Post-COVID Syndrome: A Functional Medicine Approach with Dr. Elizabeth Boham

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

We need to help people build an immune system that can do active surveillance and find viruses and get rid of them, but also not overreact and cause all this unwanted inflammation that is really underlying a lot of the significant illness and death from COVID-19.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman here. Now, so many of my patients ask me how I manage to work multiple jobs, travel frequently, well, not so much anymore, and spend time with my family and still focus on my health. I know it can seem hard to eat well when you got a lot going on, but the trick is to never let yourself get into a food emergency and to stay stocked up with the right things to support your goals. So when I keep nourishing snacks and the right supplements to optimize my health at home and in my office, I know I'm helping myself make good choices in the future. Recently I discovered Paleo Valley Beef Sticks. I keep these beef sticks at home and at the office so I know that whenever I'm in a food emergency, I have a healthy and delicious option to keep me on track. It's no secret that I have high standards when it comes to what I put in my body and Paleo Valley Beef Sticks checks all the boxes. They're gluten-free, grain-free, dairy-free, soy-free and non-GMO. Plus, they use 100% grass-fed and grass finished beef, which not only adds to the flavorful taste, but it also means they're free of any harmful antibiotics or hormones that you'll find in most meat. With grass-fed beef, you'll get more nutrients than you would with beef fed with grains, things like higher levels of omega-3 fats that help reduce inflammation and more B vitamins and other antioxidants to support your body's converting food into energy. and also more of the fat soluble vitamins that are beneficial for a healthy heart. Plus, instead of being processed with chemicals and other questionable ingredients like similar snacks, these beef sticks are naturally fermented so you get gut friendly probiotics with every bite. How cool is that? Right now, Paleo Valley is offering my listeners 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/steve forward slash hymen to check out all their clean paleo products and take advantage of this deal. That's paleovalley.com forward slash hymen. I definitely recommend stocking up on the grass-fed beef sticks to keep in your house and your car and in your office. It's one of my favorite tricks to staying healthy while on the go. All right, now let's get back to this week's episode of the doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you're worried about COVID-19 and how to protect yourself from it and what to do if you get sick and what's going on in general with the whole condition and what's happening to us from our perspective in functional medicine, then this podcast is one you're gonna wanna listen closely to. It's with my friend and colleague, the medical director of the UltraWellness Center, Dr. Elizabeth Boham. who is an extraordinary physician. She's also a registered dietitian and an exercise physiologist. She teaches all over the world in functional medicine, is on the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine, and she's just an extraordinary physician. And I'm so happy to have you.

Here talking about something that is not.

So fun, which is COVID-19. Thank you, Mark. It's great being with you. So tell us where are we at today with COVID-19? How big of a problem is this? Sort of tell us, you know, what is happening in the world of COVID.

Yeah, it's not great, right? What are we at, 15 million people worldwide?

That's of what today, we're filming this is July 24th, 15 million people have been infected.

And, you know, as we were mentioning, that's probably we're way underestimating because of just how many people we're testing and just the quality of the testing as well. And, you know, it's causing a lot of disease and death and illness, and it's changing people's lives significantly. in terms of their day-to-day life, what they can interact, their job. So it's significant, something we really need to be focusing on.

Yeah, it's changed everything for everybody, right? The fear factor is big.

It's huge.

And the actual disease is bad. It's not just like a flu. Now some people get sick and they're fine, and you can say, well, 99% of people are fine, Yes, up to 20% end up in the hospital, which is a lot of people when you look at scale, right?

Yes, it's a lot of people.

If there's 4 million Americans that have had it as of July 24th, and 20% of that is 800,000 people in the hospital. Right.

And then 5% of people get really, really sick, right?

Yeah, and end up in the ICU, and probably 1% die. But when you look at the the rate, I mean the death rate if you're over 60 is higher, if you're over 80 it's very, very high. So it's far more than 1%.

And I think that's something we've been talking a lot about and trying to determine what can people do to have less complications from COVID And that's what we're gonna really be delving into today. But we definitely see there's certain populations that are at much higher risk, right? People with underlying diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, COPD, right? Those people are at much higher risk.

It's like emphysema.

Yep, like emphysema. I mean, in fact, I just saw- For asthma. CDC just put out that they feel that 41% of Americans are at high risk for complications from COVID because of underlying health issues.

Right, I mean, six out of 10 of Americans have a chronic illness.

Right.

75% overweight, 42% are obese.

We're not doing so great in this country, are we?

80% of us are metabolically unhealthy and to varying degrees of how unhealthy you are, your risk goes up and up and up.

And it's interesting that the diseases that are involved with, you know, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, you know, our poor diet, you know, really are some of the diseases that are really making an impact in terms of people's illness mobility and mortality from COVID-19. I think that's unfortunate but interesting because of their immune system probably. We'll talk a lot about that.

Yeah, I mean all these conditions, chronic disease, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, these are inflammatory diseases. Being overweight is inflammatory disease. Sometimes you don't even have to be overweight, you can just be over fat, you can look skinny but actually your body mass is mostly fat and not muscle. And that makes you more likely to have more severe complications and more likely to die. So these are modifiable factors that you have control over. So you don't have to just wait like a sitting duck hoping you're not going to get COVID or hoping you're not going to get sick from it. So there's so much you can do. And unfortunately, this isn't getting enough press. We're hearing about all these drug interventions. We're hearing about dexamethasone and remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma and all these things which have some role. But when you look at the impact that they have, it's incremental. It's not like, wow, this is the cure for COVID-19. No, it just helps a little bit in reducing the severity, reducing the complications, maybe reducing the risk of death. We don't even know yet, but we're looking at You know, these drugs may be reducing the length of stay in the ICU from 15 days to 11 days. You know, it's not like a blockbuster solution. So the real question is how do we take this pandemic, which is causing so much disability and disruption and economic hardship for people, and how do we build a more resilient population? using the principles of functional medicine.

That's what we need to do, you know, that's what this is gonna help us do because, you know, we need to help people build an immune system that can do active surveillance and find viruses and get rid of them, but also not overreact and cause all this unwanted inflammation that is really underlying a lot of the significant illness and death from COVID-19. And, you know, they're looking at this inflammasome, right, the NLRP3, NLRP3 inflammasome, right? You know, that is involved in causing more cytokine production, that cytokine storm that causes significant issues with- those are the.

Messengers of the immune system that create inflammation.

Yeah, and they get out of hand in some people, right? And so that question is, which people do they get out of hand with?

People who come in pre-inflamed from diet. Right, right.

I mean, that same inflammasome, I guess, is upregulated also with obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular disease. so if people have that underlying inflammation already upregulated and then this infection comes on top of it, it can be really difficult for certain populations. And so that's something that we want to really be focusing on and we know that there are things we can do that can influence it.

Absolutely. We're going to talk about a lot of things, but other things that aren't really getting attention besides diet is our nutritional status as a population. Right. And I was talking to my colleague, Dr. Darshan Masafarian at Tufts, who's the Dean of the Tufts School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and he said they have a whole department of nutritional immunology there where they've identified the key nutrients that actually help to modify your immune response and improve your overall immune function and actually may be effective in various pathways that have to do with COVID-19 and they're wanting to do a large study on it. but you're not hearing about this. Who's funding these studies? There's billions of dollars flowing into vaccines and to very expensive drugs, but nobody's talking about the simplest things you can do to make yourself more resilient in the face of COVID So how do you make the host, you, more of a unwelcome place for the virus to land? Or if you do get the virus, how do you actually make your body work properly to fight it more effectively so you don't end up in the hospital or you don't end up dying.

Absolutely. We're obviously not doing a great job here in the U.S. But interesting about the nutrients, I think it's fascinating. They say that 1.5 million people worldwide are at risk for zinc deficiency. And zinc is one of those nutrients that's so critical for the functioning of the immune system. It helps both the innate and adaptive immune system. so when somebody's not getting enough zinc, it has a huge impact on their risk of having issues with any illness. In fact, they did a study looking at patients with COVID-19 and they were in the hospital and they were getting medications. They had a cocktail of medications. One group they put on extra zinc and the other group they didn't add the extra zinc and the group that got the extra zinc had a much shorter hospital stay. So it's fascinating.

The problem is it's only pennies a dose, so nobody's making out like a bandit. So nobody's pushing it. It's just incredible.

And zinc is not hard to get. You know, it's in a lot of our food sources. It's in a lot of our protein, both animal protein and nuts and seeds. Oh yeah. But you know, when people have issues with just not having good food supply, you know, they're just not getting a good healthy diet for a whole host of reasons. or they're having a hard time with absorbing their zinc, or if they've got an inflammation in their digestive system that prevents optimal absorption of zinc, or if they're the elderly. I mean, what happens as we get older? We see a lot more zinc deficiency because people are eating less and less calories as they get older and it becomes one of those nutrients that people eat less of. They're maybe choosing tea and toast for breakfast or they're skipping meals and we do see zinc deficiency. And that's one thing that a lot of A lot of my patients, especially, well actually most of my patients, but definitely my older patients, I have them take a little extra zinc because it's so important for their immune system.

Absolutely, and I think zinc is one of the key nutrients and it actually interrupts some of the mechanistic pathways that SARS-CoV-2 actually uses to enter the cell. So there's a lot of science behind how this works. It's not just overall zinc deficient. it actually has been shown to be mechanistically the right thing to do. And the risk is low. I mean, you don't want to overdose on zinc, but having adequate zinc is really important. And then vitamin D is also one of those nutrients that's being used in various studies and showing benefit. And people who have low levels of vitamin D seem to be at much higher risk of severe complications and death.

Absolutely. And you know, we test vitamin D all the time and we see so many people low in vitamin D. When you start looking, you see a huge portion of our patients. I mean, we also work in the Northeast, but we get people from all over the world. And so many people are low in vitamin D for a whole host of reasons.

I mean, I would say, unless you're a lifeguard, I would say 80% of our patients or more are low in vitamin D. And if you're not low in vitamin D, it's likely because you're taking vitamin D. Absolutely. And I think the question is what is low? And I think that's a debatable number, but if you look at the lab reference value, low could be less than 20 or less than 30. Optimal is probably 40 to 60 or 70.

Absolutely.

What's the level that you need to optimize your immune system? Okay, COVID is probably like 50 or more. And I think that's not going to happen unless you're in the summer or if you're walking around naked half the day or you're living in the southern country where you're exposed to sunlight all the time. but most of us are not like that and most of us are pretty significantly vitamin D insufficient or deficient.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that this is also highlighted is how much time we spend inside, right? Because now I'm always telling people, I'm telling myself, spend more time outside because it's just healthier when there's COVID around, right? You want to be interacting with nature, you want to have parties outside or Meetings, not that you want big parties, but meetings with other people outside.

Socially distant. Socially distant. I don't like the term socially distant. It's physical distance. Yes.

You don't have to socially distance yourself. You don't have to physically distance yourself. And I think it's actually been a wonderful thing that so many of us have been spending more time outside. Everybody in the Northeast is camping now and kayaking and getting out and spending.

More time in nature. And that's wonderful and is good for our vitamin D, right? Yeah, so that's another easy thing to do, which has low risk and lots of benefit. Another thing that's being looked at is something called quercetin. So can you talk about what that is? And there seems to be some really interesting data on quercetin and its effect on particularly COVID-19.

So quercetin is a polyphenol, right? So these are these phytonutrients, these components in our plant foods, right? So phytonutrients are components in our plant foods, that have really great health benefits for us. So we know we've got vitamins and minerals in our food, but we also have these phytonutrients. And these phytonutrients in the plant actually help the plant survive in nature. So what's amazing and what we're realizing is that our plant foods are packed full of these really great phytonutrients that have good health benefit for us. So they've been shown to be anti-inflammatory, they have high antioxidant capacity. We've been using these and there's lots of research on all of the different phytonutrients in terms of cancer prevention and heart disease prevention, but we also see that they impact that inFlammosone. So that inFlammosone that causes that increased cytokine production, we know that certain phytonutrients and polyphenols can lower they can lower that cytokine production and influence it in a healthy way. So quercetin is a mast cell stabilizer, right? We use it as a phytonutrient all the time for, you know, people with allergies and asthma and mast cell issues, but it's also being looked at at impacting somebody's response to COVID-19. And if people are taking, like, Some people take supplements 500 milligrams a couple times a day or even more, 1,000 milligrams a couple times a day. But also what's cool is it's in our plant foods. So, you know, it's in things like dill and it's in broccoli and it's in onions and capers and apples and berries. It's in so many of our foods. And so what we're always working with people on is saying, okay, let's get those 8 to 12 serving of phytonutrients every day. So they can be coming from your vegetables, your fruits, your spices, your teas. So many of these phytonutrients are phenomenal for your overall health and can lower that cytokine release and that inflammation that can come from an infection.

Yeah, and you know, we're looking at all these expensive drugs, but there is actually research going on in things like quercetin. And for example, it binds to the spike protein of the virus which is necessary for it to bind and enter into the cell of the host. It actually inhibits all sorts of inflammatory pathways, like we mentioned. It actually is directly antiviral. Yes, so it has antiviral capacities and it inhibits the replication of infected cells. So it has all these different benefits and it's completely safe. It's in our food. but you can take it as a supplement.

Yep, absolutely.

So there's another one also that people are looking at, which is called ECG, which comes from green tea.

Yeah, EGCG is epigallocatechin gallate, right? So it comes from your green tea, it's a component in green tea, and we've been studying it forever, especially in the cancer prevention world. It's got a lot of antioxidant, anti-angiogenic properties, but it also helps with production of glutathione, which we'll talk more about. But the EGCG in green tea is phenomenal in terms of this phytonutrient that has tremendous benefit in our body. And so they're looking at recommending four cups of green tea a day or 225 milligrams if you're getting it from a supplement, can really do a lot of good benefit.

So let's see, you should have a meal with oysters and pumpkin seeds for the zinc. You should have onions and dill for the quercetin. You have a little green tea in there.

Yeah, we can't forget about mushrooms.

You're gonna have mushrooms for the vitamin.

D. Yep, and the natural killer cell activity, right?

Yes, herring. So that sounds like an interesting meal.

And a little broccoli because that also has broccoli has sulforaphane in it and that we know is really important also for production of glutathione. And there's really interesting research now looking at What's the connection with glutathione depletion and outcome from COVID-19?

So they're really- so back up a little bit. So what is glutathione? Why is it important and why should we care?

I love talking about glutathione. It's like my favorite thing. Me too.

I love glutathione.

It is a master antioxidant and detoxifier in the body. We also know that it has tremendous impact on the immune system. So it can increase natural killer cells. It's anti-inflammatory. Yes, it's an anti-inflammatory too, right? So it can increase natural killer cells, which are the cells in your innate immune system which go around and gobble up things that shouldn't be there, like viruses. So it can increase natural killer selectivity. It helps with increasing the function of the immune system. It can help with preventing the immune system from up regulating, so, you know, or I'm sorry, of overreacting, getting too inflamed.

It was like the break Kind of why you asked.

You know, so we said we want the immune system to find the infection, get rid of it, but not overreact and produce too many of these cytokines, if we, you know, unwanted cytokines. So glutathione actually does that. And we've seen this forever, that glutathione has this tremendous ability in somebody's immune system. You know, we know when people have toxicity that depletes their body of glutathione, they're more at risk for getting infections. So, you know, they're really looking at people who are glutathione depleted and risk for COVID-19 or bad outcomes from COVID-19 really. And then, so you want to think about what can I do to boost my glutathione in my body? And you know, we know that food has a tremendous impact here. We know that a lot of our vegetables naturally have glutathione in them. We know that we, a lot of our vegetables like the cruciferous vegetables, the broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, help the body with production of glutathione. And we know- and green tea, as you mentioned. And green tea helps with production of glutathione. We know that the garlic and onions and shallots help with production of glutathione. So, you know, our diet has a tremendous impact on our glutathione status. But then there are some people we give a little bit of extra love to in terms of glutathione, right? We'll give them extra things like NAC.

Yeah, which also has been looked at. in COVID-19 as a compound that helps to boost glutathione and improve immune system and reduce infection.

Yeah, and you know it's phenomenal, like 600 milligrams a couple times a day often we might use. And then we sometimes give people actual glutathione, right? You can get, you know, glutathione is a tripeptide, it's made up of three different proteins.

Amino acids.

Amino acids, yes, thank you. it gets digested in the digestive system. And so optimally, you wanna get glutathione that's liposomal, which means it's a small particle that gets absorbed through the mucosa, through the mouth or the digestive system without getting broken down. Or we'll give glutathione IV. Or inhaled. Yep, yep, intravenously or inhaled. There's so many ways to give it, but it can be really helpful for somebody's immune system.

And I mean, keeping my eye on the literature and seeing case reports of intravenous would have found in COVID-19 patients with remarkable quick results. And also, I've been hearing reports of inhaled glutathione or inhaled N-acetylcysteine, which we actually use all the time for asthma or cystic fibrosis patients. So these are treatments that are available in traditional medicine, but they're not often used. And it's not like any one of these things is going to cure COVID or prevent you from getting it, but they all will help to bolster your own resiliency and your immune system and your ability to fight the infection. So instead of being sick for weeks and weeks and months, you might be having a shorter course, you might not really get sick at all, or you might recover a lot faster. There's a few other things that people are using out there and I think that are worth talking about. One of them is melatonin, which also has some benefits as well in terms of this.

Yeah, there's some interesting research on melatonin. We know it has antioxidant capacity and it does have an influence on our immune system. And so they're looking at melatonin for COVID as well, even three to five milligrams even at night or maybe higher for some. It's interesting, we see, I definitely have seen a bunch of patients who've had COVID-19 and I actually just ordered some inhaled glutathione just the other day through a nebulizer, which was really helpful for for this patient for her COVID-19. And she recovered really well and with somebody who had an immune system that we weren't sure how she was gonna do, you know? And so it seemed to be very helpful. But we do have some patients that struggle, right? And, you know, I've had a few patients who were sick March and April and still a few months later are dealing with fatigue, shortness of breath, that seems to be some of the lingering symptoms we see more of.

Yeah, so one is how do you protect yourself so you don't get it? Which is the lifestyle issues, diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, taking your basic supplements that we talked about. And then if you get it, what do you do? There's some sort of more advanced things you can do around maybe inhale glutathione or NAC and other treatments we're gonna talk about in a minute. But then there's this whole phenomena we're seeing called post-COVID syndrome, which is terrifying to me because with SARS, the previous infections, SARS 1, I guess you'd call it, at three years, 40% of people who got this and survived had chronic fatigue syndrome. And there's a study that was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looking at how patients who had been hospitalized with COVID did after discharge. So 60 days later, they reached out to these patients, and these were COVID positive patients who were quite sick, 143 patients, and 72% had pneumonia, so they were quite sick. The average stay was about 13 days in the hospital, and about 5% were on ventilators. at two months, only about 12% were free of symptoms. The rest had fatigue, shortness of breath, joint pain, chest pain, and worsened quality of life. So 87% of people had symptoms like shortness of breath and fatigue at two months. So I'm seeing some people recover, but there's a whole group that don't really get better. Now, is this infection just lingering? Did it just screw up their immune system? What's happening? And so From a functional medicine perspective, we're thinking about how do we address these patients? How do we help them recover from this? Just like we treat chronic fatigue patients with functional medicine who've been maybe affected by viruses or tick infections, we know how to do this. And so I really think, you know, if it's true that we now have 4 million people in America with COVID which is probably actually 10 times that according to the study, because many people aren't tested or diagnosed or have more mild cases, so if we have 40 million people in America with COVID a bunch of those are gonna have this post-COVID syndrome. And the question is, what can be done to help these people over time?

Yeah, and I think looking at, you know, their glutathione status is really important. You know, we do that with markers of, you know, we have some biomarkers we can look at, and we can just work to things like oxidative stress and glutathione biomarkers that can be helpful to give us a sense of what somebody's levels are. And then we work to really boost up that glutathione with, like we were talking about, the precursors to it, the actual glutathione, the diet. And then we look at all aspects of that person's health in terms of how do we boost their adrenal gland, how do we boost their mitochondria and help it heal after getting an illness like this. Sometimes you do need a little extra TLC after you get sick to bounce back. And we definitely see people, like you said, we've seen this for years with other sorts of infections and we're seeing it now for some proportion of people with COVID-19. They just need a little extra support for their body to truly recover. And it's an interesting thing to be paying attention to.

Yeah, absolutely. And we, We skipped over it a little bit, but there are other things that people are looking at as well for helping prevent or even treat COVID, which is something called NAD, which is helping your energy system, but it also seems to be effective in some of the problems that we see as well. And also our gut is a big player. And people who have more gut dysfunction, because COVID also affects the gut, seem to have more issues.

Yes, a lot of people have some GI issues that then we need to think about how can we help support. You know, when you think about things like probiotics because our good bacteria that line our digestive system, that line our nasal passageways, you know, that actually is, we've talked about this before, is like the first line of defense in the body, right? That's really important for our immune system. And so, you know, eating a diet that feeds our good bacteria or taking extra probiotics really can help support the immune system. And there's certain strains that they're really looking at that may be effective for prevention of getting the virus, as well as things that can help with recovery of the digestive system.

Yeah, and also pre and probiotic foods that we've talked about a lot. So those are always to support yourself. And there's other things that can be helpful, such as herbs like astragalus and mushrooms like reishi. Talk a little bit about how these things work and why would we sort of want to use herbs in this context.

Yeah, so you know, I love the medicinal mushrooms. I love the Asian mushrooms because they have tremendous, they can really strengthen our immune system through improving our natural killer cell activity.

Those are our little Pac-Man, they go around and kill things, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we like the Asian mushrooms, shiitake, maitake, reishi, they're really powerful, both to cook with and then some people take extra supplements or teas or coffees with them in them. so they're really something we focus on a lot. And I think the one, you know, we were asking about herbs in general, you know, as we were mentioning before about the polyphenols, the components in our plant foods that have tremendous health benefit, right? They have this, many of them have a really nice anti-inflammatory benefit for the body. And one of the things we really want to focus on is cooling down that inflammatory response in the body because that is what is causing a lot of that continued, well, it's probably what's causing a lot of that continued shortness of breath feeling and fatigue.

Yeah, and I want to be clear what we're talking about. We're not saying these are cures or we're going to fix everything, but what we're saying is that there are ways to make yourself more resilient, to improve your immune function, to make it less likely that you're going to get sick. if you get sick, less likely you're gonna get very sick or end up in the hospital or even dying. So when it's not just any one supplement that's gonna cure you, it's like you just take zinc and that's it. No, you have to eat right, you have to exercise, you have to sleep, you have to deal with your stress, and you have to make sure your nutritional status is optimized. And I think all these things can be extremely helpful. And for those listening, you're probably trying to furiously take notes and what was that thing you said and what was that supplement? All this we're gonna have in the show notes. So you're gonna have a list of everything we're talking about, both in terms of what to do for prevention, what things you can do to support yourself if you do get sick, and what to do afterwards to make sure that you address what we are calling post COVID syndrome. But what's interesting in the literature to me, Dr. Boehm, Liz, is that there are a number of countries doing things that we're not doing here that are seemingly very effective. And a lot of these are what we call oxycodone, oxidative therapies. So oxidative therapy seems like a crazy idea because why aren't we all taking antioxidants and why would we want to take something that's going to oxidize us? But these compounds seem to have an ability to create a response in the body that sort of activates its defenses. So it's like you get punched in the face, all of a sudden you're going to put your fists up and you're going to start fighting. It's the same way with the body when it gets a little stress, it actually starts to kick in its own immune function.

It's okay, I gotta get working here.

Right, it's all stem cells. And so things like vitamin C intravenously have been used in China, intravenous glutathione, there's been studies on that, intravenous NAD, and something called ozone, which is something we've talked a little bit about, but this is something that's involved in helping to create an increased immune response for the anti-inflammatory stuff and decreasing the inflammatory stuff in your body and also maybe germicidal. And right now there's many trials going on in Europe, not here, but in Europe there's 800 people being enrolled in trials in over 26 hospitals. The case reports that are coming out are pretty extraordinary. I just reviewed a case series of three patients that was published in a medical journal which showed that these were patients sick with pneumonia and with very high levels of these markers like D-dimer, which shows your blood's clotting, or C-reactive protein, which shows that you have a lot of inflammation, or ferritin, which shows you have a lot of inflammation. And so these are really objective biomarkers. And they also looked at CAT scans and X-rays. And you could see within literally days, these people got better. And their oxygen levels came up, their inflammatory markers went down, their X-rays cleared within a couple of days. and these patients are going home after three days. Where the average stay is like 10, 11, 12 days for these patients with COVID This is a game changer. There's no other therapy like that. So I'm not saying it's the cure for COVID-19, but I do think it's one of those things we should explore. The problem is that it's such a weird therapy. It's not really something that's part of conventional thinking or medicine in the United States. In many other countries, it's used in hospitals. whether it's South America, Europe, China, I think we need to start thinking about how do we look at these therapies given that this is probably in my lifetime, in most of our lifetimes, the biggest threat we've seen to our social fabric, to our economic welfare, to just our sense of being able to be in the world again. I mean, because yes, there's the pandemic of the virus, but there's also the pandemic of fear, which is going to outlast the virus.

That's true.

And if we could have a way of treating people which help them feel confident that, you know, like, well, if I get a strep throat, you know, I'll take an antibiotic, I'll be fine. So I'm hoping some of these therapies are going to get studied and looked.

At a little more in depth. And you know, that's what we, we see that all the time in our clinic, right? When we have patients and we've had with, with chronic fatigue from other viruses, Epstein-Barr or a tick-borne infection, often the thing that helps them get better for the people that are having a really hard time recovering is a lot of these IV therapies and IV C, IV ozone. That's when we start to see some people turn the corner. And for the people that are really struggling and their body's not kicking in and improving, we see big improvements.

It's sort of like jump starting your body's own healing system. 'Cause the body has a healing system and often it gets stuck. And I think that's what's happening with COVID You get this insult and the body gets stuck in this cycle of being sick. And inflammation, right? Yeah, and I've been talking to people, even young people in their 20s and 30s who get it, and it's not like they're back to normal. They're struggling with fatigue, they're struggling with shortness of breath, with tightness, their tests are negative. Does the virus persist? We don't know. But I think this is certainly a real thing and I think we are, really focused at the Ultra Wellness Center and Functional Medicine, trying to sort of help people through this process using a very science-based, coherent, and safe and effective way to help support their own body and their healing response that they can create through these various treatments.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so I think, you know, we are all struggling with coronavirus, both personally, and how it's affecting all of our lives and professionally in the healthcare system, it's kind of overwhelming. The cases now are just skyrocketing. I think the cases in Florida, in the South, and Texas are just on the rise. And I think this is far from over. So I think these kinds of approaches, if we could scale up a nutritional awareness approach. Imagine if the government was like, okay, let's have a public health awareness campaign. Eat these foods, don't eat these foods. Like if we all got metabolically healthy, and it doesn't take years. I mean, you take someone with diabetes who's 400 pounds, who has gastric bypass surgery, their diabetes is gone in two weeks. They're still very overweight. What changed wasn't their weight, what changed was their diet. And you can quickly change your metabolic health, you can quickly change inflammation.

After a meal. After a meal, right?

Yeah, one meal, but give yourself 10 days of a clean diet. and you're gonna see a dramatic change. And so we should be educating people about that. We should be educating them about nutritional support. And people just think of multivitamin and vitamin D. That's usually enough for most people. It has zinc in there. Maybe you want to add a little quercetin. But I think these are things that are very safe, they're very effective, and unfortunately they're underutilized. And when we see the studies showing that 88% are metabolically unhealthy and over 90% are nutritionally deficient in one or more nutrient, including things like vitamin D and zinc and omega-3s, all the things that really matter. You know, these are things that we can do something about as a society. And yes, we have to do all the things we need to do to investigate new drugs and, you know, the vaccine issues, a whole quagmire. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, but, you know, hopefully it's a miracle vaccine. although I think there are a lot of challenges to that. I think both in terms of people adopting it and actually working. But I think that these kinds of things we're talking about today are things that we can all do now, that we can all do to support ourselves. And so in the show notes, there's going to be all this information, what to do and how to eat and what supplements we recommend. So I encourage you to check that out and don't fret because fear is the the worst thing about this. And I think to quote Franklin D. Roosevelt, he said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And I think if you can feel empowered by understanding what to do, both to prevent it, if you get it, and afterwards, I think it will reduce a lot of that.

I agree. I agree.

Well, Dr. Boehm, Liz, thank you so much for being on the Doctor's Pharmacy. It's been great having this conversation about this very tough subject. But there is hope, and I encourage everybody listening this, if you love this podcast, to share with your friends and family on social media, leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Thank you, Mark.

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning in to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Now back to this week's episode.

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