WTH?!? The Doctor's Chat Episode 1: COVID Talk

Hey everybody out there on the great world wide web, it's Dr. Greg Eckel.

This is Dr. Jonathan Nadal, and we.

Are coming at you from NatureCures Clinic in Portland, Oregon. And we really wanted to get some information out there. A lot of folks have been talking about it. We want to talk about long haulers and long Covid and post viral syndrome. There's a, you know, we've been seeing a lot of folks in the clinic with a lot of concerns having symptoms and we want to dispel some myths. We want to educate you about what's going on. We want to let you know there's nothing new here under the sun.

Right, right.

You know, it's got a name, Long haulers, Long Covid. And it's got some symptoms that we're going to cover today. But you know, post viral syndrome has been around. I mean, we did some fun fact searching for you all and came up with some, you know, fun facts for around the dinner table.

Right? Yeah, yeah. Even, even when we think of the first SARS coronavirus or the MERS coronavirus, years ago, there was evidence of having a, what we would call now a long hauler syndrome. Right. But we dug further and even in the 1890s in the UK when there was some of the Russian influenza, there was history of fatigue and insomnia for months after. And this is on the public record, so this really isn't something that's new.

1892. Right. One of the earliest recorded post viral syndrome symptoms. Right. So this isn't new. Viruses do what viruses do. What is new though is we're not getting educated about how our bodies work, how virus, what viruses do and what the expectations are. So, you know, really it's in the name of the virus. Right. Sars. So just a remembering of what S A, R s Severe acute respiratory syndrome. So that is a viral, it's been a viral illness. It's much less significant. I mean, I know there's still talks of case numbers out there, but ultimately we want to know how deadly the virus is. And there's a lot of things that we can do to raise your resiliency. So Overall, like acute COVID 19 is defined as symptoms up to four weeks after the illness. So it's not that. And that actually is a little bit of a short period timeframe for what the expectation is. Like not everybody's popping up sprightly like a young pup after a month of the illness, you know, I personally, I had the delta variant and it literally, it kicked my ass. It Kicked me in the tuchus. I was down. I was down for two weeks. It took me about six weeks to recover and then probably about three months really, to get my full energy and faculties back on cognition. But, you know, so that's my individual story, and that's with doing everything under the sun, from a Weber laser wristwatch to nutraceuticals to IV therapy to exosomes to peptides. I mean, I threw everything I know at it.

Right.

Not everybody has access to all of that type of care. So post Covid, or the long haulers we're calling, it's greater than or equal to two months after the illness, after the first onset of symptoms. So it has an impact on the patient's life and not just explained by alternative diagnosis, because we do need to work folks up post viral if things are lingering. Right. So, you know, we. You probably know plenty of people that said, you know, long haulers. I mean, I get calls. Got a call over the weekend on I have Covid kidney. We're seeing a lot of cardiovascular symptoms, neurologic symptoms. So what is it? Long haulers. So post viral syndrome. Did you want to say anything else about some of the research that you found from back.

From way back. Historical. Yeah, I mean, it was all over the periodicals and diaries of even the prime ministers, like dealing with the influenza. You know, it's just, It's.

That's late 1800s, folks. So this isn't new. So we don't want you to think like there's some, you know. Yes, SARS COV 2 was new.

Right.

The novel pandemic virus. But viruses have been around. We've evolved with them.

Yeah. I mean, even things like the chronic fatigue syndrome that we've seen in clinic all the time, that's due to a combination of viruses or Lyme, and that's been going on for decades. So. Just that. That concept is not new.

Right. So the viruses can lead, if they're not cleared effectively or efficiently from the body, into chronic fatigue, the myalgic encephalitis, which is an inflammation of the brain that can cause chronic debilitating fatigue. So, you know, this isn't. We're not making light of it. We just want to educate.

Right.

The root word of doctor is dossieri, or teacher. I am fond of saying the emperor wears no clothes, meaning this should be coming at you from public health departments and from the World Health Organization, et cetera. There's a level of censorship that people are becoming more and more aware of, that physicians such as ourselves aren't able to educate people about what to do for their health. So we're going to keep this on the fun fact level and information gathering for you. We're not going to tell you what to do, but we want you to be informed and to understand what is happening out there. Again, I will say the emperor wears no clothes. Predicted about 85 to 95% of the deaths possibly could have been prevented had early intervention or treatments been emphasized rather than a one solution fits all for public health. This is a miserable failure worldwide of public health. I, I'm actually rather disgusted at it and that's, you know, that's just the way it is. But I just, you know, it's kind of a head scratcher at this moment in time of like what the heck just happened. But we've got most common symptoms of post viral of this long haulers. Right. So we've got fatigue, dyspnea, chest pain and cough. So in the research, and there's not great research on this either folks, but we, these, we were kind of saying, oh my gosh, What a spread. 13 to 80% of folks that had Covid illness exhibit or experience fatigue after that two plus month period after the illness. So dyspnea, which is shortness of breath, that's 10 to 71% of folks depending on the study are exhibiting shortness of breath. But chest pain or tightness, that's 12 to 44% of people after Covid and a cough, 17 to 34% and we've seen that dry hacking, irritable cough post Covid. So those are the most common symptoms. Now those aren't the ones that you're hearing about really in the media.

Right.

You know, we're hearing about the more dramatic ones, loss of sense of smell or taste, the dizziness, the tachycardia, the cardiovascular disease, kidney function and illness. And Dr. Nadella, you put together a pretty astute observation as to this whole constellation of symptoms.

Yeah, with the vagus nerve.

Yes.

Yeah. So there's a lot more research finding a potential correlation with the vagus nerve. Now that's one of the longer nerves that we have that runs from the brain down through the torso. Was actually the European Congress of clinical microbiology and infectious disease that was realizing, well what's the connection between the heart rate, GI symptoms and then dizziness and yeah, a lot of that is hitting right on the vagus nerve some way somehow it's impacting that. And well over 60% of patients are exhibiting symptoms with this. As far as the long haulers so it's pretty significant.

That is a big number.

Yeah.

Right. So it is. And so what? One, I want to cover the less common symptoms of long haulers. Right. Because this whole constellation, when we're talking about the vagus nerve, cranial nerve 10, the great wandering nerve, it goes throughout the body, 78 to 90. Actually 90% of that nerve is afferent, meaning it's bringing information to the brain. We always think that the brain controls the whole organization of our body, but this is a nerve that brings in a ton of information to the brain to help our body maintain a homeodynamic state, meaning it will regulate parasympathetic activity, which is how the body regenerates. It's a rest and digest branch of our nervous system. So less common symptoms. We mentioned the loss of sense of smell and taste, joint pain, headaches, sick of syndrome, which is a dryness of the mouth and the throat, rhinitis, a chronic congestive component, or inflammation of your sinus passageway, poor appetite, dizziness, which is. Dizziness has multiple factors. It could be from tachycardia, racing heart rate, could be from orthostatic changes, meaning from sitting to standing or lying to sitting to standing. Positional change. People get lightheaded because of a drop of blood pressure, myalgia, which is in the chronic fatigue and myalgic component, which is a muscle pain and body pain, insomnia, alopecia, loss of hair, which is a significant. And I see that a lot in, in our women patients.

Yeah.

Sweating and diarrhea. So these are on the less common component. But I know you, if you know anybody that got Covid, and I'm guessing that you did, and it just depend what level or at what point in the last two years somebody got Covid because Covid isn't Covid anymore. Right. It has evolved into a weaker virus that we're seeing out there, more like the common cold. Can it still be deadly? Certainly viruses can be deadly, but we want to really give you some information around, well, who's the most susceptible for complications? You also found some good information on severity of illness linked.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because we find. So there, there's two main things to branch out with. There's like, so what's going on in the body that can become seriously wrong, which is the idea of multi system inflammatory syndromes. And that's where we have impacts on the heart, lungs, kidneys, even the nervous system, like Guillain Barre. It's pretty scary, just temporary paralysis. But we need to think beyond that. What's the population or what are the people or the factors that increase the risk for developing Covid and even more just long term worsening complications. And that's where we get into some of the factors like type 2 diabetes. Right, right.

Yeah.

And then we also found that if there's actual viral markers of COVID but also of ebv. Right.

Epstein Barr virus.

Right. Yeah. Both of those are actual risk factors.

Yeah.

You know, a lot of people haven't even heard of EBV or know what, what it's about. You know, so there's those things and then also a variety of different autoimmune conditions. Yes. So if there's auto antibodies circulating the blood, it kind of sets the stage for this prolonged fluctuating inflammatory process that Covid could really sink its teeth into.

Yeah. So those four, you know, really another kind of a broader category that we can lay over that. So this is for who's most susceptible. And it talks about the metabolic resiliency of the population around the world. I mean, you know, we look in the US With a higher death rate, which I think is really indicative of we have a diseased, sick society. We do not have healthy people in the United States. And that again, is a failure of public health. You know, we know chronic illness is. There is a huge component of this is lifestyle. You found actually, as we were going through saying, okay, how do we want to lay this out? How do we want to talk about this with folks? And you said, oh, look at this. This researcher really was looking at like, we could learn from long haulers.

Yeah.

How?

So what we're learning isn't just about long haulers or long Covid. What we're realizing is this is more just chronic illness in general. Like, what they're learning from that is what they're realizing needs to be applied to chronic illness in general. We're coming at it from the other end. It's like, let's find some individualized health care that can actually see people where they're at and deal with underlying conditions so that it doesn't get to this.

Right, right. So we have been specializing in chronic disease and illness. You know, one of the things that I say is, you know, the western model really makes our practice because it's broken. Unfortunately, the system is broken and we see that all. Like I am again saying the emperor wears no clothes. They're not coming down from on to save us from ourselves. Like the government does not know better for what is what was responsible for this body or that body or your body. You know, we need to educate people about how to make choices for themselves, not dictate or mandate what to do for your health. Because again, the emperor wears no clothes. If it was truly about saving lives, we would have made early intervention treatments which is showing time and time again in the research to show that could have prevented a lot of the deaths rather than having people go home until they got really sick to then they needed hospital interventions is the complete bass ackwards way to handle this thing. Maybe I have 2020 vision looking backwards, but we actually have been saying it from the beginning. You can look at my informed consent video that I put out early in the pandemic because I found people were not being informed as to what the choices were made for them. So here, most susceptible type 2 diabetes. Well, that is a preventable illness, it's very treatable and it's actually reversible given the right information. And that is not following the society's directives or rules for diet or for medication. So again, I'm not offering any advice here. I just want to give some education and give you some alternative viewpoints as to what kind of reality we can have together. And one of the reasons why we created this platform, we are really jazzed up to bring more of these to you and educate you about another approach. So the other components of most susceptible asthma immunocompromised folks and it's also proportional to how bad the illness was. Right. So what we're seeing now with the new derivatives of COVID aren't the first rounds of COVID right. Those were more significant illnesses up through, even up through Delta Omicron a little bit. Now it's starting to really devolve in its potency as a virus, which is typically how we expect viruses to mutate, is they don't want to kill the host, they just want to propagate themselves around the globe as long as possible. So that is on who's most susceptible. Another component that doesn't get talked about really is the psychological or cognitive effects of, of COVID and the post Covid long hauler syndrome. Now these are small studies that we found out there, but like 100 patients with acute Covid that were actually hospitalized, so discharged from the hospital and they got some stats from these hundred people. 24% reported PTSD. That is a pretty traumatic event going into the hospital, especially with COVID because of the, you know, what was being portrayed as to what the outcomes were there. 18% new or worsened memory problems after discharge from the hospital with COVID and 16% concentration issues that were new or worsened. And, and then this really speaks into this inflammation of the microvasculature of the body.

Right.

Of inflammation, inflammatory cascade throughout the body. We do know it was the body's response, response to the virus that was the deadly component of getting into the cytokine storm, etc. And then we want to talk about recovery of like expectations here. If you do nothing, you know, if you just follow the guidelines of what's out there as well, there's nothing you can do. Well, then you run into, what did you say? 43% worldwide?

43% worldwide. If you got Covid, about 43% will go on to develop the long term complications.

Long term complications. And this is, this would be the case with any, this is with any viral illness you can have a post viral syndrome. So again, it's not new, but what is new is we want to get the information out is there is a lot that you can do. Now, unfortunately, we're not going, we, we're not going to put it out here because we'd like this video to stay up. So just so you know, in the state of Oregon where we practice, there actually was a law written saying physicians cannot, cannot educate people on what to do for Covid. You can't say you're treating Covid. I mean it is, it's asinine is what it is. And you know, I'm appalled at the state of the union and what is happening out there with censorship and education. But our encouragement for you, if you do want to know that, please subscribe, subscribe to this channel, onto our YouTube channel, get on our mailing list because we are educating people in private. We are doing that because it is that important. And this is actually how we get the word out, is sharing it. Sharing is caring. Here you go. And so any last remarks that you want to put out there?

Just the numbers keep shocking. I mean, so 43% worldwide, but in the US that's well over 15 million at this point. Well over 15 million.

15 million people with post viral syndrome.

Yeah. So it's.

Yes. And there is plenty to do in a complimentary and alternative medicine fashion. We are naturopathic doctors and licensed acupuncturists practicing Chinese medicine. You know, there is a lot we're seeing people recover, getting their sense of smell back, their hair growing in very lush and full, getting rid of their fatigue, their moods, their memories coming back. We're tired of seeing people getting pushed into a chronic disease state of perpetual fatigue or Rebounding back into this chronic fatigue pattern with lack of smell and taste and motivation, et cetera. So if that's you, please get in touch with us. Recovery and hope. So I want to finish it up with this last piece of what is a general expectation because what's getting portrayed is if you're not over your symptoms in a week, you have long haulers and now you're doomed forever because you're going to have this post viral syndrome, the doom and gloom. We're done with that. We're done with shame, blame and guilt. There's a lot we can DO. Study of 410 Swiss patients. So that's not in a North American or American population of the patients that we're seeing here, but in Swiss, 40% roughly persistent symptoms seven to nine months after illness. So that is, we could say okay, that's a very small cohort, small study though. It's what we got. We got to use, we got to use the research. When we got it, 21% of those people had fatigue. 17% loss of taste of smell or smell or taste loss of that, 12% difficulty with their breath, the dyspnea and 10% had headaches post viral component. So just to give you again some timelines, the fatigue, you know, in general, depending on how severe the illness and what your pre existing conditions were, three plus months should be able to clear that in a healthy metabolically adaptive individual. The dyspnea, 3 to 12 months. There's some blood work that we would probably run like D dimer if that's going on. If you're having trouble breathing past the three month mark. So there is some blood work to do. Investigation there. The chest pain or tightness around two to three months after the first signs of the illness. So it is, we just want to provide a little hope, little education here. If you guys have questions or gals have questions, put them in underneath the video. Wherever you are checking this out, please share with us. We also are very receptive to what you want to know. So ask us some questions we'd love to get back on. We're going to try this new going live component a little bit more frequently for you. Thanks for tuning in and have a great day.

Dr. Greg Eckel, Dr. Jonathan Nadal and.

This is Nature Cures Clinic coming at you. Thanks everybody.