Doctor Explains Form Of PREVENTION & TREATMENT of Viruses | Roger Seheult & Lewis Howes

We saw that people who were showing up to the hospital with COVID 19 were deficient in vitamin D. Now, what.

Is the truth about masks?

The problem is that there's two ways that the virus spreads.

Do people need vaccines?

What kind of a quality of life would you like to have is the question.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The school of greatness, really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howells.

You've been talking more about the impacts of vitamin D and how it can help prevent COVID 19 and potentially treat COVID 19. Is that what I've been learning more from your content? So are you able to share a little bit about the backstory of this discovery you've been finding and the research you've been finding and some ways we can apply this to our own life?

So I take care of patients in the hospital, in the ICU. Many of them recently obviously have COVID 19. Obviously it didn't used to be that way. I would just take care of regular people in the icu. And now we've just been totally flooded with, with this here in Southern California. And, you know, just as a, as a clinician, as a physician, I've had to look into and to try to keep up with all of the science that's coming down from COVID 19. A year ago, we knew nothing about this disease and science focused on this like a laser, and things started to come out. And what we were kind of forced to do was to look and see if we had current treatments available that might work for it. And that's how we have come to this position. But the vitamin D, interestingly, Louis, it's kind of funny and ironic. Back in college, when I was an undergrad, one of the things that I did as I worked in an organic chemistry research lab, I was a chemistry major. So, yeah, total nerd type of thing here. But one of my jobs as an undergraduate researcher in the lab was to make vitamin D products for the graduate students to do their research on. I worked with Dr. Okamura, who is a biochemist, but he worked with. He was a chemist, but there was a number of biochemists, this was at UCR that were looking at vitamin D and its ability to bind to its receptor and make all of these things. Let's talk a little bit about vitamin D. Since we started with that, if you just go to Google and just Google vitamin D and the structure of vitamin D, one of the things that you'd be struck with is it's a bunch of rings and circles. For those of you who don't know chemistry. But then do the same thing for testosterone or estrogen or cortisol or aldosterone. These are essential steroids that the body needs to live. If you lose these steroid hormones, you'll die in a matter of weeks to months. And if you look at vitamin D, it's unique to any other vitamin. Vitamin B, vitamin B3, B6, B12, C. None of those look like this. Vitamin D is a steroid hormone. And what that means, what we know that that means, is that vitamin D binds to its receptor and goes into the nucleus of cells and it affects how that cell transcribes its DNA, how it makes proteins. And so that's the first thing that you ought to realize, that vitamin D is not just some CO factor that binds to something and allows something to happen. It actually changes the behavior of your cells.

So withoutso, what does that mean? So with vitamin D, it changes the behavior of your cells, enhancing the behavior of your cells, making it healthier, stronger, you know, indestructible, in a sense.

And it depends. Yeah, it depends on the cell function. So sometimes the vitamin D will inhibit transcription of proteins, sometimes it will enhance the transcription of proteins. And depending on what you want or what you need, that could have different effects.

Vitamin D in general, is it good for people, or am I hearing you say that sometimes vitamin D may not be good?

In certain cases, no, it's good to have it when you have it. And in other words, sometimes you don't want to be transcribing proteins. For instance, if you're in a cytokine storm. And what is a cytokine storm? That causes pneumonia and COVID 19. It's where you have too much cytokines. Cytokines are proteins, and where those proteins coming from, they're coming from cells that are producing them. And so vitamin D modulates this. It's the person with the lever that's saying, this is what we need at this moment. This is not what we need at this moment.

Wow. Okay, so what else have you been finding in the research on vitamin D on how it actually can prevent Covid?

Yeah, so vitamin D is kind of like the cry wolf, the boy that cries wolf. Because for years medicine has been looking at vitamin D and saying, oh, man, it's good for rickets, but it's probably good for a whole bunch of other things. And they've done studies on it, and sometimes it comes up blank, Sometimes it comes up. So it's kind of like, yeah, when a lot of scientists heard that vitamin D might be beneficial. In COVID 19, they said, yeah, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me type of thing. So that's why there's been a lot of resistance to saying that vitamin D is working. But if you go back to a study called a meta analysis, this is where they take tons of studies and they pool it together so that the robustness of the data is huge and they can find things better. There was a study, a landmark study that was published in the British Medical Journal just a few years ago by. By a scientist named Martineau who did a meta analysis looking at vitamin D supplementation. And he found pretty significantly that vitamin D supplementation on a regular basis, taking it either daily or weekly, decreased the incidence of acute chest infections. And this has been borne out multiple times. There's an Irish study that looked at this called Tilda, and they reported it recently as well. This is for acute chest infections. So generally viruses, viruses that affect the chest, so influenza, rhinovirus, probably coronavirus, is in there too. All of this done before COVID 19. So we knew from a medical standpoint that vitamin D supplementation, especially in patients, this was done in Northern Europe, where vitamin D deficiency is quite, you know, plentiful. So to see that that worked there, now let's take it and apply it to COVID 19 to see if it also works in COVID 19. Of course, the studies take a long time to do, and we didn't have those studies early on, so that's where things started.

And what, what have the studies shown you? Or are you doing some of these studies yourself in your labs? Or are you seeing research that's being done and applying the science?

No, so I'm not actually doing the research, but I'm. But you almost need somebody to do this type of work where you basically look across the spectrum, see the data that's coming out, and put it together and make sense of it.

Yeah. So what have you seen with this?

Yeah, so, okay, so you've got to remember before we get started in the research is that there are certain types of research that tell you certain things. There are large observational studies where you just kind of look and see what's going on, and you'll see things that are associated with each other. It doesn't tell you that one is necessarily causing the other. You just see them showing up together, and that sort of gives you a hypothesis, like maybe these are connected. For instance, if you saw that a lot of people with lung cancer also carried cigarette lighters in their pocket. Right. You couldn't say that the cigarette lighter is causing the cancer, but they're showing up together. So maybe there's either something else that they're both causing or caused by each other. So that's what we started seeing in the first part of 2020 is observational studies. What did we see? We saw that people who were showing up to the hospital with COVID 19 were deficient in vitamin D, that people who did worse in COVID 19 were deficient in vitamin D. We started seeing that people who are older, people who have darker skin are the people that also are deficient in vitamin D and they also have worse Covid. And so we started to see this connection. But the words that go through any graduate of medical school or any biostatistician will tell you that association does not necessarily mean causation. And so that's where we were for the most of 2020 until just the last few months. Was these studies over and over again? Yes. We can predict how well they're going to do based on their vitamin D levels. Yes. If they're lower, they're probably going to have a worse course. But the part that we couldn't say based on that data was if we give vitamin D, is that gonna change something? Because maybe the disease is making the vitamin D go down and make them sick. And it's just like if I take a cigarette lighter out of someone's pocket, is it gonna make their lung cancer go away or prevent? Right. So that's the kind of thing. So now enter randomized controlled trials. And this is what we do. We say, okay, we're gonna start off, we're gonna randomize people. We're gonna blind ourselves to it. Blind them to it. We're gonna, for one, we're gonna give vitamin D. For the other, we're not. And then we're gonna see what happens.

Yeah. And so how many of these trials have been going on and what are the findings from thesethese blind tests?

So there's a lot of trials going on right now looking at this. There's one where they're actually gonna look at about 5,000 people. It's being conducted in Great Britain, and we don't have that data yet. The data that we do have are on a few. Let's talk about those. So there's one called the shade study. This was done in India on just about 100 or so people where they gave mega doses of vitamin D in people coming into the hospital with COVID 19, 60,000 units they gave.

Is it injected Is this orally?

Is this, this, is, this is oral, oral medication. So 60,000. I mean, generally speaking, when you buy over the counter tablets, take 5,500, right? You're like, exactly, exactly. So this is 60,000 units daily for seven days.

That's a lot of vitamin D. It.

Is a lot of vitamin D. So for seven days they did this. And what they found was that the inflammatory markers in those patients were lower. And they found that as opposed to only 20% of the patients clearing the virus after three weeks, 60% of the patients cleared the virus in three weeks. So it wasn't powered to look at survival and these sorts of things. They didn't notice any difference there in terms of that. But that was a study that was done. There was another study that was done in Brazil where they gave 250,000 units times one. They just gave them a whopping. I mean, it was like you're drinking.

Vitamin D in supplement form.

Exactly. It was incredible. They didn't, not, they didn't see any difference there, although they did measure that vitamin D levels went up inside. So it worked. They did not notice any improvement. The problem there though, of course, is there was some problem with the randomization in that study where the intervention group, the vitamin D group, actually had sicker patients, more diabetes. And so it wasn't clear whether or not that was just a bad randomization or whether there was no effect. The one that has the most promise, and this is the thing you got to understand about vitamin D is vitamin D. So let's back up a little bit and talk about vitamin D. So people say, well, should I take vitamin D3 D2. What is vitamin D? So this is how it works. You have cholesterol in your body and it's hanging around. And when ultraviolet B radiation comes from the sun, it comes through the epidermis, which is the top layer of your skin. Then it penetrates down into the dermis and it comes with just enough energy to do a conformational change on one of the carbon bonds, which flips it to be kind of nerdy here, but it actually converts the ultraviolet radiation, converts the cholesterol structure into vitamin D. When.

You get sunlight, is there a certain amount of sunlight on a daily basis we should be consuming on the skin?

So you typically want to. There's people that have gone into the details of this and I can never remember, but you need about, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes of sunlight a day. And since we're on the topic, there's different types of ultraviolet light there's uva, UVB and uvc. So let's dispense with UVC because it doesn't have much to do with the conversation. Although there is some data that UVC can kill coronavirus, but that's another topic. UVA can penetrate pretty far. And unfortunately, UVA has no role in the production of vitamin D. What is uva? It's not useful. UVA is ultraviolet radiation that causes skin aging. It can cause cancers on your skin, melanoma. So it's not something that you really want to have. And it can. And sometimes it can actually even penetrate through glass. Unfortunately, UVB does not penetrate glass. So sitting in front of a window with the sun coming in is not going to help you in terms of vitamin D. You actually have to be. Yeah, you actually have to be exposed.

With no blockage, nothing in between.

Absolutely, yeah.

That's uva.

So UVA will not penetrate glass. Sorry, will penetrate glass. UVB will not penetrate glass. And it's the UVB that we need. So.

So how do you get UVB that's just sitting out in the sun?

You gotta go in the sun.

And what about people who say, you know what, I don't want to look older with my skin. I don't want to get skin disease or cancer, so I want to lather up with all sunscreen to protect my skin. Should we use sunscreen or is it more, you know, be in the sun for 15 minutes, then put sunscreen on?

Yeah, so that's exactly right. B is not gonna penetrate sunscreen very well either. So it' sit's reallyit boils down to this risk, benefit, you know, so you've gotta look at, do I wanna look.

Good and not have wrinkles or do I wanna be healthy?

So there are some, there are some solutions to this, right? So fish oil is rich in vitamin D. There are certain mushrooms that are rich in vitamin D. And of course, look, we live in 20, 21, right? We've got supplementation. So you can take that and not get the risk there. So that's a good benefit.

So is supplementation. If I'm taking vitamin D, vitamins, 500, 5,000, whatever vitamins, is that as powerful as 15 minutes of sunlight or is it not gonna be as beneficial?

Yeah, it depends. It depends on too many things. It depends on your skin color. So unfortunately, if you're interested in getting a lot of vitamin D, the darker your skin, that's melanin, that's blocking that ultraviolet radiation. And so you've gotta stay out in the sun. Longer to get the same amount of it's natural sunblock. That's correct.

So you need to stay out longer than if you're more fair skinned or lighter skinned. Then you know, I need 10, 15 minutes.

That's correct. And that, and that is the reason why it was sold. It was thought that. Why are we seeing so many people of skin color coming into the hospital with COVID 19 particularly? Those are the ones with the lower vitamin D levels historically.

Is this what you're seeing in your hospital in California? What's, you know?

Absolutely, absolutely.

Really? Wow. So to go back.

Yeah. So you go through, you get vitamin D, but you're still not done yet because now the liver has to convert that into something called 25 hydroxy vitamin D. The liver takes a little hydroxyl group, puts it onto the carbon and now it's ready to be used. This is the form, by the way, that we measure. When you go to the doctor and you get a blood test, you're going to measure the 25 hydroxy vitamin D. So all of these studies that we've talked about were measuring 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels. But the studies that we were describing, like for instance, the shade study and the Brazilian study, these are given vitamin D. So they still have to go through the liver, they still have to get hydroxylated and that can take several days. So in this last study that was done in Cordona, Spain, they jumped right ahead and they supplemented these patients. They gave them pretty high doses of the 25 hydroxy vitamin D to start off with. And the results in that pilot study were pretty astounding. In the intervention group, they went from 50% of patients needing intensive care unit to just 2%. And that's a massive reduction in terms of the need for intensive care.

Okay, so what did they do when they came into the hospital? They gave them this dosage right away.

They gave them a high dose of this medication called 25 hydroxy vitamin D, otherwise known as calcifediol. That's the Medical name for 25 hydroxy vitamin D. They gave it to them on day one, day three, and on.

Day seven, and it reduced to 2%, eliminating it. Or.

It went from 50% of the patients in the placebo group needing ICU to 2% of the patients in the intervention group in the calcifediol group needing intensive care. That's a dramatic reduction.

So intensive care, meaning being on a ventilator being, you know, being taken care of the whole time. So. And the others to only 2% being in there and then what, their symptoms went away eventually after.

Yeah, nobody died in the intervention group. 7.7% of those in the placebo group died. So, you know, there was also some issues with randomization there, except in the opposite direction that there seemed to be sicker people in the placebo group. So the randomization wasn't perfect. But they're planning on doing a much bigger study. So we'll get some data probably here in the next few months.

So this is a drug or this is a supplement?

This is a drug. So this, you're required a prescription for this and it's not cheap. It's actually currently used by kidney doctors to treat problems with the parathyroid gland, which is responsible for calcium and in patients with kidney disease. So it's not readily available, but it is available if you need to use it in the hospital. And we've been doing it recently, just started recently. And so I don't have a lot of data on our patients that we're seeing. But obviously some people are getting better, some people are not.

What are you recommending to people in terms of a daily prescription for natural remedies? You know, is it go out into the sun at 8am for 15 minutes? Does it take vitamin D supplements? Does it eat mushrooms? What are you suggesting to your patients?

So for people who have not contacted COVID 19, we actually did a video on this on Medcram. It was update 59. We recently just did the top 10 tips for if you actually have positive Covid. And so what I'm recommending is based on a lot of it's based on data in other viruses, some of it's based on data in COVID 19. But we can just go down the list. Number one, vitamin D. So let's talk about vitamin D. How much should you be taking? The. You know, there's been some studies that show that if people who are at risk for vitamin D deficiency, so people who are darker color, living at higher latitudes, specifically above the 35th parallel, which is around the southern border of Tennessee. If you're in California, it's kind of just south of Santa Barbara, that area, then taking vitamin D supplementation is a good idea. So how much is too much? We actually probably overestimate the toxicity of vitamin D. It's probably one of the safest fat soluble vitamins. That being said, it's not completely risk free, but the endocrinology society says this. They say that what is the maximum dose that you can take without supervision from a physician? And for someone who is at risk for vitamin D deficiency. The answer is 4,000 international units daily.

4,000 daily?

Yeah.

Okay.

And so what would I do if someone asked me, you know, I take 5,000 international units daily just because I had my levels checked? I think the right answer is if you can get your levels checked. Got it. And where would you want to be? It's measured in nanograms per milliliter. I would say, based on the data that we've seen, the retrospective data in the United States, we see that there is an increase in SARS COV2 positive positivity once you start going below 50 nanograms per milliliter. So if you're, if, if you're not above 50, you might want to bump it up at least over the winter season. And wouldn't you know it that. What are we seeing? We're seeing a rebound in SARS COV2 in the winter season. So this, you know, this is not. It's not rocket science. It's because we're not getting enough sunlight, the days are short, People don't have enough vitamin D. And so this is what the theory is. So that's vitamin D number three. So the other thing that I would talk about is nac. That's one of the things that we've been talking about. NAC is N acetylcysteine. There is. There's some pretty good data that shows that SARS CoV2, when it infects your cell, it knocks out the receptor called the ACE2 receptor. This ACE2 receptor is very important in regulating oxidative stress in your body. We could talk for an hour about oxidative stress and hydroxy radicals and things that are very high in people who get COVID 19. So diabetes, obesity, oxidative stress is very high. So you get this viral hit, and it tips you over the edge. So one of the things that may be beneficial is consuming products that are antioxidants. So berries, strawberries, raspberries, elderberries, blackberries, all of those are excellent things to do. But if you want to increase even more, then. Taking 600mg of NAC twice daily was shown in a previous study to reduce the symptoms of the flu virus in a winter season when it was done prospectively. So in other words, they randomized people to placebo versus 600 milligrams of NAC twice daily. And they did not see a difference in the incidence of the flu in those people, but they did notice a significant reduction in the severity of the illness that the people suffered. When they were on nac. So instead of data.

So instead of being on, you know, on your couch for a week, you're able to walk around and just feel less like.

Right, exactly.

Is nac. NAC is over the counter.

Yes.

How do you spell that?

N. So that's N. And then a dash. Acetyl. Ac. You're asking somebody here to spell this.

But if you go.

It's actually marketed under nac. If you just go and type in nac, you'll have it.

Nac.

Got it.

Okay, cool.

Nac. N. Acetyl cysteine.

Take twice daily.

Twice daily, 600 milligrams. I wouldn't do it forever, but maybe over a winter season for three or four months while we're in the pandemic. That's probably a wise choice.

What else do you recommend?

I think zinc is really important too. I would not take more than 40 milligrams of elemental zinc a day, because as you increase your zinc intake, you can reduce your copper in your body, and that's not a good thing. You want to have enough copper. So zinc and copper are kind of like on a seesaw. But if you want to maximize your zinc intake. 40 milligrams of elemental zinc. I say that because when you pick up a zinc supplement, it could be zinc picolinate, it could be zinc sulfate. All of those have a different molecular weight, and so the milligram is just gonna be different. But if the bottle is worth anything to put the pills in, it'll tell you how much elemental zinc is in there. 40 milligrams is the maximum daily dose.

Okay, and you're doing all these steps yourself too, right?

Oh, yeah. I'm smart because I basically tell my wife what to do, and every morning the pills are there. I don't even have to worry about remembering it, because if I did, I would not do it.

Yeah, you gotta, like, plan and put it out in front of time and make sure you have it all set up to win. Okay, what's next?

So this is where it gets a little bit less in terms of evidence. So there is some evidence that zinc can help stop viral replication. The protein that the virus uses inside your cells to make more of those viruses is called replicase. And. And there is some evidence, in vitro data, albeit, that zinc shuts that down. The problem is that when you take zinc, you need to get that zinc inside the cell. And one of the things that has been looked at and has had some promise in Ebola, for instance, and was being studied in this Virus is quercetin. Quercetin is a natural product. It's over the counter. It's high in concentration in capers, in onions, in vegetables, roots, basically. And so I don't see a lot of downside with taking quercetin. And so I do that as well.

Okay, you'll add that in your daily practice.

Yes. And then the last thing, I left the last thing for the end. And that's something that you're probably like, what are you doing with this? And it's a long story that we can break into. But contrast showers.

Oh, yes, you're speaking my language. Yeah, Speaking about. So hot and cold or cold only.

I do hot for five minutes and then I do cold for one minute and then I do five for hot again and then one for cold, and then finish it up with three for hot and one for cold. And the one that clued me onto that formula was a Dr. Neil Nedley, who is out of Wiemar, California, who, who's actually done a lot of research. And it actually has a clinic up there called New Start, that's. That's doing this sort of stuff and with amazing results.

So what is. So this isn't clinically tested yet, but you're. You.

Well, let me tell you the story. Yes, it's a long story, but because.

Because we've had, you know, Wim Hof on who is a proponent of this and the power of boosting immunity and how he's done these kind of superhuman tests where they've injected him with viruses and he's been able to essentially say, no, go away from my body in the cold and through breathing and mindset. So, yeah, I'd love to hear your story on this.

So you don't need to be. Well, you don't need to be Hoff to do that. You don't need to be part of the Polar Bear club, not to say that there isn't some use for that. So I started to look into the research on this and one of the areas that really helped my fascination was the 1919 pandemic. 1918 flu pandemic, and what happened. So one of the things that you've got to understand about COVID is the timing. Timing is everything. And really there are two phases to this disease, and you can really draw the line with COVID is when someone is at home versus when someone is at the hospital. Covid. And what's going on with COVID at home is completely a different animal than what's going on in the hospital. And I'll Explain. And this has been borne out by research and studies, and I think this is not controversial, this is pretty well understood, is that when somebody is infected with SARS CoV2, it suppresses the innate immune system. Now the innate immune system is part of your immune system that gives you a fever. It sends out these macrophages to kill things that don't look like what it's supposed to look like, as opposed to the adaptive immune system which is later on. That's antibodies, that's protein structures, that's T cells, B cells. So what the virus does is it has a strategy where it infects the person, it suppresses the immune system, it allows it to replicate and spread into multiple organs of your body. And then when the adaptive immune system comes on, it now has all of these cells that it has to attack. All of that inflammation, especially in the lung, can put you into pneumonia, get you hospitalized and on a ventilator. And so the strategy should be at the beginning of the virus is to improve, is to substantiate, is to boost the innate immune system to get rid of the virus before it gets to that phase. But what we're noticing is when people get to the hospital and they have pneumonia is the immune system is over ramped, it's causing inflammation too much. And that's why things like steroids work, that's why things like anti inflammatories work. And so what we're noticing is when we do randomized controlled trials on Remdesivir, which is antiviral, that's gonna work early best. When we look at steroids, we found that only worked great at the end. And so the timing is really the key. So when you understand that, you'll understand that one of the tools of the innate immune system is something called interferon. Interferon is a protein and it does exactly as it sounds. It interferes with viral infections. What SARS CoV2 does at the very beginning of this is it takes interferon and suppresses it. And it does it in a way because it uses its proteins in a way that it suppresses the body's ability to, to create interferon, to use interferon. We know that from very well conducted studies that have shown that people who have innate problems with interferon always seem to have very bad courses with SARS CoV2. People who have mutations with low interferon levels have very bad courses of SARS COV2.

So we want to strengthen interferon.

Correct. So with that in mind, with that framework in mind, one of the things that I looked into is what did people do prior to 1928? And why do I say 1928? It's because in 1928, we discovered penicillin and penicillin and the use of penicillin. Prior to penicillin, when you went to the hospital, things were very labor intensive. The doctors, the nurses, they would be doing hydrotherapy, they would be doing all of these treatments that were very, very Labor Intensive. After 1928, and the production of penicillin and antibiotics and. And drugs and the FDA and randomized controlled trials, now we were able to control disease by affecting the pathology, so the bacteria. And so a lot of that, what we learned had gone away. So what was it back in. Prior to 1928, what was it that we did in these hospitals when the flu pandemic arrived? And so I started to research that, and what I found was something that was really interesting and started to really attract my attention and start to look into it. If you go back, there was a number of hospitals, especially in the northeastern part of the United States, which is where America basically was centered at that time. There was this rebirth, if you will, among the snake oil experts and the people peddling morphine and arsenic for all of these things that could work. There was this understanding of this rebirth in the late 1800s, about natural remedies and about things in terms of nature and fresh air, sunlight, these sorts of things. And these hospitals, they were known as sanitariums. Well, there was one particular fellow, actually, a number of them. There was a Dr. Jackson in New York, but more notably John Harvey Kellogg, who you may recognize that name as starting Kellogg's Corn Flakes and this health food industry. Back at that time, he was the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which was the world's largest hospital. And they saw very, very elite patients. People like J.C. penney, people like Montgomery Ward, people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart. They would all go to this hospital for.

They were like the Cleveland Clinic of their time.

Exactly, exactly. And these weren't just like things that they were pulling out of a hat.

These things worked.

And that's why people went there, because it was the state of the art. So what did they do? They were using hydrothermal therapy. They were heating up the pa. I mean, if you can see pictures of this, it's a hilarious crackup, because you'll look down the hospital hallway and you'll see these rooms, these treatment rooms with little holes, and out of these little Holes were their heads. The patient's heads were popping out. And this room was used to heat up the body. It was a hot box simulate.

It was a sauna.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what they were doing and keeping their head cool. And now this type of treatment spread and it was well understood. And I think the zenith of this, interestingly, was a guy by the name of Wagner Joreg. He was an Austrian psychiatrist and he had his assane asylum there in Austria. And there was obviously a lot of people with neurosyphilis. Neurosyphilis is a condition, obviously where you have syphilis that goes to the brain. It's a type of bacteria, it's an organism. And this was before penicillin. So we couldn't treat it. We could treat malaria, but we couldn't treat it. So this guy, Wagner Yorag, noticed that when his neurosyphilis patients had fevers, they actually responded and they got better, their symptoms abated. And so he had this idea what would happen if I purposefully infected them with malaria.

Right.

Because malaria gives you really high fevers. And so he did it, and wouldn't you know it, he cured them of their neurosyphilis. And then he treated them. Yeah, and then he treated them with. He treated them with the known treatment at the time for malaria, cleared the malaria. So he was able to basically cure neurosyphilis by inducing a fever. And for this, he actually won the Nobel prize in medicine, ironically, in 1927, the year before penicillin was discovered. So if you look at the 30,000 foot level, about where we've come in the United States and in fact the world in the last hundred years, we were going down a path of enhancing the body's own way of dealing with the virus or whatever bacteria, whatever it was. The immune system is so incredibly complex, we didn't understand it at the time, but we understand it now and has so many ways, so many angles of attacking pathogens that if we are able to just turn on that machine, that machine is going to be. I mean, let's look at it. People who get infected with coronavirus Today, more than 80% of them recover on their own because of the immune system. It's only a small amount of people that cannot deal with the infection, and they end up in the hospital because we have so many people being infected that it's overwhelming our system. So what happened in 1928 was the discovery of penicillin, the discovery of all these medications, randomized controlled trials, the fda, that what we've done is since that time, we've gone down a road where we take a chronic disease, we study it, we know, and we do the randomized trials, which is what we should do, and we come up with treatments that treat that, and that works really well until you have a pandemic and now you have a brand new disease that comes on the scene. It is overwhelming everybody. There's no way we can do the randomized controlled trials fast enough. And so what I became interested in is, is there something that we can do that isn't a pill that doesn't need to be prescribed, that doesn't need to have a factory to make, that we can do to already enhance a system that we are already given when we're born to help deal with the disease that's already kind of dealing with it anyway. But if we could just go from 80% to 85, 80 to 90%, that would take care of it, that would have a tremendous impact on taking off the stress from our healthcare system. So that's what I intended to do. So I looked at what were these guys doing at the time of the pandemic, because here these people are, they know what to do with these diseases. This is the treatments that they're using. What did they do during the pandemic to treat this? And wouldn't you know it, I found the resource and it was amazing. And I'll stop there to see if there's any questions before I go on, because the next part was just mind blowing.

Yeah. What's the resource or what's the research on this?

Okay, so there was this guy by the name of Dr. Ruble. Dr. Ruble was the medical director of the sanitarium in Boston. It was the New England Sanitarium. And he said, this is what he said. He said, basically, I'm paraphrasing, he wrote this article in a. It wasn't even a scientific journal, it was a. It was a church periodical. These were all. These were all Seventh Day Adventist institutions in the northeastern part of the United States that were doing hydrotherapy. Same thing with the Battle Creek Sanitarium. And what he wrote in there is like, the pandemic has offered us this opportunity to really put to the test these kind of treatments that we're doing. Let's see if it works. So this is what he did. He coupled, he got all of the information from about 10 sanitariums in the northeast of the United States, and he pulled the data and then he went to the army camps because in the army camps, they had the best, they had the brightest doctors. They had all of the resources. As you remember from 1918, these people from Europe, these soldiers, were coming back to the United States. The war had just ended, and they were bringing back, unfortunately, with them the flu. And so as they came back, they made these camps in the United States, and they were treating these people. So about 20% of the people in the camps came down with the flu. And when they came down with the flu, again, two components to the disease. The first part was the virus, the viral replication phase, and then pneumonia. And if they got pneumonia, there's no antibiotics. It was almost like a death sentence, because 40 to 50% mortality rate. Okay, wow. So the key was, is you don't want them to get to the pneumonia stage. You want to get this before it gets to the pneumonia stage. And the thinking in the army camps at the time was, what's killing these people? It must be the fever. It must be the symptoms of the flu. And so aspirin had just come out in 1899, Bayer Aspirin, ironically, it was a German company that came up with aspirin. And so they were giving aspirin to all of these people in the camps. I mean, because aspirin would take away the fever. Aspirin, ironically, the fever is the sign that the innate immune system is doing something right. You get interferon, fever goes up. And so the very thing that was trying to help these patients, they were.

Getting rid of, they were suppressing it, which was causing them to be more sick.

Exactly. And so at the end of the day, it was about 10, 15% of these patients were coming down with pneumonia, okay, because they were giving aspirin and all of these sorts of things. Compare that now to what was going on in the sanitariums. So in the sanitariums, they were not doing this. What they were doing, what was the treatment? What was the rational treatment, in the words of Dr. Ruble, that they were doing? So as soon as they came down with symptoms, they would isolate them, they would put them in bed, they would have them rest. They would also expose them several times a day to sunlight, sunshine, fresh air, ventilation was very important. And then they would do something called fomentations. And that's the old term for hydrotherapy. Essentially, what they would do, practically speaking, is they would get a pot of boiling water, they would put these towels into the pot of boiling water, take it out, wring it out, and they would place it on the bed. The patient would lie on this with a sheet in between so they wouldn't be burned. And then they would place fomentations on top of them, basically creating, if you will, a hot box. And they would do this for about 20 minutes. When they were done, they would then put cold water on them and rub it. And basically to cause vasoconstriction, we now understand, and lock that heat in. So only about 2 to 3% of those patients came down with pneumonia. So at the end of the day, the overall case infectivity of mortality rate was like 6% for the army camps and 1% for these hospitals, these sanitariums. So then I looked at that, I said, that is remarkable that here we have. It's not a randomized, controlled trial. Different populations, different things. But it at least tells me that this has been tried before. I mean, a Nobel prize has been given on the basis of this type of treatment. And here's something that you don't need a prescription for, you don't need a test. If you feel bad, you can start this right away. And so, as one of my recommendations, going back to the original question, doing contrast showers is a nice way of doing this as a tonic to help prevent and keep your immune system on kind of a sentinel mode, looking around. But if you actually come down with it, if I've gotten where I think I might be coming down with something, I will do the hot fomentations. And you'll just be sweating there. But after you're done, you feel amazing, really.

So if you feel like, okay, I'm getting a cold, I'm getting a flu, I'm getting a virus, whatever, something, what would you do from that moment as you started to feel that you go right into hot, cold showers. Is it the.

So the first thing I would do is I would alert my wife. Yeah, of course, it's hard to do it on yourself. And what she'll do is she'll get a large foot bath and she'll put the hottest water you can tolerate in there and put that on the ground.

Just for your feet.

I'll lay down. Yep. And I'll put my feet in there. And that helps. Anything part of your body that you can do to try to heat it up, heat up your core body temperature is important.

Okay.

Soso, basically we'll put down a hot towel, I'll lay on that, keep my feet in there. Anything that will increase your core body temperature, cover me up with a blanket. So I'll be basically in my own hot box. I'll have A cold towel on my head, cold towel across my carotid arteries here so that my head remains cool. And it doesn't know that my body's being heated, but I'm being heated up. And then that's for about 20 minutes and then that comes off. I get cold water on the feet, cold water on my chest, and then for just a brief moment, for about 30 seconds and then I go lay down. And you can do that once, twice a day. And what that will do, and this is not hocus pocus, they have actually done the studies where they will take monocytes which are responsible for secreting interferon, take monocytes out of. They've done the study where they take them out of people at different temperatures and then they expose them to, you know, bacterial challenge or some, some sort of foreign challenge. And right when you get to about 39 degrees, the interferon response goes up tenfold. I mean, it starts to go up, starts to go up. And then right about 39 degrees centigrade, which is, you know, maybe 102 degrees Fahrenheit, you get a ten fold increase in interferon response, which is exactly the same substance that we are lacking early on in the course of this disease. COVID 19.

Is this something that someone could prevent on a weekly basis where they do hot cold as well, or is this just something you do in the shower? It's like, okay, let me do hot cold for five minutes and help me there.

So I do my showers hot cold. But that's another point that you bring up because there is a whole society on this planet that does literally this pretty much twice a week, five times a week. And you know who I'm talking about.

Yeah. And they don't get sick or they say that. You know, I talked to Wim Hof and he's like, I don't remember the last time I got sick.

I mean, I mean there's the Finns. There are so many saunas in Finland that if you were to ask every Finnish person to go into a sauna at the same time, there would be enough saunas to do that.

Yeah. And then they jump in the cold, they jump in the cold water.

And so if you look at the COVID data in Finland, they outperform just about any other Nordic country next to them in terms of mortality rate in terms of, I mean, not to say that the Swedes don't do saunas and the Norwegians don't do saunas. They just don't do it as much as, and the data is actually a little bit overestimating because a number of people, a lot of people who are in Helsinki that came down with COVID were actually people immigrants from Africa that had come down. There was a huge problem early on.

Interesting.

And that goes back to the vitamin D issue. So here we have people with dark skin coming from Africa who are used to getting the sunlight that they need to stay healthy. And, and now you're putting them literally at the other extreme of the planet where through the winter the sun may not even come up and they are at extreme risk of getting vitamin D and huge problems in terms of COVID 19.

So is steam room and saunas also beneficial in hot tubs or you think just hot cold showers?

I think it's interesting. I think all of those things are acceptable if you look culturally. And I've talked to people from Iran, I've talked to people from Asia, I've talked to people from Africa. In every one of their stories, there's always a grandma that knows when someone gets sick to heat them up. I mean, whether it's using the sand in Iran or using the hot pools, they all seem to have this understanding in their DNA, for lack of a better term. It seems as though we knew this as a society for many years, but because of, of technological advances and just labor and ease of treatment, we've kind of forgotten it.

Right. We'll just say we'll take this pill and that'll make you feel better. But heating someone up when they start to feel some type of sick for 15, 20 minutes, making the head or the neck cool, heating it up and then putting cold afterwards and then resting, sounds like a simple remedy that we could all do naturally.

Yeah. And if people are interested in this, a website that I found that's really helpful is a simple one. It's just hydrotherapyathome.com hydrotherapyathome.com they have a number of resources that I found that are very helpful videos to show how to do it. You know, there's another website that I found called hydroforcovid.com that's a number four there. Hydro. The number four, Covid.com where they actually go through the techniques and what a lot of these websites have done that have been doing this because there's been this sort of background movement all this time for the last hundred years that never fully got rid of hydrotherapy, especially in the physical therapy literature. They use it extensively for people's muscle aches, for people's, you know, when people are recovering from certain diseases, physical or physiotherapists love to use hydrotherapy because it's been shown to work. It probably works for more than just that. What they did there on those websites is they tried to go back to, you know, what heart John Harvey Kellogg used in their protocols. You can actually get the book that John Harvey Kellogg wrote. It's about a thousand pages. And the name of the book is Rational Hydrotherapy. It's available on Google Books. Someone scanned it in. Some poor, poor soul scanned every thousand page in there. And you can read it. And these guys were. I mean, they were giants back then, that. They were just amazing.

Wow. I'm curious. You're exposed to Covid every day, right? I mean, you're exposed to people with COVID every day, essentially, right?

Yeah.

Have you, have you got Covid yourself?

Not that I'm aware of. You know, I never. If I had symptoms of a virus, it was. It lasted about a day and then went away. So I figured that couldn't have been. Couldn't have been Covid. But, but at the same time, one of the things is when I go into the hospital, I've got ppe, there's negative pressure rooms. It's. It's probably. If somebody gets Covid at the hospital, almost always it's because of something they did outside the hospital.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm curious, is there a way, do you believe that with all these disciplines that we could do, with all the steps, with all the strategies, you know, all this stuff, is there a way to prevent it from. And actually if Covid entered our body, that we could reject it and disintegrated it or just. It would not affect us. Is that possible?

It's possible. If we had the kind of. I mean, it happens every day. People get Covid every day and their immune system kicks it out. Yeah. The problem is that we have comorbidities. And so if you were to look at it, I mean, there's different populations that have different abilities. We can predict. It's not a mystery. We can predict plugging in your information, your age, your comorbidities, your weights, your bmi, all of these things, we can kind of predict what your chances are of getting it, and then if you do get it, what your chances are of dying.

What's comorbidities? What's that mean?

Comorbidities, other diseases, diabetes, hypertension.

If you have other diseases, then the immune system probably won't be able to defend it as well.

Yeah, exactly. And so that's why we take a multi pronged approach. And so one of the biggest, in my opinion, one of the biggest barriers to getting what we need to get done is just perceptions and politics and all of these sorts of things. So if you look at, if you come to Medcram, which is where we do a lot of the stuff you'll never be able to figure out. Kyle and I are sort of the co founders of MedCram. You wouldn't be able to figure out if I was a Democrat and he was a Republican or vice versa. I mean, that's one of the things that bothers me about this, is that we're talking about people's lives and people's lives, you know, in my opinion, are rank at the top. Politics is something, it's like a hobby that you might want to do. But to see what we've done, whereas we've actually used this pandemic to promote our politics, is just so and so. You know, I talk about masks and say, oh, you talked about masks, you must be a Democrat. But then I talk about, you know, natural remedies too. Oh, well then you must be one of these anti vaxxers. No, I mean even a dead clock is right twice a day. Right. So I mean just go for the truth and speak what the data speaks and let the rest take care of itself.

Now what is the truth about masks in your opinion or I guess based on the data?

Yeah. So basically here's the problem. The problem is that there's two ways that the virus spreads and here are the two ways it can spread in large droplets. So if I'm standing in front of you and I speak and you know, spittle comes out of my mouth and lands on you, in that droplet are probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of particles of the virus. And that's a large amount. And if you, you know, if that goes into your mouth or your wipe or you touch, you're going to get the virus. So what masks do is that they avoid, they completely eliminate that. That's why the masks don't have to be to the level of being airborne. They don't have to filter out virus viral particles, they just have to eliminate droplets. But unfortunately that's not the only way that it spreads. So if you can imagine being in a room and somebody smoking on the other side of that room, even if they're wearing a mask and you're wearing a mask, you're going to eventually smell the smoke because the very tiny little particles of smoke are going to fill up that room eventually because of diffusion. That's another way, an airborne way. That's another way that the virus spreads. Masks aren't going to help that. That's why you can go. If everybody went to a large meeting and everyone wore masks and it was an enclosed room with no ventilation, Covid is going to spread like wildfire. And that's why we get these different decisions. Look, look here. The masks didn't help. Why are they making us wear a mask? It's because there's two different ways. And so the way you take care of that way of the virus spreading is through ventilation. And really, unfortunately, the CDC hasn't gotten onto this until just recently. There's a guy that we had on, a researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Joseph Allen, who's been really on this since the very beginning, talking about ventilation, talking about cracking your windows open, talking about if you're in a room, making sure that there's enough turnover of air in the room. And so really, you got to do both of those. And so people don't understand that. Unfortunately, politicians don't understand that. Here we have outdoor dieting shutting down. So. So why is that? We don't want people congregating, but it's outdoors. And so the chances of you getting a virus outdoors in, well, ventilated areas is pretty low. So what do people do instead of having their parties at outside dining, they go home and they have big parties inside of a house. And what happens is we get, you know, a lot of people coming down.

Surprise. More so because. Yeah, because I've been hearing that people are wearing the mask all day long. They're still getting it. Certain people. Right. So it's not. It's not only the mask helps, but it's not. You can still get the virus.

Well, and here's the. Here's a case in point. So imagine getting a bunch of people all wearing masks into a long cylinder and keeping them in there for hours on an hour.

You're talking about when we go on a plane.

Exactly. And we haven't. I mean, there's been some stories, but for the. For the. By and large, we haven't had massive outbreaks of COVID 19 coming from planes. And why is that? Here it is. Is because that air is highly filtered through HEPA filters. 50% of the air coming out of those jets from up above, 50% of that air comes from outside, which ostensibly, I would hope, has no viral particles. And the other half is coming recirculating from the plane, but it's gone through extensive HEPA filtration where it completely takes out the virus. And so that is probably the cleanest place that you can possibly be is on a plane. Absolutely.

Even if someone's sitting next to you, one foot away, and they're sitting.

Yeah. If they're sitting next to you and they've got a mask on, then you should not be getting those large droplets. But here's the problem, though, is on a plane, that system is only working when the engines are running. So the most important times to be very careful and not to snack. Not to take your mask off is on before it takes off. Exactly.

So get on the plane last.

Exactly.

Keep your mask off.

Don't pay to go on the plane first.

I know. Wow. Yeah. Sit in the back seat if you have to, to go last. Okay. What about nose breathing? I've been doing more research. There's someone we just had on who's studying the effects of nose breathing and how. I'm always getting this wrong. Is it nitric oxide or nitrous? Nitric. Nitric oxide. When you breathe through your nose, it creates nitric oxide. And it. And there's been studies, I don't know if you can confirm this, that essentially Covid cannot exist in a state of nitric oxide. Is that true? And what does that do when we breathe through the nose and not through the mouth?

Well, I'm not sure that the amount of nitric oxide in vivo. So here's the word that your viewers should be aware of. In vitro. That's on a lab bench on a petri dish, and then in vivo. So we may do studies on in vitro that that something, you know, that nitric oxide kills the virus or that zinc kills the virus or that hydroxychloroquine kills.

In a little petri dish.

In a little petri dish. Right. At a concentration that may never be achievable in the actual human body. And then we move over to the human being and it doesn't work. I haven't seen those studies. I will say this, though, that breathing through the nose humidifies the air. And I know that the virus does not like humidity. Generally speaking, it does not like humidity. And so that also may play a role. But I mean, this thing about in vitro and in vivo and getting a medication that works, and why can't we just get this medication to people? I mean, if I could show you staph aureus or streptococcus. I mean, these are bacteria that infect people. I could put staph aureus on a petri dish and I could drop a little disc of, of methicillin on that petri dish and you would see clearly that there would be this halo around this disk where the bacteria would just decimate. They were just killed instantly. And I'd be like, well, great. This is amazing. Hey, we got this patient over here with a staph aureus pneumonia. Let's just give him methicillin and he should be fine. Well, as a doctor for the last 20 years, I've seen case after case and I've gotten to learn. And anybody who does this will learn. It's not just me. And that something may work really good in the lab, something may work really good on paper, this thing may just decimate staph aureus. But you give that to somebody, maybe there's some other extenuating circumstance that's causing them not to get better. I mean, the body is a very complex machine. Putting a seatbelt on after the car accident is not going to help the person who's injured, even though it would have prevented it in the first place. There's such complexities that I think the public needs to understand that just because there's a lab test or a value that seems to work, it's a whole nother thing.

Yeah. Applying it to be putting it into a patient and testing that over and over and dosage and does it affect other. Does it impact you in a negative way by that much? All that stuff? I'm curious about this comorbidities idea. What do you think or what is the research proving and showing is one of the main comorbidities when someone has this, whether it's obesity or diabetes or something else is also impacting it at a high level, that if they decreased that thing, they should have a greater chance of defending themselves and having a stronger immune system for not getting Covid.

It's the chicken and the egg, unfortunately, because we see that stress, oxidative stress causes obesity and then obesity causes oxidative stress. And then when you have a lot of fat, you store a lot of fat soluble things and make it not available. So like vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin. So it's hard to tease out exactly what it is. But we do know this. Here are the comorbid things, here are the things that make people more susceptible to dying from COVID 19. Kidney disease. Kidney disease is a big thing, number two, diabetes. And so those are very big things. So why would that be when you get infected with the virus, the virus is binding to this protein called ACE2. ACE2 is part of a huge complex system of enzymes that regulate your oxidative stress. And so imagine you are. Imagine that you are obese. Imagine that you have kidney disease, diabetes. Your body is literally sitting on the edge of a cliff. Not literally, figuratively sitting on the edge of a cliff. Okay. All right. And it's basically getting by. It's getting by. You're not in any kind of. I mean, it's compensating for the system. Now imagine that you completely remove this enzyme. By the way, ACE2 is responsible for. For cutting down on oxidative stress and increasing proteins that cause reduction. Antioxidants, essentially. So now you basically pull the mat from under the whole thing. You tip it over the edge, and you can see very clearly how this type of a hit cannot be compensated for. I mean, there's so many different analogies I can use, but the virus basically causes everything to start unraveling. And once things start to unravel, things become compounded and you reach that point of no return. And unfortunately for some of the patients, by the time they reach the hospital, we have already reached the point of no return in a lot of those cases.

No return, meaning death.

Yeah.

And kidney disease and diabetes are two major factors that will increase the likeness of this. Is that right?

Absolutely.

And how do we. How do we prevent diabetes and kidney disease?

Well, I think a lot of it has to do with diet and activity. These are things that we as a culture, as a society, have placed more emphasis on. Commercialism, advertising, taste, short term benefits and not really the long term benefits. It's kind of like we've been in class and we've been, you know, cramming for quizzes all along, and now we're sitting down for the final exam and we got nothing.

That was my whole life in school.

Yeah. I mean, I could talk to you about so many different things. We know, for instance, that high fructose corn syrup is a big inhibitor of vitamin D. We know that. We know that. The scientists, when they. When they induce. Yeah, when they induce oxidative stress models in their. In their mice. How do they do that? By feeding them high fructose corn syrup. There's one country on this planet that consumes more high fructose corn syrup than any other country. In fact, number two is less than half of that consumption.

Oh, my gosh. What is number two? Mexico.

It's some country in Europe, I think. I have to look. I was surprised because Europe is really, really against high fructose corn syrup. If you go to Europe and buy a can of Coca Cola and see what they use to sweeten the Coca Cola. It's cane sugar.

It's not corn syrup.

Yeah, it's not corn syrup.

Man, this is interesting. I'm going to say something very unpopular, and I want to talk about this for a minute, about the movement of loving your body for where it's at and loving yourself, no matter how obese you might become. And I think what I'm hearing you say is diet and exercise and taking care of your health is actually preventing these things to happen. Kidney disease, diabetes, which is also another cause of dying if you contract the virus. How can we, I guess, again, talk about this in a way that gives people the facts, that helps them improve their health, the overall quality of their health, but doesn't, you know, hurt their mental health or make them shame themselves for where they're at as well? What would you suggest as a medical professional?

So it's. It's the thing that. That's absolutely very important, and that is realizing that accepting somebody for what they are doesn't mean that they. That you want to keep them the way they are, that you're willing to work with them and move them to a place where they should be. So what's. What's the absolute wrong way to do it is to go into somebody who has a particular diet and say, here's the diet goal that I want you to be at. I want you to stop your diet right now, and I want you to adopt this diet. That's the worst thing that you could possibly do. Because, number one, nobody can do that. Number two, unless you're extremely highly motivated. I'm certainly not that person. And then, number two is that if they try to do it and they fail, they're going to just throw the.

Whole thing out and eat more of the bad stuff.

Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I used to eat meat. I used to eat. You know, I used to go to the hamburger place in college. The same time I was doing that vitamin D research. You know, my girlfriend and I would go and eat out. So what I started to do was I started to find the things in my life that I felt was the most egregious. And I say, I'm gonna. I'm gonna focus on one thing, and that's the thing I'm gonna cut out. So I cut out beef, for instance. And you know what was weird is that after not having it for three months, I said, you know what? It's been a long time. Let's just try it. You know, and when I went back to trying it, it just didn't do it for me. It didn't hit the same receptors that I thought it would. And what I realized and what a lot of people have said is that your tastes change after about two or three months. And it's true. You don't think it could happen, but it actually happens. You, you actually start to like the things that you have changed to.

And you live in a blue zone. Are you, are you vegan or plant based?

Yes, so I am plant based. You say a blue zone. You know what that means then, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. And you're in. Because you're in Loma Linda, right? You're in that area. Yeah, correct. So that's a predominantly plant based zone in the world.

And the thing about, and the thing about Loma Linda that's interesting is you look at the other blue zones, like Okinawa, Japan and these other Sardinia. Sardinia, right. These other blue zones, as great as they are, they are very homogenously genetic. These are particular populations that have maybe grown that way culturally. The interesting thing about the Loma Linda blue zone is that it's not at all homogeneous. It's very heterogeneous. It's not even really a blue zone. I mean, if you go to other Adventist centers around the country, like Kettering or Andrews University there in Michigan, or PUC up there in Angwin, California, you'll see the same thing. It's the same sort of thing. What's nice about it is that you don't have to be of a certain genetic type to enjoy the blue zone. I mean, in Southern California is. The air quality in Southern California is probably second to none in terms of being bad, especially now with the wildfires recently here. But still you're able to get, according to Adventist Health Study, two men seem to benefit actually more than women in terms of getting 7 to 10 years of extra life. And why? It's because of not just diet. It's not a diet, it's a lifestyle. And part of that lifestyle is exercise. And there's been some really interesting emerging data coming out of, of Canada actually looking at exercise and depression and anxiety, especially in COVID 19.

How does depression and anxiety play in with weakening your immune system and attracting more coronavirus?

And this is not, I'll have to be honest with you, this is not something that I was an expert in until recently. I'm not even an expert in it now. I'm just starting to learn about it. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm Not a neurologist, but I can tell you that depression and anxiety are two things that rev each other up. Anxiety causes depression and anxiety is something that you get when we're in this pandemic. We've been in this pandemic for about a year now. And people are very anxious. They're anxious about getting COVID 19. There's just a recent article that came out that showed that children, a recent study in children that have had distance learning and these sorts of things, that anxiety is becoming more and more prevalent, suicides, etc. And what I found there was an interesting research article that was published by Dr. Jennifer Heiss out of the FIT lab in McMaster University in Ontario that I thought was excellent work. She looked at, she did a randomized controlled trial and she took students right before exams. So you remember what it was like before exams, right? Yeah. Six weeks before exams. They looked at them for six weeks and all of these students were going to go through exams. Very stressful time in their life. Their careers are dependent on this. This was before COVID And they randomized them to three different tracks. Number one, do nothing, just keep doing what you're doing. That was the control group. Number two was a low intensity exercise regimen. So they did three times a week.

A walk, a jog, a hike, or.

In this case, they were very specific. They had to do it very scientifically. So they actually did a VO2 max test, which is, if you don't know what that is, it's where they put a thing in your mouth, you pedal and they measure. So they made it a very specific percentage of their total max. It turned out to be getting their heart rate up to about 140 beats per minute for about 20 minutes. And they did it three times a week and they did it for six weeks. So 18 treatments. Okay. And then the third group was this high intensity group. So heart rate was like 180 beats per minute. Okay. Really high intensity exercise, again, three times a week for six weeks. And what did they measure? They measured cytokines. So these inflammatory cytokines like IL6, which has been implicated in COVID 19, they looked at depression scores. So validated depression scores, not just, you know, and they blinded the researchers to which students were getting what? I don't know how they did it, but that's what they did. So they looked at blood tests, they looked at depression scores, they looked at a whole host of things. What did they find? This is what they found. They found. First thing they found that was amazing was in the control group. In the control group, that depression scores at the beginning versus at the end of the six weeks, which ended just at the same time as finals, depression scores went up dramatically. So first thing that they found was, number one, it doesn't take a long time of stress exposure to increase your risk of depression. That was six weeks. We're in it for a full year.

So six weeks in the control group, the depression went up across the board of all three groups?

No, just in the control group.

The control group meaning the one that.

Didn'T do anything, didn't do any exercise.

Got it, Got it. Yep. They went up.

Yep.

So more and more stress and anxiety. What's happening? I don't know. Finals or Covid depression increased and they did no exercise.

Exactly. And that's not exactly what you would expect. You would expect the depression score to be about the same. Right. But what that shows is that stress over a period of time increases depression.

Wow. Okay.

But in the exercise, moderate and high intensity group, in the moderate intensity group, depression scores went down, anxiety scores went down, inflammatory marker scores went down in all of those. So in other words, there was no bad trade off to doing moderate exercise. Now in the high intensity group, the depression scores went down, but not as much as they did in the moderate group. Anxiety levels, they still had actually the same amount of self reported stress in the high intensity group. And interferon levels went actually up in the high intensity group.

So when your body or your mind is under attack, emotionally, mentally, uncertainty, it's not good to do no exercise. It's not good to go to destroy your body. It's good to have moderate types of consistent, healthy movement is what I'm hearing you say.

Exactly, exactly. And this is really, really important because this data is not picked out of being unique. There is a whole cadre of data that has shown this exact thing. It's called the J curve. The J curve, meaning that you start off here with a normal amount and then as you start to do more moderate exercise, the risks go down. But as you do more exercise, the risks go up. And so this is a real problem in people like Olympic athletes. They have to be very, very cognizant when they are doing high intensity workouts, that they're not getting sick because they're actually more susceptible to getting sick. More susceptible to getting. And imagine the stress that they're under. Right. Their one shot at Olympic gold is coming up.

They've been waiting next long years.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so their athletes and trainers are. They're very well versed in this literature and this information. People like you and me are not. But I think it's very, very important that one of the things that I think would be very beneficial and I would add it to my list of things that I would recommend people do. Sleep, sleep, obviously, because I'm a sleep physician, but exercise. And you know what? Exercise improves your ability to sleep.

It does, it does. And it makes you less anxious when you're moving and you get that anxious energy out of you, out of your body through movement, you feel more relaxed, it increases dopamine, all those different things.

Right. So here's the key point is you don't have to be Wilhoff to get the benefit of hydrotherapy and you don't have to be Carl Lewis. Exactly. To get the benefit, benefit of exercise. And so I think that's the first thing that everyone needs to know. And here's the key, it's getting that heart rate up. So here's an extra benefit. When you're sick and sedentary, you don't have to do that much to get your heart rate up to 147. The more you do it, you know, you might not take walking after a while, you might have to actually jog after you do it. But getting started on that routine, you would be. I mean, I've had patients, not a lot, but I've had those patients come back and tell me, doc, I followed your advice. I got on a, on a diet and exercise plan and man, I feel so much better. I mean, it's amazing.

Yeah. I mean, obviously exercise and diet won't automatically cure anxiety and depression necessarily, but it's been proven to show that it decreases depression and anxiety in population. In the population, yes. So if you feel overwhelmed, anxious, uncertain, depressed again, you know, it's not the end all cure, but it can. It could be, but it may not be, but it'll definitely support you in a massive way based on science.

The thing that I like to use is this. Look. When you go into the operating room, one of the things that we don't want you to get is a post operative infection. So what do we do to make sure that that doesn't happen? The surgeon wears a mask. We make sure that the pressure in the room is under positive pressure, so that air is coming out, not air coming in. We also use a solution on your skin to sterilize the skin. Do we do all of those things because we feel that one of those things is not working? We shouldn't know. It's a multi Pronged approach. So everything that we've been talking about here is not in lieu of social distancing and wearing a mask. It's in addition to all of these things. So I got the vaccine. Do I still wear a mask wherever I go? Absolutely. It's just another layer of, of protection. Do I still do all of these things to help? Yeah, because it doesn't just help my immune system, it also helps me in general in terms of health.

Now, can you explain more about the vaccine? And this is again gonna be controversial on different sides. We have people that are science based and love the science, and then we have a certain part of the population that is 100% against vaccines. We've had this conversation with doctors in the past who, you know, I'll put out information about this and people, you know, want to unfollow and unsubscribe from everything that I've ever done. So based on scientific evidence and what we know so far with this new vaccine that's out there, what is in the vaccine, you know, what is your recommendation? And if people don't want to get the vaccine, do you feel like that's okay as well?

Good question. So the vaccine is like this big umbrella and we'll have to talk. I'll probably limit my talk to just the ones that are available because there are going to be so many different types made using different techniques and how they work. The question. Well, first of all, the first thing that you have to understand is that nothing in life is without risk. Everything has risk. And the decisions that we make as medical doctors, as providers, is what I'm about to do going to have more risk than benefit or more benefit than risk, and that determines what we do. When you go to the supermarket, you could get in a head on collision, you could get, you know, all of these sorts of things could happen. But you in your mind make a mental calculation that getting food from the supermarket has a better benefit than the risk of you getting in a head on collision. So you do it. Okay, so in other words, if we find that there are risks with something, it doesn't necessarily mean that we don't do it. We do things all the time in the hospital to patients that have risk, but we believe that we are correct in doing it because the benefit we're going to derive is greater than that risk. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong, but if we do it hundreds of times, sometimes you're going to have problems, sometimes you're not. Okay, so that's the first Thing second thing is the decision to get vaccinated in a pandemic is not a decision to get vaccinated versus nothing, it's to get vaccinated versus getting the infection. That's the decision that you have to make. And so when you look at the risks of getting vaccinated, for instance, what is the long term effects of getting the vaccine? We don't really know the long term effects because it hasn't been a long time since we've gotten the vaccine. But if you look at other vaccines that we've done in the past, we can see that most of the long term effects that have occurred on those vaccines usually pop up within the first two to three months. And so we can kind of get a sense about what the long term side effects are going to be. Now let's look at the virus. We don't know the long term implications of being infected with coronavirus. Do people get diseases after viruses? Absolutely. Can people get post viral complications? Absolutely. People can get myocarditis. Guillain Barre this is a condition where you basically you can't move and you need to go on a ventilator just by getting the infection. There's a recent study that showed that over half of normal asymptomatic athletes still had signs of myocarditis. That's inflammation of the heart tissue after either a mild or asymptomatic bout of COVID 19. Okay, so you've got to do this understanding really what your choices are. In both cases, the vaccine and the virus. What happens is a particle infects one of your cells. It releases an messenger rna, which is an information packet that tells your cell what kind of protein to make. In the case of the virus, the ribosome, which is part of the cell, is going to make more viral particles, and those viral particles are going to spread to other cells and make more viral particles. And that's exactly what's happening in the first phase of COVID 19. In the case of the vaccine, the vaccine is much more attenuated, just a little component, a little information packet on just the protein. It's just making a little portion of the protein, the spike protein. And so your cell, when this information packet goes in, the cell is going to make a lot of these proteins and put them on the surface and maybe present them outside so that your immune system can kind of look at what's coming down the pike potentially and be ready for it with antibodies. So when that virus really comes in, the antibodies can cover it, can prevent it from spreading, and you can basically suppress the infection. And apparently, according to the studies, it's 95% effective at doing that. This messenger RNA is like a. It's like a sticky note. It's like a, you know those 3M yellow sticky things that you can put on? So I think it like your DNA is like your Social Security card. You don't laminate it. You put it in your filing cabinet. You never take it out. That number can do a lot of good things. You can apply for a loan, you pay your taxes with it. If you're, you know, I have my number memorized. Some people don't. But if you ever had to use it, you would take it out, you'd look at it, you'd write it down on a sticky note. You put it down, you put the security card back because it's very, very important. And then you'd use that sticky note. And then, you know, after you're done with it, you'd rip it up and you'd throw it away. The messenger RNA is the sticky note, okay? It's there one day, it's gone the next. Messenger RNA doesn't stick around. It doesn't last. No, no, it's there. That messenger RNA is telling the cell, I want you to make this protein now.

And then it goes away, right?

You don't want the cells to be making that protein for the rest of their lives. You want the protein to be made when it needs to be made. And that's why it's so important that these proteins that go into the nucleus to tell what type of messenger RNA needs to be made have to be turned on and turned off. That's what vitamin D, as we discussed, does in many different senses. But the messenger RNA is there when you want the protein. It's gone when you don't want the protein. So the cell has a way of breaking down this messenger rna, so it doesn't exist. In fact, the scientists have to go above and beyond to try to keep this messenger RNA intact long enough to get it into the cell so that it can actually make the protein. Because after a day or so, it gets degraded and it gets broken down. So the DNA is like the Social Security card. The RNA is like the little sticky note that you write and it gets thrown away.

Now, I've talked about this on my show before. Most of my audience, if they've been listening for a while, know this. I grew up as a Christian Scientist where wewe never took medicine. My dad didn't believe in medicine. We believed in healing. Through the mind and thought. And I never had vaccines. I never had a shot until I was 24, 25 when I went to another country where I needed to have a shot to just get into the country. I got the measles. I had that in the 90s when there was an outbreak. And I remember getting sick a couple of times, but nothing really as bad as the measles. But eventually I was fine. I was still alive. I'm here, I'm semi normal. I function. And I never had vaccines growing up necessarily right. So I'm curious. And there was flus and the pandemic in 1912 and all these other diseases that have come since then. So do people need vaccines, you know, to survive, to thrive, to be healthy in today's world, should kids be getting the vaccine or, you know, can we still survive and live our lives without it? Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day.

Sometimes we take things for granted when we don't have them. What kind of a quality of life would you like to have? Is the question. The fact that we don't have polio today, the fact that we don't have to worry about smallpox today, those are direct consequences of polio, of our ancestors in this country and around the world realizing that if they took this vaccine, we could eliminate those diseases. And we've effectively done that. When we in this country started to say that a vaccine choice, for me, what's the stuff that goes into the integration of making a choice about whether or not I get the vaccine? And for some people, it's been, hey, if you don't want your daughter to get hpv, you know, basically cervical cancer, then get this vaccine. If you don't want your son who's going away to college to get meningitis, get this vaccine. And that's how, honestly, that's how the pharmaceutical companies have marketed these vaccines. Is this vaccine is going to help you? What we've completely forgotten, I think, is how vaccines help us, us as individuals. So we have. We got, all of us have gotten the benefits because our ancestors, maybe our grandparents, got the polio vaccine and the smallpox vaccine, and they didn't spread it. Eliminate it.

They didn't spread it.

Yeah, it's eliminated, it's gone. It's not even. It's not really even a risk at this point. Right.

Because they got vaccinated. And so since they didn't spread it and kill more People, we don't have it anymore.

And it got eliminated. It's because everybody. So it's kind of gestalt. Right? Gestalt, by definition, is when the sum of the parts are greater than all of the sum of the parts. Right. That the greater is greater than some of the parts. So, yes, there is a benefit to the recipient of the vaccine, but there is something bigger. There is something bigger that we all get as a derived benefit when everybody gets the vaccine.

And.

And that is the elimination of the disease or the near elimination of the disease.

What are the negative effects? Potential negative effects? Obviously, we haven't had enough time to really test this, but what could be the negative effects of taking the vaccine? What could that do potentially to the body?

So, yeah, I'm not going to tell you that this is a panacea. First of all, there are common reactions that can occur when you get the vaccine. So this basically is your immune system. Your immune system is revving up. You're going to feel bad when your interferon levels go up.

You're going to feel sick for a.

Few days, you're going to feel sick. And that's not. It's the same thing. What happens when you work out? You want to be a muscle man, you want to look fit. What happens after you work out? Do you feel great or do you.

Feel well, you feel pumped, but then you're sore, you're recovering, you can't walk. Yeah, yeah.

And so this is the natural consequence of doing something that eventually is going to be good for your body in that sense. But there are some adverse reactions that have nothing to do with that. So allergic reactions is a possibility. But hey, if we had people out distributing peanuts, we would have allergic reactions. And that's a perfectly natural substance. Right? There are some. There is some evidence that on certain vaccines in the past that people have gotten diseases that we would never have wanted them to get. For instance, there's the flu vaccine that was given in Europe back around 2009, 2010 that caused a rash of narcolepsy. And it's probably because there was an autoimmune response against the vaccine that cross reacted and started to destroy parts of the patient. But that's on the vaccine side. Does that mean that's not gonna happen? If you get infected with coronavirus, people say, hey, look, there's a 99% chance that I'm gonna survive infection with coronavirus. Why would I take a vaccine if I've got a 99% chance? Yeah, right. So the thing is number one is that's, that's kind of black and white. That's like living versus dying. And who's to say that in that 99% you're not going to have, you know, disease you're not going to be living up? I mean, you're going to have people, these long haulers. Let's talk about the long haulers, people who have these. I get questions all the time now. Hey, I had coronavirus three months ago. I'm still having burning, I'm still having chest pain, I'm still having all of these things. And what do we do with that? You know, people get clothes clots from coronavirus people. It's not unheard of. People coming to the hospital to get discharged and then a week later they're coming coding because they've got a massive blood clot. So it's not like this is a cold virus. You're just going to get over it and no problem and you're not going to have an issue. So, yeah. Do we know the long term side effects of the vaccine? No, we don't until we have a long time. But we don't know the long term side effects of the virus either. And at least preliminarily there may be some, some issues. The other thing I was going to mention to you because you sort of made me think about it, was this thing about faith. And I know there's a lot of people, you know, so there's two ways of looking at the vaccine for an individual. Does the benefit outweigh the risks? And that may be different. If somebody has horrible allergic reactions and anaphylaxis, I would say do not get the vaccine because you're at high risk for getting another allergic reaction. But that's a medical risk benefit ratio. There are some people that believe that it would be a denial of their faith that God is going to protect them if they went ahead and got the vaccine. And I would just say, because I've wrestled with that as well, I would just say there is a very, very fine line between presumption and faith. And that's something that each one of us has to work out together. But to think that there is no such thing as presumption. What do I mean by that? I mean to put it in terms of religious or spiritual terms. So you remember the story about when Satan tempted Christ. One of those temptations was when he took him up to the top of the temple and said, hey, look, it says in Psalms 91 here that, you know, he's going to Bury you up in your hands, lest you dash your foot against a stone. Why don't you just go ahead and jump off the temple? He's going to save you anyway. That would have been presumption on Christ's part. He said to Satan, he said, I rebuke you. It's also said, thou shall not put the Lord thy God to the test. And so the question is, are we jumping off the temple when we have a vaccine available to us that could actually take care of not only ourselves, but also people around us? And so that's a real question that people have to look at.

Yeah, we got to make those decisions. And unfortunately, those are challenging decisions for some people. And some people will say, well, let's just focus on getting herd immunity. Let's destroy this thing by, I guess, everyone beating it through herd immunity. What do you say to that?

I don't have a problem with herd immunity. I think we need to get there. The problem that we have is that we only have 900,000 acute care beds in the United States and we have 300 million people. And so even if 1% of the people in this country die from coronavirus or go on their way, I mean, probably ostensibly a lot more than that need to be hospitalized. We just don't have the acute care beds to take care of everybody at once. And this virus rips through people quickly. You know, some people last on ventilators weeks. And so if this virus has an incubation period of five days and we just let everybody get the virus, you know, there's going to be so many people at the hospital there already is, that we're not going to be able to take care of the rest of the 99 who are going to be fine. But let's say they get in a car accident or let's say they, you know, break their heel or their foot or ankle or they have a heart attack, we can't take care of those people. And so right now, for instance, in Southern California, we have literally, we have made beds, ICU beds, just to take care of the extra people.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm curious your thought. I want to talk about kids again for a second because obviously there's a lot of parents who are, you know, not sure about what's proper information. What should I do with my kids? All these things. Should kids at a certain age be getting this vaccine? Is that more dangerous to have young kids getting vaccines? And also, what's your thoughts on in general, on protecting and trying to have your kids so perfectly clean and Never touched by anyone and always rubbed down with wipes in your face and sanitized life bubble versus allowing kids to be exposed to its much potential diversified organisms to build their immune system. What's your scientific thoughts on that?

Okay, so let's. That's. There's so many things that just popped into my head. So let's talk about the vaccine. So the vaccine is approved down to the age of 16 years of age right now. So anybody over the age of 16 or above can get it. I think that's a reasonable thing to do. I would say that the reason for children or kids or young people to get the vaccine, although I have seen people in their 30s in the hospital, I have seen that it's more for herd immunity at that point because it's those children or those individuals that are going to go to grandma and grandpa and spread it potentially. So to the degree that we have data now that shows that asymptomatic spread can be prevented by getting the vaccine. We do have some data that. About 67% in the Moderna vaccine, for instance, that would be helpful. I don't believe that a vaccine in a 16 year old is going to do much in terms of preventing them from having hospitalization because they're not getting hospitalized right now. They're actually doing fine.

So they're getting Covid, but they're just like no symptoms or very little. It's like I lost my taste, but I'm fine.

Yeah. And why is that? It's because young people have great innate immune systems. Innate immune systems in children are very strong. I mean any little virus and what do they do? They get a fever. I mean most pediatric visits are for fevers. And that's because kids have great innate immune systems. And that's what we ought to be doing with adults is trying to figure out how to improve their innate immune system. Now if you're going less than 16 years of age in that situation, you know, we need more data. And right now we don't have that data. They're looking at doing that. They're actually doing the studies at this point. But even more so for the young kids. Right. Because they're not. While there are some risks of getting post infectious complications, like we saw this thing earlier last year about Kawasaki disease type of thing, post infectious type of things, it would be good. But I think the primary protection that we're getting there is preventing the spread to those that are going to be ending up in the hospital. That's why the vaccination schedule that you're seeing the 1a1, b1c2, 3, et cetera, is starting out with these very critically elderly patients who are in nursing homes, for instance, who are the most susceptible to getting the disease. And probably the last people that will be getting this vaccine will be those less than 16. What was the other thing that you.

Think parents should be protecting their kids and being the cleanest? Or should we be exposing our children in general to touching dirt, touching walls, licking everything? You know, what should we be thinking about?

Yeah, they're gonna do that. I think you probably should let them do that. There's actually good data, this goes back 10 years that in parents who do this type of thing where they protect their kids from antigen exposure, early on they have a higher incidence of asthma and atopic diseases. So it's. Well, no. Oh yeah. It's well known that when you, in the maturity of the immune system, the immune system has to understand self from non self, otherwise you're going to get immune autoimmune conditions. And when you do that, when you expose them to these antigens, for some reason it appears as though the immune system is better educated at not attacking itself when you do that. And so, you know, I don't know. I grew up, I grew up in that era where we, we were latchkey kids. I came home, I had a key, I opened the door, you know, I made my breakfast, I studied. You know, we didn't have helicopter parents taking us to these things. I don't know, I don't know what kind of upbringing you had or.

Yeah, I was like, go outside and just do whatever.

Exactly, yeah, that's powerful.

Anything else we should be asking ourselves or. No. As I wrap up with the final few questions and I would love to have you come back on at some point and talk about sleep and all these other things that I think are extremely important for us, but any other questions around this you think we should talk about?

In terms of the vaccine?

Yeah. In terms of boosting the immune system, in terms of anxiety and depression and mental health around this, in terms of, you know, some of the things we've talked about.

No, I think those are, there's, there's a, plenty on that plate. I know that you've been talking to some of the interviews that I've seen about fasting. I think that actually has a role to play as well. Really Intermittent. Oh yeah, there's very good data out of usc. You probably, he's probably talked to you more about this data than I have, but there's plenty of data that intermittent fasting rebuilds the immune system. It's quite, quite. The other thing that I was going to mention too is. And this, this gets a little bit more kind of, kind of weird at first when I first started to learn about it. But there's a lot of research, especially out of Japan, that looks at something called forest bathing. Have you heard of that before?

I've heard of this, but you mean just being in trees and hugging trees and, you know, you don't need to hug them.

No, just walking outside in a forest that. There are aromatic compounds, or phytocides they're called, that have been shown to improve immunity. One of the ones that has actually been studied probably the most is eucalyptus. So, you know, at first my wife was sort of getting into these essential oils. I thought she was crazy.

We live in la, right?

Yeah, exactly. But you know what, there's actually some science behind it. Do you know, for instance, that back in 1918, during the flu pandemic, that eucalyptus was a major export of Australia? In fact, they almost chopped the trees to extinction, it seems, because eucalyptus was well known even at that time to have medicinal properties. It's the main ingredient in Vicks VapoRub, believe it or not. But there's actual data, and this was data that I looked at not for COVID 19, but for chemotherapeutic agents. There was a group that looked at what could they do to boost the immune system of patients that were on chemotherapy, because people on chemotherapy are susceptible to all sorts of infections. And the sentinel members that are out there to make sure that infection doesn't happen again is the innate immune system. Well, this was in, again, an in vitro study where they took cells and incubated them in a very low concentration of eucalyptus. And it had the same effect as basically a bacterial antigen. How it activated the system, turned on, increased something called phagocytic activity. This is where these cells go out, find something that's not self and eats it. And I was just really impressed with how something like that could improve the innate immune system. The studies out of Japan looked at these people living in Tokyo, and they took them up for just a few days into the forest and they tested actually something called the hinoki cypress tree. So they used hinoki cypress oil, and the effects on the immune system were not only significant, but they lasted for about seven days. So it's not something that you have to do every single day.

So they tested them, their immune system, before and after. How did they test this?

So they looked at something called. They looked at cytokines. They also looked at natural killer cells, natural killer cell activity. And then they looked at the little bubbles inside the cells that have the enzymes that degrade and kill bacteria, granzymes, things of that nature. And they noticed that in all of these counts, the natural killer cell activity, the amount of enzymes, everything was increased when they were just basically walking through the forest.

Yeah, a couple hours once a day or once in the week.

Well, in this particular one, they did it for two or three days, and they walked for about two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. And then after they were done, they went back and measured it again seven days later, and they still had elevations even seven days later.

So walking in the woods a couple hours a day for a few days will increase your immune system? Based on science?

Absolutely.

That's crazy. I mean, people say, yeah, just be in nature and you'll feel better and your depression and anxiety will go down. But I'm hearing you say that you're. Why does your immune system boost? Is that because what you're breathing in, Is it because you're walking? Is it, you know, no.

So they didso. Here's what happened. They asked the same question that you just did. And so what they did was they took the hinoki cypress oil and they diffused it in a hotel room in downtown Tokyo. So basically, they tried to simulate exactly the same. Same thing in the room? Yeah, in the room. And they found everything was exactly the same except for one thing. And that one thing was, is that urinary cortisol levels were not as low as they were in the forest. So in other words, the stress level, they knew that they were still in downtown Tokyo. The phytocytes from the trees were still having the effect on the immune system, but they were still not in nature and enjoying nature. And we know we don't have to get into this, but cortisol levels have everything to do with immunity and how that affects your immunity. So it's multiple benefits. You know, that's the other thing that we tend to do in medicine.

We try to hack.

Exactly, exactly.

Let's do these glasses. Let's do these creams or whatever.

And how do we know that this stuff isn't put together in a way that it actually helps us in a way that couldn't happen if it was just individual. To give you a quick example, they noticed epidemiologically that lung cancer patients did better if they had diets high in vitamin E and vitamin A. So what they did was they extracted those, they fed to lung cancer patients high doses of vitamin E and vitamin A. And what did they find? That it actually accelerated their death. So here's the point is, maybe it's the way the vitamin E and the vitamin A is packaged in nature that helps those people get it. And maybe we don't need to extract it and isolate it from how it's coming, you know what I'm saying?

Sure.

So maybe those phytosigns in nature are packaged in a way that we just as human beings, need to get there and experience that.

So what I'm hearing you say is that you could take this eucalyptus sensor oils and you could put it in a more manufactured arena, like your room or something, and it might have some benefits, but it's not going to have the total benefits as if you were in the nature.

No. So I'll actually fill you in on something there. Back in 1918 and 1919, when they were doing the hot foot baths and they were doing the fomentations that we talked about, they would put eucalyptus leaves in the hot foot bath. The oil from the leaves would dissolve and absorb into the skin. You can also rub it in a carrier oil like olive oil, and put it on your skin and the aroma you can breathe in. Like your mom used to do when.

You were growing up.

She put Vicks on, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Now, is this a particular forest or just in nature in general, you think?

So they're finding this. There's all sorts of these, of these compounds in trees like the fir, like the cypress, like the cedar tree. This is not. It's not like you got to go out and find a particular tree. We find it seems as though that this has an effect in a number of different trees. The ones that we've studied the most is eucalyptus. And so fortunately, eucalyptus is endemic here in Southern California, obviously in Australia, but it's not hard to get eucalyptus oil. But I would caution, eucalyptus oil is very, very potent, it's very strong, should not be ingested. There's been some side effects when people.

Ingest eucalyptus oil and I've got a couple final questions here, but one is about new mutations of COVID impact on the vaccine testing and treatments. If, you know, you get the vaccine and then there's a new mutation, will we need multiple vaccines? How will that impact those strands, those new strands?

I guess, yeah, very good question. So the four variants that we're looking at right now is the UK variant, which we found out first, there's a south African variant, there's a Brazilian variant, and then of course, there's a variant here in the United States out of San Jose. And so what we know as of today, we know that there is data that was just published yesterday that showed that the UK variant is going to be just fine in terms of the coverage that we have with the current vaccine. So that's good news. And that's despite mutations in the spike protein. We don't yet have that data for the South African or the Brazilian or the United States variant, but they are working on that currently. As it turns out, if those go the way as the UK variant, we will not need to have a new vaccine. But if there is, if there's something called an escape mutation where the virus is able to escape the immunity put on by the human body, here's the silver lining there a little bit, is that all they would have to do is change the sequence of the messenger RNA in the vaccine that they're already giving to reflect the new structure of the spike protein. And so it would not take very long for that new vaccine to be developed.

Gotcha.

The other thing I was gonna mention real quickly is that your immune system is so smart that it also, the cells that make the antibodies against that virus also have in it a slight mutation to anticipate, believe it or not, to anticipate that type of a mutation.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

The human body is fascinating.

Yes.

This has been probably one of the most informative interviews I've done on this topic. Definitely. And I'm just very grateful for your consistent research, testing, understanding and access to this information to be able to share this with us. I know you're in the hospital on a weekly basis treating people. I know you're constantly doing research and I know you're educating people over@medcram.com with incredible data, information that is extremely helpful for people to understand this on the science, on the medical side of things, and the practical tips you give as well. So I just want to acknowledge you, Dr. Schwelt, for showing up in a big way for people and putting yourself out there and educating us with content, with videos so that people can be more informed and hopefully make better decisions for what's right for them and their families, for their health. And again, I acknowledge you for doing it in an understandable way where you can break down the data and science, but then also give some good stories and analogies so that common people like myself can understand what you're talking about. I want people to follow you over on social media. You're everywhere. MedCram videos, Twitter, MedCram, on Instagram, Facebook and MedCram. C R A M.com Lots of incredible videos over there. We'll have it linked up in the show notes. Where else can we go to connect with you or support you?

Well, that's it. You've just mentioned those. Yeah. Thank you very much for inviting me on, Louis. It's been amazing. But yeah, follow us on Twitter and also on. On the YouTube channel, Medcram.

Yeah, YouTube is great. You got some amazing videos and I'm sure they'll be linked up here as well.

And I'd also say, too, it's not just me on medcram. We also get experts in the field. We recently had Shane Crotty, who's a expert virologist, immunologist down there at La Jolla, and recently Dr. Joseph Allen at the Harvard School of Public Health. So we try to get experts in the field to talk and explain.

Amazing. Yeah. I want everyone to check this stuff out because I think we're going to need more of this information over the next year and beyond as things evolve in this virus. I want to ask you a question I ask everyone at the end of my episodes. It's called the three truths question. It's a hypothetical question, and I'd like you to imagine you live a very long life and it's your last day. And for whatever reason, all of the content you've ever created, all the stuff on medcram, and anything else you create for the rest of your life, it has to go with you to the next place after you leave this earth. So no one has access to any of your information, but you get to leave behind three lessons you know to be true from your life and your existence that you've learned that you would leave with the world. And this is all we have to remember you by. Are these three lessons what I like to call the three truths. What would you say are yours?

I would say that whenever someone comes to you with something new, it's good to be skeptical and not be driven by every wind of. Of. Of saying. But at the same time, at the same time that you're doing that, leave part of your mind open to the possibility that it can be true of what they're saying and investigate it for yourself. Don't believe anybody. Be skeptical, but investigate it because it could be the truth. The reason why I say that is because we live in a world of information and it's no longer a question about whether or not the truth is out there, or whether we have to search for the truth or find the truth, the truth is there. The problem is expressing it and getting people to believe it. Because there are so many alternative motives that people suspect other people of having to be open minded and to find it.

That's number one.

Okay, that was number one.

Number two. Second truth.

Number two. I would say that, you know, I guess I'm informed by my upbringing and by my spirituality. And so I believe that good doesn't come from within, good comes from above. And what I try to do on a daily basis is simply reflect that as much as I can. So that means every day polishing the mare as best as I can. Because, you know, people will say, hey, you did a great job. You're so this, you're so that, you're so the other. I'm like, you don't know who you're talking. Do you know who you're talking to here? This is just me. And so I've noticed that if you try to grasp at wealth, riches, money, all that sort of stuff, it's like, it's like ropes of sand as you try to grab for it. It's hard to find.

Yeah.

The other third thing I would say is don't be afraid to think big. Don't be afraid to explore your mind. There's so many things that I love to get involved with and, you know, medicine is just one dimension of my life. I love music, I love all of these things. And one of the, I guess if someone were to say to me that was truly, you know, somebody like this, I would want to be known as a Renaissance man.

Yeah, me and you both.

Yeah. Somebody who is, who is good at a lot of different things and investigated things and try to put things together. One of the things that I really find interesting is the grand unifying theory of life. Trying to put it all together.

Yeah. Have you read the book Range?

No, I have not.

David Epstein? You should check that out. Range. Talking about, you know, in a world of specialists, people specializing, we should really be expanding our range and the benefits of being really good at many different things and how it'll impact the overall quality of your life and decision making and relationships, etc. So might be a interesting book for you to check out called Range. These are three powerful truths I want to have you back on. If people want Dr. Schwelt back on, then in the YouTube comments below, leave a hashtag greatness or let us know if you want him to come back on. I think it'd be amazing. And talking about sleep and more things about the immune system and how we can really improve the overall quality of our life based on science and the medical research that you've been doing. And my final question for you is, what is your definition of greatness?

Definition of greatness would have to be, huh? That's a good question. I think it would go along with my second point. Somebody that reflects and doesn't get in the way. Somebody that can reflect greatness and doesn't get in the way. That's the definition of greatness. And that's what I try to do, is try to get out of the way.

Yeah. Well, Dr. Schwelt, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it. Hope you enjoyed this episode with Dr. Schweilt.

And if you did, make sure to.

Leave a comment below, click on the subscribe button right now. And like this video. Also, if you want to learn how to prevent COVID 19 and increase your immune system, then make sure to check.

Out the this video right over here. Now, it turns out that people with.

The highest vitamin D levels in their blood have the longest telomeres.

Really? Really.

More vitamin D equals longer telomeres. Yeah. Equals longer life. Correct. Hypothetically, longer health. Spanish.