Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Long-COVID, Radiotherapy, And More

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Hi everyone, welcome to the episode of Ask Mark Anything. My name is Hershel Perth and I'm the Dr. Hyman Plus Community Manager. and I'm joined by Darcy Groves, one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. Hi, Darcy.

Hi, everybody.

And we are here to ask Mark anything. We've collected your questions this month, and we're here to have our expert, Dr. Hyman, answer them. So, hello, Dr. Hyman.

Hi there.

All right, so let's go ahead and get started. Our first question is about long COVID. So we know that you've had some podcasts with some very interesting guests, Dr. Dr. Gallon, and you guys have talked about a supplement protocol for long COVID to help prevent it. And our community wants to know, so we've heard from them, but what would you recommend for someone that could be facing long COVID? What's your go-to list?

I think the important thing is how do you build a robust system and a robust immune system? And how do you make yourself more resilient for whatever happens in life? And particularly around COVID. And I wrote, I think in March or early April, I wrote a blog called Functional Medicine Approach to COVID. And you can go to Dr. Hyman/C19. I haven't updated it, but it's still pretty good in terms of the foundations, which would be for both preventing COVID, for if you've gotten COVID or if you are in a long COVID situation. And that is really upgrading your diet. Food is medicine, and I can't emphasize that enough. So go to that article, look, but essentially it's whole foods, it's adequate protein, your body needs protein for the immune system. It's really important to say your antibodies are made from protein. You need lots of phytochemicals from colorful plant-rich diet. you need to get rid of all the sugar, starch, and processed food. You need to be really well hydrated, just the obvious stuff. Second, you need to make sure your lifestyle is okay. So stress levels, meditation, yoga, deep breathing, sleep, exercise, all critical. So those are foundational and are really important and they matter more than you think. And if you look at the people who are dying or sick from COVID and get really sick, it's the ones who are not doing those things. and then there's the supplement regimen, which I would, you know, sort of, there's a preventive approach, there's a treatment approach, and there's a, you know, post-covid long-haul treatment. So from my perspective, you know, the key is to, is to sort of look at what is, what do the data show? And I think the most important things that we need to be taking are vitamin D. That's probably one, two and three. So if you, if you take nothing else from this entire podcast or anything up and I've said for the last 30 years is take vitamin D every day. It's pennies. 5,000 is usually a vitamin D3 is a reasonable dose. The upper limit that the government says is 4,000, but nobody gets in trouble with 5,000, unless you have some really weird vitamin D absorption issues where you're hyper-absorbing it. So basically, between 2,000 to 5,000 units of vitamin D every day, I think zinc is very important, usually 30 milligrams twice a day, vitamin C, again, 1000, 2000 twice a day. And acetylcysteine, usually 600 milligrams twice a day. That's NAC, really important antioxidant and upregulatory glutathione. Quercetin also is helpful. But if you're really sick and you're way in the hospital, these are going to help, but they're not going to cure you. But preventatively they're great and also for post-COVID. Then there's other things you can take like NAD and melatonin, fish oil, and there's a whole list. We'll post it in the show notes and the doses and where to get them. But, but I, I take these, I take this stack, not just, you know, to treat my, what is myself, but I'm taking this stack in order to prevent myself from getting sick or to minimize the effect of COVID if I do get sick. And I, I'm very religious about this, especially if I'm out and about traveling. So those are the, those are the sort of short list of supplements. There's, there's certainly more things you can do. There's adaptogenic mushrooms. there's lysine, there's antivirals, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can do. I think, you know, long COVID often is a mitochondrial issue, it's an immune issue, it's a gut issue, it's a cognitive issue. So we have to kind of focus in on what people's symptoms and issues are and treat those things. I also think there's a lot of therapies which are out of the box, which are often needed that, you know, we touched on a little bit that can be extremely helpful for people stuck in long COVID. And these include intravenous ozone includes peptides, includes exosomes, includes transfer plasma exchange, which is basically like where you clean out all the nasty inflammatory chemicals in your blood by drawing your blood out, filtering it and putting the blood cells back in and living the plasma, which has all this inflammatory stuff out and giving yourself albumin. It's a whole medical procedure. It's not for the faint of heart, but it can be effective. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, I found it also very effective in certain people. So those are the kinds of tools that we use to help people recover. the traditional stuff that medicine uses, the pharmacology, just not cutting it. And the problem is that those things that I just mentioned, other than the supplements and lifestyle, which can be enough in and of themselves for a lot of people, they're expensive, they're hard to access, they're not widely available, they're really on the leading edge of medicine. And I've had patients who've really been stuck in long COVID and they've been able to afford it and go out and do it. And I've seen quite amazing results from those various therapies. So that's sort of my general thinking about it. I think It is one of the things that functional medicine is probably better equipped to deal with than anything else. There are post-COVID clinics in many, many hospitals, but unfortunately, they're really doing the same old, same old. And I think we have an opportunity to really do something different.

Yeah, that's super helpful. So a follow up to that is that let's say you have COVID and you're trying to avoid long COVID and you take the list of supplements or things that you've recommended. How do you know how long you should take those supplements for? or is it just something that you continue to take, you know, to kind of keep your immunity?

Yeah, I mean, I would say the full stack, I'm taking them as long as COVID's around in force like it is now. Okay. That's me. I think, you know, depending on how you're doing and things calm down and you're, you know, you've been infected and, you know, you still can get reinfected, it's less likely, but you still can get reinfected. It's important to keep your immune system robust. So I think, you know, for me, vitamin D is a lifetime supplement. NAD, NAC, for me, those are lifetime supplements. Zinc, they're usually in a multivitamin. That's good enough. Quercetin for me also is a very important supplement. So those things I would take regularly and I think long term. And I think you can also see how you feel and then after a year of treatment, reassess and see where you're at.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. Darcy, over to you for the next question.

Yeah, so I think pretty much everyone we know has either been directly affected by cancer or knows somebody who has. So radiation or radiotherapy is extremely common and it affects just so many people. So I guess the question is really, you know, we were pretty familiar with some of the side effects of radiation and radiotherapy, but what could somebody do if they've had this to kind of support or heal from that and live as healthy of a life as possible while recovering from something that's probably fairly necessary.

Yeah, I mean, chemotherapy, radiation, those are rough therapies. And thank God we are going to be entering a new era of cancer therapy because right now it's kind of barbaric. When we think about what we're doing in 20, 30, 50 years, we're going, what the hell are we cutting, poisoning, burning people? And what stem was that? clearly, and I want to mention something that's around now, which is new, which may help prevent your need for radiotherapy, which is a liquid biopsy. And there are literally thousands and thousands of proteins in your blood all the time that we don't even measure or look at. And cancer does release these proteins, and you can actually identify which proteins different cancers have that are in your blood by a simple blood test, and it can pick up 50 different kinds of cancer, before you ever see it on an x-ray or an MRI or a scan. And so it's called Gallery, G-A-L-L-E-R-I. You can look it up and go to the Gallery Cancer Test. It's not cheap, but it's not that expensive considering, you know, to get a colonoscopy every few years, it's way cheaper than that. And then, you know, you might have to go find out if you find something to go chase for it and look for it, but it's better to pick it up early so you don't need it.

With that said, I think the other.

Thing I would mention is if you're, if you're going to have radiotherapy, I think there's increasing data about this. And, and also in terms of one only minimizing side effects and the consequences of chemo and radiation, but also on increasing the effectiveness of chemo and radiation in cancer is restricting calories or, or ketogenic diet. So there's two main things that have been studied. One is called the fasting mimicking diet. Walter Longo is Pioneer. This, he's been on our podcast, essentially he's eating 800 calories for five days or during a while you're doing the chemo or doing a ketogenic diet, which my friend Patrick Hanaway, who's a cancer, who's a cancer survivor and a functional medicine pioneer, had done a ketogenic diet while he was getting chemo and radiation and had really no side effects and consequences, which is really striking. So that's really important. And then the other part is increasing your intake of protective antioxidants and intake of nutrients and whole foods and all the same things that keep you healthy from everything else. So those are really the sort of bottom line. The other piece that may or may not be helpful are some of the advances in regenerative medicine. And I'm saying this completely without any scientific basis other than what I think would work, which is, you know, can you take tissues and repair them? Can you take damaged parts of the body and heal them? And I think the answer is increasingly yes. We're seeing incredible breakthroughs, for example, in cardiology, where you can inject stem cells into a damaged heart and the heart will renew. Or I've had a whole bunch of procedures on my back after 20 plus years of back pain and arthritis, and I'm pain free now because I've regenerated tissues in my back using everything from exosomes, which are derivatives of stem cells. I've taken stem cells, placental placental material, which has got a lot of healing factors injecting in there, all kinds of therapies. So I think there are avenues in the future where people are going to be able to kind of mitigate a lot of those effects. So stem cells, hyperbarics, all those things. Ozone, there are just regenerative therapies may be helpful, but I can't guarantee that. I'm just, I'm just assuming that based.

On how the body works in biology that it might be helpful. Yeah, that's incredible and so hopeful and just looking at all the innovative therapies that they're coming out with and everything that you've just mentioned is just really exciting and interesting and just super hopeful. So thank you so much. So the next question is about fibrinolytic enzymes. So a similar topic with the enzymes but slightly different in what they do. So the question is all about what are they and are they beneficial to take as like a prophylactic measure to prevent things like cardiovascular disease, blood clots, strokes, stuff like that.

I think what you're referring to are, you know, how do we keep, you know, fiber fibrin is the material that your, your platelets will excrete in order to create clotting. So they create a, like a, basically a matrix. If you have an injury in your body, you know, there's basically the platelets release fibrin, which creates this. matrix where you build a clot. Fibrolytic enzymes are things that help to reduce that fiber and actually help prevent the clotting. The two ones that are mostly used are lumbricinase and nattokinase. Nattokinase comes from natto, which is a Japanese fermented soybean product. It's a natural product. and lumbrokinase sounds gross, but it comes from worms. And I have used both in my practice. For example, I don't want to take aspirin. Aspirin can be, you know, now know that the indications for aspirin are much bigger than they should have been and that it should be much more carefully used in medicine and new guidelines have come out to really, really reduce the people taking aspirin for prevention of heart disease and even colon cancer. and then nattokinase and lumbricinase can be used as an intermediate step. So I think that can be very helpful. So there are a tool in our toolkit for helping people with increased clotting disorders, increased risk of blood clots, thick blood, and so forth.

Okay, got it. Thank you.

Oh, also, yeah, I would say there's another thing to mention just briefly. There's a, you know, as your body heals if you had trauma. And I use this and I find it really effective. Like you sprain your ankle or you hurt a muscle or something, you want to like clear out the, all the damaged protein. A lot of the fibrin and all the inflammatory molecules come there and that can cause the secondary onslaught of our own immune system and parasystem healing. It can cause a lot of discomfort and pain. And so there's a product that it's called wobenzyme, which has been quite well studied, W-O-B-E-N-Z-Y-M-E. which we have over the counter. And I use it if I have a sprained ankle, if I have an injury, trauma, and it's remarkable how it helps to really heal. I had a sprained ankle once years ago and I used it and just healed right away as opposed to taking weeks and weeks and weeks. So I think they're, they're a really, really great product. They're like Wolverine for athletic kind of kinds of, or trauma injuries that can be healed faster if you use these. proteolytic enzymes.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad-free podcast episodes, plus Ask Mark Anything episodes, plus monthly functional deep dive episodes, I guess that's why we call it Dr. Hyman Plus. Then head on over to the Doctor's Pharmacy on Apple Podcast and sign up for your seven-day free trial.

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