no side effects.

None. Yeah. Yes. And so, all of a sudden, it's like, okay, you know, and this is vitamin D. Yeah. Take zinc, take NAC, take selenium, take, you know, lowest naltrexone, take GLP-1s, take all of a sudden, like all these things we have, take quercetin, take whatever. They're all super nuanced just like this.

Yeah.

And that's where I think, you know, this toolkit skillset that we used in, in the beginning of COVID when it was just acute, now it's long, applies to a whole bunch of things.

Yeah.

And, um, I think that's the point is when people listen to this to realize not just COVID is like this, but it's like heart disease, it's diabetes, it's chronic fatigue, it's POTS, it's dysautonomia.

It's all a continuum too. Like the treatment, the treatments that exist. May also depend on where you are in your journey associated with this illness. I mean, like there's, there's a different treatment sequelae or different treatment, let's say armamentarium for acute COVID then versus long COVID, the same way that if someone has cardiovascular risk, but no evidence of plaque or someone who has actual plaque and stenosis, like it's, it's all relative. You got to meet the person where they're at and then explain what the treatment options are. There's a lot of overlap, but it's not all one size fits all, same, same. So that's really important to understand as well. Like LDN across the board, probably for all these patients, but like you're not necessarily flooding the system with high dose C, high dose D, high dose zinc, unless you're acutely ill. And then once it's long COVID, you just want to kind of optimize those levels and you're working more at other aspects, which we're going to get into, like the mitochondrial dysfunction or persistence of spike protein or reactivation of other latent viruses. That's when now the acute treatment plan shifts gears to something a little bit more nuanced. But again, if you don't know until you see these individuals and then you got to test and, and there's no standardization. And like you said, they pulled the funding and closed the clinic. So how's anybody going to get that information?

Yeah. And I'm in. And so while we're doing this, and I'm just going to go and read this because I'm between 2023 and 2025, a network of federally funded long COVID clinics across the United States. Started closing their doors. The grants have been expired, expiring. The NIH Recovery, which was the billion-dollar research initiative, started winding down. And how many, and the question is how many approved therapies came out of this billion-dollar-plus research initiative? And the answer is zero. Yeah. But the basic thing is that the government's kind of done with long COVID. And we know that this is, this is our chronic fatigue fibro, chronic Lyme disease, mold kind of thing where it's, you have to, you have to have like 8 specialties, 9 specialties really be able to address this. And our current research system where it's like we do one thing. This was Dale Bredesen's issue with his Alzheimer's work, you know, End of Alzheimer's. He had to leave the country and go to Australia to set up a research protocol. 'Cause he is like, I'm doing 13 to 30 different things.

Yeah. It's, it's 8 specialties if you're practicing in the silos of conventional medicine. Or I'll give you that one functional medicine doctor.

Yeah. Well, well-trained with clinical experience.

Right.

That's been doing this for a bit, you know?

Right.

And that's what we're talking about. And now, now that they're pulling back, it's like, what about the 17 to 23 million Americans who are still suffering? Not quite. And that's 8% of the population. That's a lot. And that's people we know about, you know, the original numbers about 10% of people with who got COVID would get long COVID. So, which that's not, that's not too far off of that number, but Yeah. So the history, you know, early 2020, I remember my first long COVID patient I saw was May of 20. I was like, this is long, you know, it was called long haulers at that point. Well, it didn't get called long haulers till August.

Yeah.

But you know, when was it officially recognized as a thing? And the answer is the WHO published a formal clinical case in 2021.

So like 12 months.

Yeah.

A year later.

Yeah. And so point being is that if you're waiting for social media, Instagram, Facebook, news reporters, establishment to tell you like where the cutting-edge stuff is. You're gonna— in a year is actually pretty good because typically it's like years.

Yeah.

Um, but you're always going to be behind the 8-ball, which is unfortunate because we're dealing with these people now that are sick.

Yeah. And I think that that timeline was truncated because it was a, it was a pandemic, not an epidemic. It was a world event. And so there were other organizations leaning, and World Health Organization— this wasn't just our federal government. And so as, as heels get dragged, this was kind of pushed along a little bit. I remember my first case too. I was in the ER at the time, and so my cases were clearly severe. And it was actually someone in the military who had been overseas and he was young and he was incredibly fit. I mean, the guy was built, had no known medical problems, was a nonsmoker, came in in respiratory distress. We wound up having to intubate him because there's nothing that we can do to keep his oxygen up. And we didn't know what was going on. And he had that kind of bilateral pneumonia looking on the chest X-ray, which again, hadn't been described yet. No inclination that this was viral. Um, so you kitchen sink it. Guy gets broad spectrum antibiotics. He's treated as pneumonia with sepsis and respiratory distress. ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and That guy wound up going into the intensive care unit. He wound up going on ECMO. He wound up getting a lung transplant. He survived, but barely, and only because of his baseline health. Months later is when we started calling it COVID. And I thought about that case and I was like, oh my God, that guy was a COVID case. And I had no idea. Yeah. No one did. They just thought this was like random outlier. And, and they were, when he was still awake, just like pummeling this guy with questions about sexual promiscuity and IV drug use and like, where in the world have you been? 'Cause they're start thinking like outta the box with infectious disease stuff and, and they couldn't find anything.

Was that before everything was going in Italy?

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

It was early.

Early, early.

Yeah.

It's, you know, my probably first COVID person probably was someone, you know, even before that, um, who had November the year prior, um, had been hospitalized for pneumonia. Got out, came back and see me, and they're like 8 weeks after still with coughing, still wheezing, still not feeling well, still feeling tired, fatigued. And I seen them like probably December timeframe. So that was before I even, even had started hearing about this. But we now know that we have DNA evidence that was, it was here March of 2019. So, but the point is that, so what now? How does this help us now? And I think talking about, you know, I call it the Tale of Two Cities, you know, you know, you know, we have, you know, if you read the book, The Tale of Two Cities, it's actually a great book.

Yeah.

But you got basically London and Paris, right? And two totally different things going on during the French Revolution. But that's kind of like, you know, integrative medicine, functional medicine, and the traditional world with COVID Like one group is actually caring for these people and managing it, having great results. And one, one, one side is like, like, oh my gosh, that's the end of, you know, everything. And yeah, what are we gonna do?

And what do we do?

What do you guys over there doing?

Who's responsible for this?

Yeah.

Who do we put this on? And then like, that's when multi- multidisciplinary clinics start to pop up. Yeah. Because when, whenever you see a multidisciplinary clinic, unless it's well organized and well-meaning and well researched, I mean, I guess they're all well-meaning, but like well organized, it, it, to me that always means that no one really, because of the siloed nature of conventional medicine, no one's claiming ownership over these cases. No one wants to steer the ship. So it's like, okay, we need pulmonology cuz there's clearly a respiratory issue. Oh, now we're seeing cardiac sequelae. We need cards on board. Um, now we're seeing all these neuropsychiatric issues. Let's get psych involved, but who's guiding it? Who's really pulling all the strings? They're just weighing in on their separate organ systems. When the pathophysiology is so deep-rooted and goes down to a cellular level, like you have to understand systems biology in order to understand complex illness like this, and you have to treat it as such. Otherwise, yeah, you might get their lungs a little better and their breathing accordingly, and you might prevent a heart attack. But they still have, you know, some cardiac decompensation. Like the reality is, is that it's not the right approach. And, and I think that's, that's really the problem.

Yeah. And in 2021, that's when we started seeing some multidisciplinary clinics popping up. And that's just a fancy way of saying a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, and a, a different sub-specialists, like kind of sort of saying, hey, we'll kind of band together and help these patients. Which, you know, locally at the local medical school looked, looked like a physical med rehab physician, which is pretty stoop, doing some pretty cool things.

Yeah.

Using the LEAF for treating some of the people's like palpitations and stuff. But they were just kind of like, you stay in your, your wheelhouse, you stay in your wheelhouse. I'll be the person kind of oversees it. So if you have lots of palpitations, the cardiologist sees it. Short of breath, the pulmonologist sees it. They follow up with the physical med rehab. Kind of got into a little bit of physical therapy, which was interesting because a lot of these people were hypermobile and developed pain syndromes, but it's still very siloed and not truly integrative in the realizing that, okay, why are these people still suffering? And right now, this is, we're recording this in 2026. What I'm seeing with a lot of my long COVID people are a lot of the dysautonomia, POTS, um, chronic fatigue, fibro type stuff, brain fog, residual symptoms. Not as much as like the heart at this stage, the heart and lung stuff. But we, we'd see that with Epstein-Barr or Lyme or CMV or post-concussive syndrome.

Or CIRS.

Or CIRS or mast cell activation syndrome. And depending, and then depending what world you're in right now, we either think that long COVID is a CIRS phenomena, which is part of chronic inflammatory response syndrome, which is like the mold stuff.

Yeah. Biotoxins.

The biotoxin, or it's a muscle activation syndrome phenomena, which I kind of think it's, it straddles both of those, but that's cool because it means there's also interventions we can do to help people get better. But are the academic places talking about that? No, they're actually folding now. And so it's coming back to us in the integrative functional medicine world to kind of keep helping people and keeping this forward. But at the same time, realizing that, you know, if every physician in the country right now became a integrative and functional medicine doctor, like overnight, we would still need about 3 to 5 times more providers than we have to take care of people. So we have to educate people and to take charge of their health because ultimately, you know, it's just not—

some of the DIY stuff that you were referring to. I mean, it has to be, it has to be cooperative. I mean, there's just not enough of us to do it. And what were the clinics actually doing? You know, like collecting data.

It was just collecting data. It was like collecting symptoms list and then seeing how you feel every time. And that's how we knew that all you just, you know, you know, Oh, 1/3 of people will still have long COVID up to a year later. And oh, maybe 10 to 20% still have symptoms 2 years later. That's where we got that data from was because, but it wasn't like, okay, how do you, how do people respond to letrozole, naltrexone, or methylene blue? Or are they getting checked for reactivation of Epstein-Barr or Lyme? Or, you know, for my first long COVID patient, their home and workplace were riddled with mold. And so all of a sudden COVID was the trigger that caused them to have chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And they didn't start getting better until they— we started doing mold work on them.

Yeah. So overflowed their bucket, flipped them into SIRS. Every one of my long COVID patients is a SIRS patient. And I don't know if that's coincidence, but they just are. Now, I'm not saying that COVID caused their SIRS, but it was one of the, the inflammatory immune-mediated, dare I say, biotoxin-associated hits that pushed them over the edge. Because again, like if you're genetically predisposed to biotoxins and you can't antigen present properly, your immune system doesn't communicate from innate to adaptive. What happens when you get a really bad novel virus? You're not getting antibody recruitment. You're not getting killer T cell recruitment. This is maybe where some of the persistence of virus lives. This is maybe where these, these persistence of spike protein and all that, the polarization that we see with T cells that allows for latent EBV to become reactive. Like that all makes sense to me. And in that demographic, that's where we see a lot of overlap of dysautonomia and mast cell and other things. So. I think it's just interwoven. So it has to be kind of addressed, worked up, treated as an interweaving.

And I'll, I want to say something on a side note for that real quick before I mention something else here. One of the issues with some of these retained spike protein retaining, which we've seen with Lyme and seen with a bunch of other, this is not the first time we've seen this, but part of that has to do with lipid medicine. If people has a, have a mismatch in their omega-3, omega-6s, they have lipid rafts, they've oxidized lipids, they have long-chain fatty acids. All of a sudden, these things will get stuck in the cell membranes of white blood cells, red blood cells, every blood cell. And what is the fix for that? It's lipid medicine. It's PC, butyrate, TUDCA. And it's interesting how with IV—

Quality 6s and 3s.

Yes, correct. Yeah. Improving bile production, et cetera. But all of a sudden, using IV phosphatidylcholine, using PC, I'm seeing some of my patients with those that were stuck getting better. And so it's just continuing to evolve, continue to change. But my point to that is as of 2023 and now 2025, we're seeing these places close. Some of these things we're talking about just aren't going to be amplified and taken to the level of the masses because we're— the funding shut down. And now let's talk about the integrative response to this because from the very beginning, you know, we, we were there seeing people. But then the IFM, yeah, it was probably 4 or 6 months in, started having like a series where educating, like, this is what we're learning now.

Institute for Functional Medicine.

Yeah. Institute for Functional Medicine. We start educating the practitioners about these are some things we're learning. It was really super early on. I think it was August maybe.

Yeah. It was really early.

Yeah. They started doing that, their series. How did the, what are some of the things you, in the integrative world? 'Cause we did it a totally different way.

Yeah.

And this is the way we have to move forward with it. But besides the IFM starting their educational things, what other things were going on?

I mean, for me, I remember when, um, Dan Lukács started putting out all those videos and they were just basically like, we're not really sure what's going on, but this is what we know. And it was constant update and constant education and constant revisiting. And it felt like someone was taking the baton and at least leading the charge in how are we going to get these patients better, trying to figure out why some get worse than others and then what we can do about it. And a lot of attention, as always, when it comes to functional medicine was to the gut-brain axis. To nutrition, to high antioxidant, high polyphenol rich diet choices, things that are going to boost your immune system and suppress unnecessary inflammation and oxidative stress, vitamin D optimization. So a lot of basic nutrient stuff, but like it was, it was really making a difference. And when you look in hindsight back at like who had bad outcomes, obese people, diabetics, like, so these are, these are interventions that would help those individuals. Mitigate some of their baseline dysglycemia or baseline inflammation or baseline immune dysregulation or even immune suppression. So I think it was really cool to see in the beginning that they were trying to, to really keep something that was scary and complicated, very simplified, like control what you can, eat more of these anti-inflammatory foods, avoid these bad foods, make sure you're getting a lot of color and high polyphenol. And in hindsight, what's a high polyphenol food that also is a zinc ionophore? Catechins, like green tea, right? So people were getting their EGCG, or you can drink your green tea, getting your vitamin D, getting your vitamin C, getting your berries and the, and the things that go along with it. What's, what's in blueberries? Ellagic acid. What does ellagic acid become? Urolithin. Urolithin does what? Improves mitochondrial biogenesis. Now all of a sudden the mitochondria that were hit are working better because you're eating blueberries. Like it was just really cool to see these simple steps followed along. And then, uh, Merrick and Pierre Corey doing all their repurposed medication work and all that stuff. I mean, they were pariahs. They were constantly testifying in front of every board under the sun. Um, licenses being dangled in the wind. I mean, those guys really stepped up and they started talking about, um, you know, mast cell activation and microclotting. And I remember when there was a lot of conversation around neutrophil traps because these individuals that, that couldn't breathe. And, and had subjective air hunger, but would have like a normal PECT, pulmonary embolism CT, like a spiral CT to rule out a blood clot, or get an expensive cardiac workup and no evidence of endocarditis or myocarditis or heart attack or ischemia or anything. And ultimately it was these microclots and these microemboli that nobody was really seeing because the imaging couldn't pick it up. And so they were symptomatic, but everybody thought they were just crazy. And, and really on, on a, in a hindsight level, we know that that wasn't the case and that fibrinogen levels were spiking and D-dimers were spiking. And then all of a sudden people started adding nattokinase and lumbrokinase and bromelain, which is a proteolytic enzyme from pineapple. And, and it was just this snowball effect of, as we understood the pathophysiology and the sequelae, what are the things that we can do about it? I mean, what were some of the things that you were noticing?

I mean, with Well, we had the IFM doing their thing. We had Dr. Merick, which eventually became the FLCCC. And then we had other individual practitioners being like, "Hey, this is what I'm doing." I remember being on a call with some people looking at, "Hey, in Brazil, they're doing IV vitamin D, you know, 250,000 units when people get in the hospital." Small, you know, 20 or 30 patient things. No one's dying. I'm like, "Whoa, whoa." Well, how hard is it to do just lots of D? And so we, we had a couple of groups of people that eventually solidified, either were our individual physicians doing things. In my group, one of the groups I'm in with, it's called the Masterminds Mast Cells, really all realized there's a mast cell activation aspect to this. So, Pepsid, Claritin, Zyrtec, that eventually became standard in hospitals. You come in with COVID you get Pepsid and Zyrtec. So all these, it was indivi— multiple individuals were kind of discovering similar concepts, but as the practitioners, we're there look learning from all these people and saying, okay, I'm boots on the ground now too. At the same time, we were pariahs. We were scoffed at. What's your evidence for that? What's your data for that? Now it's really like, oh yeah, y'all, it's funny how like now we realize those things actually are helpful and no one talks about it. But it's like literally we were struggling with our patients and doing really well, having good outcomes, but at the same time being kind of sort of attacked.

Well, that's when the ivermectin war was being waged. And, um, I mean, low-dose naltrexone, maybe not so much pushback, but the question was, why are you doing it? The answer is pretty easy. I mean, it's anti-inflammatory, it's immune modulatory. I mean, we use it in autoimmune patients. I use it in chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. I use it in SIRS, chronic pain, and all my long COVID patients. I remember, I remember when you had a, um, A woman that wasn't even a patient of yours watched a video that you did randomly about COVID and about ivermectin. Put yourself out there and this woman wrote you because she convinced her primary care doctor to prescribe her ivermectin. She was horribly symptomatic. Nobody was helping her and she immediately got better and was literally like, you saved my life even though you're not my doctor. Thank you so much. Like, that was like pretty moving to hear that.

There's that one. Then there's also one that was a Long COVID with naltrexone, low-dose naltrexone.

Yeah.

And it's just like, but the point is like we were doing things and helping people while everybody else was sitting and being like, I'm waiting for the, you know, I'm waiting for the government. I'm waiting for the system to tell me how to do things. And now that system is closing down and stopping funding. So that's—

which is even slow going, even, even if they were still open. I mean, like it's still slow going. It's what, like 15 16, 17 years before something goes from bench to practice?

You know, it really, it all depends on your data point. If your data point is like a phase, a finished phase 1 to phase 4, yeah. But if your thing is, if your thing, the data point is bench science, then all of a sudden it's like 30 or 40 years. So it depends on where at in the scientific discovery thing you're looking at. But any, you know, from a phase 1 trial, hey, this looks like it's not harmful and might have some benefit to, Phase 3 is approved. Yeah, you're looking at 15 years, but bench science.

Even longer, maybe double. Yeah.

Crazy. So that's, that's, I want to start, stop episode 1 there. Just, there's two different systems. We're going to help people. This is what Integrative and Functional Medicine people do. There are answers out there and people who are out there suffering with Long COVID, and this is any chronic illness. This is also mast cell. This is also chronic Lyme. This is also post-concussive syndrome. This is also Mold, chronic inflammatory response syndrome, you know, whatever, you know, POTS and dysautonomia, you know, all these things. There are answers and these all share a lot of similarities. I'm just wanting to talk about long COVID because this is one example about how we look at stuff. And we do every patient like this, every disease. And it takes, you know, 15, 20 years to figure out how to do this kind of medicine. It's not, you don't figure it out after, you know, 4 years of school and 3 years of residency. So any other parting thoughts before we move on to our next?

No, I think that was a good opener. I think that set the stage for what's to come.

Cool. Well, hopefully this information is helpful. This is a little maybe esoteric, but we'd like to hear your comments below and we will hop on, come back in a few minutes with our next— actually, we're not coming back in a few minutes.

We'll get right, keep on going. We'll see you soon.

See you soon. See you soon, I should say.

Yeah.