Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: COVID-19 Vaccine, Functional Medicine, And More

Hey, podcast community. It's Dr. Mark here and I'm so excited to introduce a revolutionary new platform my team and I have been working on. It's called Dr. Hyman Plus and it's a premium membership exclusive for my community. With Dr. Hyman Plus you get a ton of private content and special access that nobody else gets. Now the yearly membership gives you exclusive access to ad-free Doctors Pharmacy podcast episodes, access to all of my docu-series including the Longevity Roadmap and Broken Brain 1 and 2, plus all the bonus content. You get monthly functional medicine deep dives where one of our doctors goes deep into a health topic to tell you.

Everything you need to know.

You also get access to my monthly Ask Mark Anything Q&A where I answer the Dr. Hyman Plus community's biggest health and wellness questions. and this Q&A is only accessible with a membership. Because I'm so excited to share this platform with you, I'm releasing a teaser of my brand new Ask Dr. Mark Anything episode. And I hope you enjoy it and I hope you head over to drhyman.com/plus that's drhyman.com/plus for more information.

Okay, here we go.

Hi everyone, my name is Kaya. I am the director of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries and I'm joined here today with Drew Perewitz and Darcy Gross and of course the expert himself, Mark Hyman. And this is our first ever Dr. Hyman Plus Ask Me Anything and this is the first of many. So continue to submit your questions@drhymanplus and we'll keep doing this. So let's get started. I'm gonna pass it over to Drew.

For the first question. Great, thanks Kaya and welcome to our Dr. Hyman Plus audience and welcome to the man who is the plus, Dr. Hyman. We have a bunch of great questions here from our community. So I'm going to jump right in with one of the very popular questions that came in in this world of COVID-19 and all things pandemic, people are trying to make the right decision for their health. And a big part of that includes making the decision around vaccines and how to go about it. And I want to start off with, you did a whole podcast on it. So we will cover some of the topics you covered there. But really, first and foremost, people want to know from your perspective as a human being and all also a doctor, but you're making a decision for your personal health. Is Dr. Hyman planning on getting the vaccine? And if so, when would that be or how is he thinking about it?

You go right for the hard question right away. There's no warm up. There's nothing, just right in there. Give me the tumbler. So the answer is, I qualified yes. And I will qualify what I mean by Yes. First of all, what's going to happen to our society is there's not going to be a vaccine mandate. But if you want to travel, if you want to go to a restaurant, if you want to get an airplane, if you want to book a hotel, if you want to rent a car, you might have to have a vaccine certificate. And those are decisions that individual businesses will make. And I think that's going to drive who decides to get a vaccine or not. With that said, I think the vaccine world right now around COVID, has a lot of good science around it, but it's still a little bit like building the jumbo jet while you're flying it because we don't have real long-term data on a lot of the questions that are still persist out there about vaccines. So let me sort of just give you like a primer on what the vaccines are and how they work and what we know and what we don't know. And now there's about five different phase three trials and clinical vaccines that are sort of really happening right now. There's, there's, there's the Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, and there's others actually that are emerging from China and Russia and so forth. So there's a bunch in the pipeline. There are different, some are mRNA vaccines, some are adenovirus vaccines, some use other technologies and vectors to get an immune response. So it's not like there's a uniform vaccine that works. For example, the AstraZeneca vaccine turns out not to work against the South African variant, whereas others might. So we're sort of in a learning curve, but here's the framework. There's vaccines, for example, that prevent permanent, that cause permanent immunity, like the measles vaccine. So you would get a measles vaccine and you'd get it once and you're done for life. You should never get measles again. And that is what we call sterilizing immunity. Then there's a flu vaccine, which you keep having to get year after year. It doesn't actually make you permanently immune and it also doesn't prevent the flu all the time. It may reduce the severity of the flu. And coronavirus vaccines are very much like the flu vaccine in the sense that they're for respiratory viruses. They are something that probably won't lead to long-lasting immunity. So meaning you might have to get the vaccine every six months, every year, two years, who knows right now. It doesn't actually prevent you from getting the infection. So maybe reduce your risk. So there's 40% of people in some of the vaccine trials that got COVID who'd already been vaccinated compared to the placebo group. That's a lot. There's also evidence that if you get the vaccine, you can still get it again if you've already had it. In other words, if you had COVID, you got the vaccine, well, you can still get COVID again. It also seems that there may be while maybe reduction in transmission, it doesn't eliminate transmission. So you could get the vaccine and you could still be asymptomatic, you could still be mildly symptomatic and still spread it. So it doesn't mean that you can kind of walk around as if you're immune and you're never going to get it and then you might have it and spread it to somebody else. So it's really quite problematic. And I think, you know, from a public health point of view, if 90 plus percent of us got the vaccine, it would make a big difference because it would lead to a reduction in the overall caseload, the hospitalizations, the ICU user buckling. I mean, I just was heartbreaking. I was listening to NPR or some radio station the other day, and there was a hospital in Ireland that was just overwhelmed. And the whole system there, they have 900 ICU beds. They're all overflowing. They're having to ship their patients to Austria and using military planes. I mean, it's horrible when the healthcare system just can't handle it.

So that could happen.

But the truth is that 90% of the population is not going to get vaccinated. So what is that going to mean? Well, it's going to mean that probably half will get vaccinated and half won't be. And the half that is vaccinated will probably feel great. And I'm like, I've heard these people say already, I'm going out now. Like, I'm fine. And they're gonna start infecting everybody else even though they're mildly symptomatic. And that other group will lead to increasing caseloads, increasing total deaths. The percent of people with COVID dying will be less because the severity will be less, but the total number of people getting it and the total number of people dying will be higher. So I don't think we're out of the woods yet. I don't think vaccines are universal panacea. And in my opinion, they're one part of the puzzle to help address COVID, including, you know, obviously the mitigation strategies, which while not perfect are effective. But even more so, I mean, I just got a text this morning from, you know, one of my friends, colleagues, whose husband, who's, you know, an African-American guy who's very overweight, who's extremely high risk, got COVID. And I said, okay, immediately start on this, you know, eat this way, take these supplements that are, you know, directed to COVID like vitamin A and vitamin D and zinc and vitamin C and quercetin and a number of other things that we know from the data are helpful for immune function or antiviral. And she said he was mildly ill for a couple of days, and then he was better. And she was with him in the house, and she took the supplements and never got sick and never turned positive. So I think, I think we, we have a lot to learn about how lifestyle and nutrition and upgrading our metabolic health can help us to become immune resilient and prevent us from actually getting the virus and even lead to a better outcome. So, and we know from early data, for example, around vitamin D, you're 80% less likely to get, sorry, 94% less likely to get into the ICU and die with COVID if you have good vitamin D levels. And if you have low levels, you're 80% more likely to get sick and die. So that's a simple intervention that can really dramatically help. And when you combine them all together, you basically help to reduce the overall inflammation in your body and get healthy. So are vaccines gonna save us as it seems to be, you know, rapport in the press? My opinion is no. Now the question is, will I get the vaccine? Which I'm trying to avoid, but I will not. And the answer is probably yes, probably right now. I'm right now sequestered pretty well away from people and don't really, plan on traveling. But if I get that back in circulation, if I'm starting to see patients again, if I'm being exposed or exposing others, I certainly will plan on it. And I also think, you know, I'm gonna wait a little while and I think we're gonna learn more about, you know, what the vaccines do and so forth. So I'm not in a rush, but I'm not opposed to vaccines. And I, you know, I generally don't like the idea of, you know, the mass amount of vaccination schedules that we have in America. I think they're a little bit of an overreach and I think the, you know, the, the, the vaccine is a really important public health measure. But, you know, I remember being at a conference with, you know, a pediatrician from University of California, San Francisco, who had to present the schedule. And this was even years ago, before it was even bad as it is today. And he says, you know, these are a lot of vaccines. I have to tell you, this is what the academy tells me. I have to tell you. But it's a lot of vaccines to give little kids. So I think we're still, we talk about evidence-based medicine. I think we need to do more research on on vaccines and how they affect people and the implications of who would benefit and who wouldn't. And in fact, Mayo Clinic has a whole field of vaccinomics, which is personalized vaccination strategy. So I think there's a lot of conversations here, but at the end of the day, I think, yes, I'll get a vaccine and I'll wait a little bit until, you know, I'm at higher risk. And then I also understand that it's not the panacea that we all hope it will be. But I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

That's a great answer, very robust and straight to the point, Mark. On the topic of vaccinomics, which I feel like is something interesting that functional medicine has to bring to the table, which is it's already been established that there are certain people that there's maybe not as much evidence with when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine, for example, pregnant women, right? So there's an individual choice, talk about it with your doctor. In the world of functional medicine, they are good and doctors like yourself are good at identifying people who are frail in the eyes of functional medicine but would not be considered frail in the eyes of Western medicine necessarily. What are some other categories of people who really should be having a discussion with their integrative or functional doctor if they're worried that they might be in.

This frail Yeah, I mean, I think you mentioned pregnant women. I think, look, when you do large studies, these are studies on 20, 30,000, 40,000 people, which sounds like a lot, but when they do a study, they try to create, you know, very cross-section or homogenization of the patient population that they study. And so you're really only looking at those people. When you start to give it to not just 30,000, but 300,000, 3 million, 30 million, 300 million people, all of a sudden you're in a different ballgame. You can't say there's evidence about how that's going to work. I mean, if you have autoimmune diseases, if you're pregnant, if you're children, if you're a child, I mean, these groups have not really been carefully looked at. So we need to start to get more data on what happens when you have various conditions, whether you have a, for example, a very highly allergic person, or you're having autoimmune disease, or you're pregnant, or maybe you have cancer. We don't know if you're on immunosuppressive medication for various conditions. So I think we really don't know. And I think it's a matter of time before we start to get the data in. But I'd be cautious about some of these subpopulations. And I would really focus on the things that we do in functional medicine, which is how do you create immunoresilience? And at the very start of the pandemic, I wrote a blog called how to use functional medicine to approach COVID-19. And I think I've learned a few things since then, but I would look back at it and I was like, this is still pretty relevant right now and it talks about what you can do from a lifestyle perspective, what you can do from a supplement perspective to help really boost your immune system and make yourself more immunoresilient.

When you prepare, let's say eventually, if you do, as you said, you're not rushing to get the vaccine, but if it's required in other components or if you start working again with patients, you want to be mindful so you would get it in that instance. When you do get it, thinking out to that moment, some members in our community wondering, would you do anything additional that you aren't doing right now to prepare for it or any recommendations that you would have for other folks who are about to get the vaccine?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a hierarchy of strategies. So, you know, I doubly focus down on my immune system during COVID and I've had some a few immune scares myself. And so I feel, you know, I've doubled down on eating real food. and upgrading my diet. I double down on getting enough sleep and exercising and meditation, and I double down on supplements I'm taking in order to help maximize my chances of having a robust immune system. So I take different classes of stuff, and I'm fairly aggressive. I don't know if everybody has to be, but I think there's the vitamin camp, right? Which is vitamin A, vitamin D, zinc, vitamin C. These are well-established immune modulators and can help. and the risk is very low. And then there's the adaptogenic, this is the adaptogenic type of supplements, for example, like the mushroom family, which can really help build immune resilience. They have a whole class of compounds called polysaccharides, which are really quite robust immune modulators and can help prevent infection, can help recover from infection, have been studied in cancer. And so there's a lot of benefit to these sort of adaptogenic products. And then and then there's a class of compounds that are more sort of, I think, sort of directed at sort of addressing some of the mechanisms of action and there may be coming from plants, for example, like quercetin is a very important derived phytochemical that comes from the peel of oranges or onions and is a very potent immune modulator, anti-inflammatory, and even antiviral. Various supplements such as N-acetylcysteine and others that have been shown to be effective. Glutathione levels tend to be low in people who have poor immune function and in COVID there's been some evidence that glutathione can be helpful. NAD also seems to be helpful in COVID and in certain small studies I've seen. So, these things are things that I would often use anyway, but I do think that it's important that you need to double down on things that really are going to help.

Fantastic. All right. Well, I'm going to pass it over to Darcy who has the next level of questions for you. There's a ton of people that watch the docu-series that are now part of Dr. Hyman Plus. They're very excited to take their health to the next level, but they may not always have access to a doctor like yourself or a functional medicine doctor. So, we have a few questions in that category. So, I'll pass it over to Darcy.

Thank you so much, Drew. Hi, Dr. Hyman. So we had a ton of people. We had a ton of people writing in just super jazzed about functional medicine. A lot of people haven't ever heard of the functional approach before. So when they watched this docu-series, it was their first introduction. And it was a whole new way of thinking. I think a lot of us have felt that way where it's just different than the conventional way of thinking, but yet so hopeful. It really resonates with a lot of people. But we had a lot of people asking, they're just not sure exactly how to find a functional medicine practitioner, and even more so, maybe how you would recommend that they could work either on their own or with their conventional doctor to get a more functional approach. So if you could kind of speak to that.

Absolutely. I think what functional medicine is, first of all, is an approach to addressing your health that focuses not so much on diseases, but focus on health. What's the science of creating health? How do we identify where your imbalances are that are taking you away from optimal health and how do you reset those systems so you can optimize your health? That's really what functional medicine is. And so from a perspective of testing, things I look at are quite different. We do look at all the same regular tests that any doctor will look at, but I do think we look at a layer deeper and the body is really organized into these seven key functional systems that are all connected and all dynamically interacting all the time to create health or disease. And so what I'm really curious about is how are these systems doing? How's your microbiome and your gut? How's your immune system? How's your energy system? Are you making energy effectively? Are you having lots of oxidative stress? Are you detoxifying? Are you overloaded with toxins? How's your, for example, communication system going? What about your hormones, neurotransmitters? How about your structural system all the way from your cells to your biomechanical structure. And then how are all those affected by your lifestyle and various factors like toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, poor diet, which are often the triggers for disease, and those interact with your lifestyle and they create imbalances in these systems that then we're trying to look at. Well, I hope you enjoy that teaser.

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I'll see you there.

Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

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