Proven Health Hacks To STOP SICKNESS & Reduce Inflammation| Roger Seheult

Remember now that when the virus comes into your body, it replicates up to some. Some studies have shown a billion to a trillion copies of itself inside one human being. And it spreads everywhere. I've looked at the autopsies that goes to the brain. I've seen slides in the bladder, in the bone marrow, in the heart, in the lungs. It's everywhere. So that is one of the things that we talk about in terms of inflammation. So how do you prevent that from happening?

I think you got to have a dream.

The school of greatness, really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis. How?

Start with a statistic that I saw, according to a report in the Journal of Nature Medicine, that inflammation is the root cause of disease, and it contributes to 50% of deaths in the U.S. and I'm curious, why do so many people suffer from inflammation and how is it contributing to so much loss that's happening right now?

That's a great question, Louis. So right now we're talking about coronavirus and COVID 19. And that's a whole section by itself.

Yes.

But as you may know, people get into the hospital because they can't breathe. And the reason why they can't breathe is because their lungs aren't able to get oxygen into them. So if you were to actually take someone's lungs and spread it out. So it was paper thin. Okay. Because that's exactly what we're talking about. It's about paper thin. It would be about the size of a tennis court.

Wow.

So think about a tennis court being wrapped up. That's the kind of layer that oxygen's got to diffuse through. So you know what happens if you hit your finger in the door? You know, it swells up. So that's basically inflammation. And the Romans had a way of describing this. Everything in medicine is described in the Latin language. There's calor, which is hot. It feels hot. There's rhubor, which it appears red. It's swollen. That's two more. And there's the last thing. Dolor. And if you speak Spanish, you know what dolor is? That's pain.

Yeah, yeah.

So those are the four cardinal things that you see with inflammation. So imagine that happening to this paper thin thing that you're trying to get. It starts to swell, fluid goes in it. And now instead of oxygen being able to pass right through this paper thin sheet, it's now thickened, it's now inflamed, and you can't get the oxygen. And that's why people are dying, because of inflammation in the lung. But it's not just the lung. The number one killer in the United States is heart disease, or it used to be. We're becoming very good at treating heart disease. We'll talk about that. Heart disease. And cardiovascular disease is a completely. Is a disease almost completely from inflammation.

Really.

It is. So if you were to see angiograms, an angiogram is where they shoot contrast into the blood vessels of your body. And the ones that we're particularly concerned about are the blood vessels that actually supply the heart muscle. They have to beat continuously every day for the rest of your life. And so they need a good supply of oxygen, which they get from the blood. If those blood vessels become diseased because of inflammation, they start getting ratty. Cholesterol starts to break, and they get clots forming. And that's what happens when you get a heart attack, is those blood vessels close off and that heart muscle, which still needs to beat is now being strangled to death. And that's tremendously painful. People. That's why they get that painful feeling when they have a heart attack. So we just talked about COVID 19. We just talked about heart disease. Let's go down and talk about cancer. A lot of the risks with cancer come as a result of inflammation, really. So, yeah, people who have reflux or heartburn, there's cancers that can come as a result of that. If you have that for very long called Barrett's esophagus, it's not very common, but it can happen. Hepatitis. Hepatitis is an inflammatory condition of the liver. People can develop liver cancer that can come from viruses. So, yeah, I mean, when nature says that up to half of the people in this country are dying from inflammation, that might actually be a short sale. It may be larger than that. Inflammation is a big deal.

So how do we eliminate inflammation? What are the main factors that support us?

Yeah, so inflammation by itself is actually not that bad. It's useful when you need it. Exactly. Well, it's useful when you need it. So, for instance, how does the body get rid of a virus? It gets rid of it by finding those cells that are infected with the virus and calling all their friends in to destroy that cell. And part of that is inflammation. The problem is when the inflammation goes out of control. And we talked about last time.

Or chronic inflammation.

Chronic inflammation. Yeah. So we talked about in our last interview, vitamin D. Vitamin D is one of those substances that looks. If you just look at. Just Google the structure of vitamin D and you'll find out very, very shortly that it looks like cortisol. It looks Like a lot of the steroid hormones. And these steroid hormones go into the cell, go into the nucleus, and they go down to the actual DNA and they can manipulate and they can regulate, that's probably a better term, regulate the transcription of messenger RNA and tell the cells to be more inflamed, to be less inflamed.

Vitamin D can do that.

Vitamin D. And so that's part of the thought process about how vitamin D might be helping people with these inflammatory viral infections. We don't know for sure at this point how vitamin D, if vitamin d works in COVID 19, but we certainly have good evidence from going back to 2018, published in the British Medical Journal, that steady supplementation on a daily basis or a weekly basis with vitamin D can reduce the incidence of acute chest infections. That came out of Ireland, that came out of the UK, big meta analysis, 25 different randomized controlled trials.

And that was before COVID Consistent vitamin D supplementation.

Yes.

Reduces chest inflammation, is that what you said?

Chest infections?

Chest infections, yeah. And what happens when you have a chest infection?

Chest infection is like a viral. It's like a cold and it goes down and becomes a bronchitis. And this is what causes a lot of mortality, death. Pneumonia used to be known as the old man's friend because it would just put him out of his misery. Really? That's what it was? Yeah, look it up. Old man's friend pneumonia. You can Google that and you'll see. So this idea that vitamin D, lacking vitamin D, especially in those northern latitudes, may be contributing to that. That's why a lot of countries in the northern latitudes have introduced programs to supplement vitamin D in a dietary.

Really?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Wow. Okay. So would you recommend vitamin D for everyone then? Or if you're in sunlight, you're outside a lot, you don't need extra supplementation.

So who are the people that are susceptible to vitamin D deficiency? It would be people who are older, because as you get older, it's harder to make vitamin D in your skin. Number two, people who have darker skin. This vitamin D is made literally from the ultraviolet B light from the sun, and it's made deep, deep, deep in the sun. So if you've got a lot of pigmentation above that, it's going to be harder. You're going to have to spend more time out in the sun. People who live in northern latitudes, people, you know, living in northern Europe, people living in Canada Northwest, actually, anybody living above what we call the 35th parallel, which is sort of the Southern border of Tennessee is not really able to get enough vitamin D. And Luz, we can talk about where we have come as a culture in the last hundred years. So think about this just to sort of set up the rest of the talk. A hundred years ago, we spent a lot more time outside in the sun all day than we do. Absolutely. The other thing that's really important is we spend a lot more time sleeping. A lot of back a hundred years ago.

Absolutely.

What have we done in the last hundred years? Just look at a nighttime satellite image of the United States.

The lights are on.

We have basically turned night into day. And that has tremendous implications for us as human beings, as our culture, our health. Not. I mean, let's just take out. Let's just take off the table the fact that we have severely cut back the amount of time we've allowed for sleep. That's number one. Number two, the socio culture in this country that if you need to get some sleep, you're somehow weaker. Right, Right. So there's that stigma. Let's just put that off to the side. There's a whole nother aspect to it, and that is that light, especially at those very sensitive times before you go to bed, stimulates receptors in the back of your eye to shut down melatonin production, which is essential. And it's a very powerful anti inflammatory. So you mix all of that together. So think about all of the socioeconomic things that have happened in the last hundred years. Think about cities, think about commute times. Think about how early you've got to get up in the morning to get to work, and then how long you've got to work. And then when you get home, what do we do? We want to relax. We turn on the.

The lights.

The lights or the iPhone. And this is hitting our eyes. There's a recent study that showed that the blue light filters don't do a thing.

That's what I heard.

Yeah.

You mean like the blue block, like.

The blockers, Blight filters. Because it's the blue light, particularly we know this from. From academia that seem to respond to those receptors the most or stimulate those receptors. The blue light filters don't work.

So you're saying wearing sunglasses or some type of glass blockers and watching your iPhone here isn't that effective?

It could work at a certain point. The sunglasses. What I was referring to was the. Was the actual machine itself has a switch in it that will make the light a little bit more redder, but it still doesn't work.

Doesn't work. Gotcha. So Sunglasses might work. Yeah, Might help out, but not. Gotcha. Okay, cool.

And then. Okay. Now on top of all that from 100 years ago, we're very agrarian culture. We weren't as rich as we are today. And so as a result of that, we couldn't afford to eat a lot of the substances that we eat today. Processed foods. Let's just talk about vegetarian versus meat. That's a hot topic. Back a hundred years ago, it was. Every piece of square footage of land was very valuable. Even though we had lots of it, it was hard to farm. And we didn't have the big industries with the big machines. Right. So. So we didn't have a lot of that money. So anything if we grew this off of this part of land, we had a choice to make at that point. Do we feed it to the cow or us, or do we feed it to us? Right. Much easier to do the former than the latter. Nowadays, since we have so much grain, so much machinery, we actually have vast amounts of acreage in this country that are used to feed cattle. And so we are able to probably more than any other time in our life, eat meat more today than we were able to before, abundantly.

Whereas 100 years ago was probably maybe once a week or something. Yeah.

If you look at per capita meat consumption in the United States, it has never stopped. It's continued to go up.

Really?

Yeah. We're eating more meat today per capita than we've ever eaten before. Per capita. Yeah.

I was just interviewing Dr. Matthew Walker, who's like the sleep expert in Northern California, I think in Berkeley. And he saying a lot of same things that you're talking about. Like even if you, you take down one hour less of one night of sleep, how it impacts the immune system is exponential. And if you do it every night, you sleep less and less, or you have one hour less sleep or two hours less sleep, or you miss a few hours. It really impacts the brain and impacts the immune system and all these things. So sleep is a massive factor for having a healthy immune system as well.

Absolutely. No question about it. I mean, they did this study once on some college students. Okay. College students are our favorite. They'll do anything.

Yes.

Pull an all nighter.

Got you.

I'll just put it this way. There's a way to determine where the circadian rhythm is and it's to find the coldest temperature in the 24 hour period in your core body temperature. And the way that the scientists like to do that is to put something up the backside. Really? Yeah. That's part of the study. So college students will do anything. But the interesting thing about this study was they had them do an all nighter. How many times as a college student did you do a pull in all nighter?

I probably did once a quarter when it was finals, something like that.

Yeah. So the next day they checked hundreds of different proteins and they found all sorts of derangements. Things that were supposed to be high were low. Things that were supposed to be low were high. And these are really important substances that regulate immune system function. Looking for cancer cells. Some of them have to do with diabetes, had to do with hunger. So all of these things were manipulated just with one night.

One all nighter.

One all nighter, man.

Okay, so sleep is a big thing to help prevent disease, it sounds like. But also inflammation.

Yeah.

Having inflammation. What are some other factors on how we can prevent inflammation? So get a great night of sleep. What is the research you've shown? Seven to nine hours.

Yeah. So actually, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's come up with some really good recommendations. Once you get out of high school, generally speaking, it's seven to nine hours of sleep. Seven being the bare minimum. Right. And who gets seven hours of sleep? I mean, I mean, I'm preaching, right?

Yeah, Yeah.

I should be preaching to a mirror because I need to get more than that. But when you are school age, you know, teenagers, if anyone is watching, it's. It's 8, 9, 10. It's like elementary kids, like 9, 10. Yeah.

So what are, what are some of the main things to help us prevent inflammation? So that if we attract a virus, it doesn't hurt us or it helps us minimize the pain or the side effects or anything that could hurt us.

Yeah. So we have known for a long time that there are certain risk factors that increase the risk of death in viral infections. Let's say COVID 19 in this case. So BMI is one of those things. Body mass index, age is another one. Obviously older people get into the hospital and don't do as well. Diabetes, hypertension, all of these things may sound familiar as to who is having the problem. And very early on we knew that the ACE2 receptor, this is this receptor on the cells, was the focal point for where the SARS CoV2 virus came in. The spike protein that we've all heard about interacts with the ACE2 receptor. Now that ACE2 receptor, that ACE2 is not just a receptor to the entrance of the cell, it actually has a very important function in all of the cells in the respiratory cells. In the GI cells, what it does is it reduces the amount of oxidative components. Oxidative stress pro. Oxidative stress components. And it reduces that, and it increases the amount of antioxidants. So ACE2 is like this humming engine in each of your cells that is regulating the amount of oxidative stress that's going on. And when that virus binds to it, it shuts it down. So now all of your. So your oxidative stress goes up in that cell and your antioxidants go down.

Okay?

So if you can imagine you're on the edge of a cliff. You are balanced. You are just sort of. And there's. Imagine this cliff and there's people standing in different places. Okay. There's some people that their oxidative stress balance is right on the edge. And you could probably tell who these people are. They're older, they have some diabetes, hypertension. They're on a lot of blood pressure medications, maybe have some renal problems. They're standing right on the edge. And then there's the younger people who don't have these medical problems. They're far away from the edge. Okay. And then this massive gust of wind comes called coronavirus, knocking people off the edge. And who are the people that are going to knock that? Exactly. It's the ones that are on the edge. And so it's kind of like a stress test. This spike protein comes in, binds ACE2 receptor, and it causes problems. And remember now that when the virus comes into your body, it replicates and replicates and replicates up to some studies have shown a billion to a trillion copies of itself inside one human being.

That's crazy.

And it spreads everywhere. It goes to the brain. They've done autopsies. I've looked at the autopsies. That goes to the brain. I've seen slides in the bladder, in the bone marrow, in the heart, in the lungs. It's everywhere. And each one of these trillions of viral particles have spike proteins all over it. So you can imagine the load of spike protein and the complete shutdown of the ACE2 receptor, among other things. So that is one of the things that we talk about in terms of inflammation. So how do you prevent that from happening? How are you getting away from the.

Edge of the cliff?

Exactly. Because, you know, there's a big gust of wind coming. Some of the things you can do for a long time, it takes a long time for it to work. Other things, sometimes you have to implement. You don't have time to do it. Somebody comes in, someone's sick. Their diet is their diet or whatever it is that they've had. Right. So one of the interesting things that's come up, there's a guy named Dr. Varki in San Diego that's been studying this thing called sialic acids. This is the newest thing and it's actually very interesting.

Sialic acids.

Sialic acids. So I won't even talk about the fact that some people believe that the virus actually uses sialic acids to enter into the cell. That's a whole other topic. What I will mention though is we're all used to seeing the outside of cells on these, you know, these animations that they see on the tv. And they've got proteins coming up, right?

Yes.

So imagine my arms are the proteins and imagine I don't have a hand. That's kind of how they've been describing it. But that's actually not reality. Reality is, is that you've got proteins. And then my hand. Think of on my hand as glycoproteins. Glycoprotein that's a sugar and a protein put together. And then my fingers are the sialic acids. Okay? Okay. So really it's the part of the cell that is the first thing that gets touched. Sialic acids are really important.

Okay.

Okay. It's a 9 carbon sugar. And actually, if you were to go to, let's just say, HIV vaccine convention, almost the entire convention would be on sialic acids. Why? Because the HIV virus masquerades itself with. With sialic acids. That's why we haven't been able to get a vaccine for hiv. Because sialic acids are sort of like, put it this way, the Christmas tree is the protein, the decorations. Sialic acids, okay? That's what we're talking about.

Gotcha.

So here's the problem. The problem is with sialic acids is that the human body can only make one type of sialic acid. Let's call that Nu. Neu5ac. I'm going to get a little wonky here, okay. But people want to look this up, so I'm just going to call that ac. So a human being makes a certain type of sialic acid on its glycoproteins, on its proteins, on its cells. That is called ac and that is self. Now, we used to have a gene, apparently we used to have a gene. It's non functional now, really, that used to make a different kind of sialic acid called NEU5GC.

Okay.

But we don't make it anymore.

Okay, why don't we make it when do we stop making it?

Good question. The biologists have their theories millions of years ago and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, but we don't know, right? We don't know for sure because we weren't there. What we do know is that animals makes both AC and gc, okay. Cows make ac, gc, Any mammal makes AC and gc. Okay, so here's the problem. When you consume those animals that make AC and gc, okay.

What happens?

What happens is it goes into your digestive tract and it breaks it down and the body absorbs the AC and the gc. It can't tell the difference between the two, and then it gets absorbed whole in the body and the AC and the GC gets put onto your cells.

Okay, okay, so we're getting animal GC now.

Yes.

What does that mean to us?

The problem is, is that you have antibodies against gc because it's not self.

It's not self. It's not us.

It's not us. We have antibody. We have antibodies in our system. It's not hardwired. But almost all humans develop antibodies against GC by the age of one.

Okay, okay, so if we're consuming gc, what does that mean?

That means that now that GC gets put onto our cells and our cells start to look to our immune system as foreign.

So our cells are, what, defending themselves against it.

Then the antibodies start to react against the cells with the GC on it. And what they get, what they call it, is a sialitis. Siala. Itis. Itis. Anything in medicine with an itis at the end is inflammation.

Okay.

Pancreatitis, appendicitis. Got it. All of that meningitis, just inflammation. So you get the sialitis. And that, they believe is one of the potential reasons for low grade inflammation. So they always.

Consuming meat.

Yeah. So they always wondered, okay, how come people who eat white meat, chicken, fish, how come they don't get the levels of heart disease?

Why is that?

This is what they think may actually be the reason. They could never figure that out. They did studies, huge epidemiological studies in the United States and in Europe, and they found that in some of the studies that it was only processed meats that were associated with cardiovascular disease and regular meat was not. But.

And what's the difference between processed and regular?

Good question. So processed meats would be like sausage. Yes. It would be like cold cuts. It would be like those. Yeah, Right. So those are. But red meat's just like the pure red meat that you'd buy at the supermarket. Okay. So that's the difference. But newer studies are now starting to show that it doesn't matter if it's processed or not processed, that you still.

Get red meat you're talking about.

Correct.

So white meat doesn't have the gc.

It does not.

Interesting. Okay.

Fish does not fish.

Not chicken.

Yeah. So here's a study that was done, and they said, okay, so let's connect this together. So here's an interesting study that they did. They got a bunch of people and they said, give us exactly your dietary habits for, like, 30 days. And so they wrote down. It was meticulous. And then what they did was they went out and they looked at the food and they figured out in that particular food item how much GC was there. And you should see this list. It was a French study. I'm glad it was a French study. And I'll tell you why. Because they listed every type of cheese you could possibly ever imagine. Wow. Because cheese is part of it. So you had, you know, mozzarella at the bottom, and you had hard cheese at the. I mean, and so they listed it because there's a big spread. Some. Some cheeses have hardly any GC in it, really. Other cheeses are just packed. Certain meats have a lot of pork, has a lot of gc. Other meats don't have as much. And what they did was they stratified it and they weighted it, and then they looked at the diet and they tried to figure out, okay, how much anti GC antibodies did they have. And they matched it up, and it was this perfect correlation. So the more you ate of high GC foods, the more information you had, the more antibodies you had. And they linked it to colorectal cancer risk.

Oh, man. So the antibodies, the more GC you have, your body's creating antibodies.

Correct.

And those antibodies cause inflammation.

That's correct. This is an immune system response. So when that antibody attaches to that antigen, that triggers an immune response because it's a foreign substance. And that's what causes inflammation. So what you have then is inflammation in the blood vessels, inflammation in the colon that can cause colon cancer. So again, getting back to that nature article, inflammation probably causes more than 50% of deaths in the United States.

Now, you are practicing near the Loma Linda area. Right. You're not in Loma Linda, are you?

I'm not in Loma Linda, but I practice close to it. Yes.

Very close to what, 10 minutes, 20 minutes away.

Exactly. Yeah.

And so some people might say, well, is he influenced by the blue zones and by being in this region where it's most primarily vegan, in Loma Linda. I think that's right. It's mostly vegans. So does that play any influence into you?

It sort of gets me interested in that topic.

Interesting.

But here's, here's.

Do you eat meat yourself?

I used to.

But not anymore?

No.

Because you saw the data or because of other reasons?

Because I saw the data.

Really?

I stopped eating meat in college.

Really?

Yeah. And I didn't start getting into this until like a year ago, starting looking into this.

So why did you stop eating meat then?

I think it was the influence of me being in Loma Linda.

Really?

Yeah.

And just being around.

But here's an interesting thing. So if you look at the Adventist Health Study 2, Adventist Health Study 2.

Which is Loma Linda, Adventist, pretty much.

Actually, basically California, Southern California, 50% of the people involved in that study, which were Adventists, 50% of them were not vegetarian. Really? And this was the interesting thing about the study was because a lot of times when they do these epidemiological studies on diet, there's a lot of confounders. So here you have a unique opportunity to take a very narrow set of people, people living in Southern California, subject to the same air quality, had the same values, went to the same kind of churches. But because it's not a strict religious requirement in the Adventist church to be vegetarian, it's a dietary lifestyle, they were able to eliminate a lot of those confounders and compare the vegetarians with the non vegetarians, with the pesco Vegetarians, vegans. Oh, yeah.

So what do they find in this study?

Well, if you line up, let's say you got vegans right here. Okay.

There's some unhealthy vegans. I've seen some really unhealthy vegans who eat processed potato chips, soda, sugar.

Absolutely.

You can eat sugar all day and carton bread.

Absolutely.

And create a lot of information still.

Right? You're absolutely right.

Okay, but let's.

But I would say in the Adventist church, people who are vegan tend to be that way because they're health conscious. And that's the argument that a lot of people used was that, yeah, vegetarians and vegans have a better mortality rate because they tend to be health conscious people. And it's their health conscious activities, like smoking in general that's doing it. But here you see now, now you've got the ability to kind of eliminate that, those, those confounders because generally nobody in the adventure Smokes.

Right.

Okay, so you can see what I'm saying. Yes. So if you got the vegans here on the right or on the left to you, I guess. And then the vegetarians, and then the, what they call the pesco. Vegetarians.

Fish only.

Exactly. And then you have basically the non vegetarians. It was a step.

Any type of meat.

Any type of meat.

Okay.

Any diet. Yeah. You have this stepwise approach in terms of BMI and the same step wise approach in terms of diabetes and the stepwise approach in terms of hypertension.

Really?

Absolutely, yeah. It was published.

There's so many people that are not going to like this conversation that swear by this carnivore, lion meat eating diet.

Absolutely.

That say I had all these inflammations, diseases, physical ailments, pain when I was only eating vegetarian. I only need these certain types of food, raw, vegan, vegetarian, whatever it may be. And then when I went on the steak only diet or this diet, it went away.

Yeah.

And I lost the fat and I felt healthier and I felt clearer. I've heard that by many people over and over again. What would be the cause of that, do you know? Or is it just certain body types?

Maybe, you know, it's. There's a Gaussian distribution of people. And so we can't. All we can really say is look at the data.

Right.

In terms of that data though, there was an interesting article that came out. Like we're talking about Paleo, basically.

Right.

Paleo diets, Atkins diet, what was referred to the Atkin diets before. I'm sure there's differences between keto diet, Keto diet. So there was a study that I found that was really interesting. This was a study that just came, came out. It was published. I have it here in front of me here. And my eyesight is going bad. I don't know.

You need some meat.

So the name of the study was plant based diets, pescatarian diets and COVID 19 severity, a population based case control study in six countries.

Plant based diets.

This is plant based diets versus pescatarian diet versus and other diets. So there was this network of healthcare providers in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, UK and the United States. Okay. Pretty western. Yes. And most of these were healthcare providers there. Basically it was this network talking about, what are you doing for Covid? What are you seeing over there? What should we be doing here? They used this network to send out a very detailed dietary questionnaire where they had at least 18 different meals that had been surveyed. Very detailed. Okay. So it Was very good. And these are all. Most of these were male physicians. Okay, I'll just put it out there. Okay. I think it was like 70% male, 30% female. There were some nurses involved in the.

Sure, sure.

But all of these were healthcare providers. They were all. I mean, you can imagine we're not talking about low socioeconomic versus high socioeconomic. So again, we're narrowing the field here. We're trying to get rid of these confounders. And they asked them, you know, what kind of diet do you have? And then the reason why they went for this is because these were the people that were highest at risk for getting Covid. They're in the hospital.

The healthcare providers.

Exactly. They're treating patients.

How many people were in the states?

This was a 3,000. So they said here that 2,884 frontline healthcare workers from six countries with these different. Yeah, yeah. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK and USA individuals who reported following plant based diets and plant based diets, or pescatarian diets that were higher in vegetables, legumes, nuts, and lower in poultry and then red and processed meats. Okay, so those. And what they were able to do is divide these people into the plant based diet versus. And they specifically said this high protein.

Low carbohydrates, keto paleo type of diet.

Because a lot of times people say, you know what, in those studies where people had high fat diets, high protein diets, did they ask them were they eating a lot of carbs? Because it's the carbs that cause the inflammation, at least, as the saying goes. Right, right. The bread and the breads and all pastas and all that stuff. So here you have physicians, ostensibly, and most physicians that I know that would say, yeah, I eat a high protein, low carb diet. They're doing that because they want to be healthy. Right. So they're not probably engaging in other health risky behavior. So when they actually looked at all of these and they. And they checked them out for where they worked in the hospital. Right. Because that's important. The pulmonologist is probably going to get a higher chance of getting Covid than a radiologist. Right. It's not going to come through the screen. Right, right, right. So when they did that, it was astounding because what they found was that those physicians and healthcare workers that said that they had a high protein, low carbohydrate diet had four types of times the risk of moderate to severe COVID 19.

Really four times the risk. That means they were getting it.

They Were getting. They were contracting it. So they said here that how many actually contracted it? There was. There were 568 COVID 19 cases and 2,316 controls.

Got it.

And they said here that I'm assuming.

They'Re all wearing their masks. Are they all vaccinated or non vaccinated?

This is before the vaccine.

Gotcha. So they're all wearing their masks. Who knows if we don't know how many more people they're in contact with who had it. But you'd assume that they're all wearing their mask.

Right. So this is not a causation study up front. This is an association. And we all know that association does not mean causation. Yes. So all we can say is that it was associated.

Right.

So we can say that it's not.

The cause, but it's associated.

Well, we don't know that it's the cause. It could be the cause. It could be the cause. Could be the cause, but we don't know. It's kind of like, you know, having a cigarette lighter in your pocket and then saying it's associated with lung cancer. But is the cigarette lighter actually causing the lung cancer or is it associated with the smoking? Exactly. So that's the same thing. So the question really boils down to what are those doctors doing that say they're on a high protein, low carb diet that's causing them to have four times the risk of severe COVID 19. Is it the diet or is it something else? They're doing the study can't answer that.

Right. But those people were eating a different diet.

They were eating a different diet. Whether that's the cause or not, we don't know. But it's associated with it.

Right. So do they have a lighter in their pocket? We don't know.

Yeah. So but when you put that together with what we were just talking about, with that cliff. Right. And the fact that that kind of a diet's probably going to have higher sialic acid neu5 GC.

Yes.

Is that what's pushing them to the edge and causing them to fall over or at least getting them to the point where they're almost falling over.

Right. So essentially we want to eliminate every factor that could be closer to the edge.

Right.

And GC is one of the fasters. And this is what that is associated with. Meat.

Correct.

But not fish, is that right?

Not fish.

Not fish or chicken.

Right. And so not fish or chicken. And so that's the interesting thing there is that they mentioned pescetarian or vegetarian. So pescatarian was grouped in with that.

Interesting.

Yeah, it's really interesting. So it's this kind of this Swiss cheese model of how I look.

Explain the Swiss cheese model.

So, you know, people say, are you pro vaccine? Are you anti vaccine? Are you pro vitamin D or antivitamin D? And I look at it and say, look, people hear me talk about vitamin D and hydrotherapy and all these great things that we can do to treat Covid that have nothing to do with the vaccine. And they automatically think that, well, he's saying that because he doesn't want to take the vaccine. And then I talk about the vaccine and the things that it does, and people say, well, you're just talking about the vaccine. You're not. No, it's the Swiss cheese model. So what's the Swiss cheese model? So imagine a big block of Swiss cheese with all the holes in it, you know, like you see on Tom and Jerry. And you chop it up. And if you were to pull out any one of those slices, you would see that there's a hole in it somewhere. And you pull out a different slice, and maybe there's a hole somewhere else. But the point is, is that when the, when the bullets start flying, hopefully the Swiss cheese stops it. But when the bullets start flying, the holes are in different places. So if you were to wear like a bulletproof vest, if you just wore one sheet, you could get hit.

Right.

But the more sheets you put on, because each intervention works in a different way, the advantages of one intervention are going to help out where maybe there's disadvantages of another intervention. And so the whole Swiss cheese model helps. It's kind of like in the operating room, we don't want to have post operative infections. It's really important that we don't have post operative infections because they can be lethal. So think about all the things that we do in the operating room to prevent that. Surgeons wear masks.

Wash your hands.

We wash our hands. Exactly. Gloves, we put on sterile gowns. We have positive pressure ventilation in the room. That we have a scrub nurse who monitors everything. We sterilize the equipment. Right. So if we say that sterilizing the equipment works, we don't say, well, sterilizing the equipment works. Why are you wearing masks? We don't say that. Right.

You fill all the holes.

Exactly. We want to make sure that we approach 100%. And the best way to approach 100% is. Is answering the test question. All of the above. And that's the, that's the method.

I take so what are all the above ways to prevent contracting this or any type of virus?

You know what? It's redundant. The good news is, is that if you, if the evidence shows that if you line up your lifestyle to prevent diseases in general, that would do great against COVID 19 and any variant that comes along with it. Okay? So you really need to set yourself up. And that is really. There was another study that showed that. Another study, this is not the different study, that showed that a vegetarian diet reduced the risk of severe COVID 19 by 73%.

A vegetarian diet?

Yes.

Wow.

A history of a vegetarian diet. So that's just one. Okay, so what are the other things? Sleep. We could talk about fresh air. We could talk about sunlight. We could talk about stress. We could talk about. So all of those things. But you know what? I have seen people and I'm in the intensive care unit. I work in an intensive care unit and it's a one unit hospital. What I mean to say is that if anything happens on the campus of that hospital, whether it's a surgery, whether it's a hangnail, whether it's a delivery and it goes wrong, it shows up in my unit.

Really?

So nobody dies in that hospital without coming through my unit first.

Wow.

Sometimes I'm the last person they see.

They get sent to you if they get something really bad.

That's correct. We don't have a surgical ICU and a medical ICU and a cardiac icu.

It's one icu.

One icu.

And it comes because a baby, if.

It'S a grandparent, well, the baby goes to the nicu. They would go to a different hospital.

Gotcha.

Because I'm not a pediatrician, but. Yeah, other than the mother. The mother would come if she was in danger. She would come to our unit. Absolutely. So the point is, is that I see all of this stuff and I can tell you that I have seen people with COVID 19 in my unit that didn't have risk factors. And they were pretty young.

They didn't have risk factors.

No.

Really?

Yeah, they ate. They ate well, they seem to be. They weren't obese, let's put it that way.

Right.

Maybe. And I didn't ask them if they, if they had had a vegetarian or non vegetarian. So. So. And that was back when we didn't have the delta variant. We are seeing now with the delta variant that it is hitting younger people. It's hitting people without comorbidities harder than they are.

Really?

The non delta. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So. So what I am Saying is, is.

That are the, are the, the younger generation that you're seeing in this unit, are they recovering, are they passing away? How's that?

It's been so recent, like here in Southern California. We're talking here, What, April, sorry, August 17th today, right? Yeah. So we're talking, this is early August. We're just starting to see a couple weeks. And they're still on the ventilators.

Really?

Yeah.

How young are we talking?

30S.

Really?

Yeah, late 30s. Wow.

So they come in because they're at home, quarantined, they can't breathe and they're like, I need to come in.

That's right.

Gotcha.

Yeah. And there's, there are. So we've talked about lifestyle and obviously you can't do lifestyle changes when you get COVID 19. You can do it, but the effects are not going to kick in right away. So the question is, what things can we do? We know what we can do in the hospital. We have treatments in the hospital like dexamethasone. We have treatments in the hospital like anti inflammatory mediators. Like we talked about inflammation as the problem in the lungs. Right. So there are medications like something called tocilizumab, which is an antibody against IL6, which is supposed to reduce inflammation. We're not really seeing it help with oxygenation early on. That's something we can do in the hospital. We can talk about all of the things like getting enough sleep, like making sure your vitamin D levels are good, like making sure that you're getting enough fresh air and sunlight. And that can happen on the way to it. But what do we do during that period of time where you've contracted COVID 19 but you're still at home, you're not sick enough to be admitted to the hospital. That's a very important period of time.

What should you do then?

That's about seven days. So to understand what you need to do during that period of time requires you to understand what's happening. Okay, now, so let's talk about the immune system. There's two parts to your immune system. We talked a little bit about this last time, but let's get into it. There is the innate immune system. The innate immune system are all the cells that go around your body and eat up things, macrophages. And they're not educated on what the protein specifically looks like. They just know that it shouldn't be there. This is the innate immune system. The innate immune system is very powerful when you are young, as you get older, the innate immune system becomes less and less powerful. The innate immune system is the immune system that is responsible for making a fever. The kids get a viral infection at the drop of a hat. They've got a fever. It's very.

The fever helps fight against it.

Yes, exactly. And that's where we're going with this. But on the other hand, adults who get infections, they rarely get fevers. They don't get fevers as often as kids get fevers. And the reason is because the innate immune system in the young is very strong. The key here is that you need a very strong innate immune system because it shuts down viral replication. One of the products of the innate immune system is a substance called interferon. You may have heard of this. It's a very well named substrate. It's a very well named substance because it interferes with the virus.

Interferon.

Interferon. So remember that. Interferon.

We want to have that.

We want to have that.

Yeah. How do you get that?

You get that from your cells and having a very strong immune system. But there's another way you can get it. We're going to get to that. Now, that's as opposed to the adaptive immune system. The adaptive immune system is a different part of your immune system. It's the part that comes afterwards. It's the part of your immune system that recognizes antigens and makes antibodies. The problem is that the adaptive immune system comes in about seven days later, and what happens is that it starts attacking all of the cells in your body that are infected. So this is the typical scenario for somebody that ends up with COVID 19, in the hospital. The innate immune system is there. It's trying to fight this virus. There's this tug of war going back and forth for the whole week. The virus is suppressing the innate immune system. The innate immune system is trying to suppress the virus. The virus does a workaround and gets into cells and starts infecting many, many, many cells. Okay. And so the person's just sort of. Just sort of going along for the week. Then all of a sudden, day seven, day seven, the adaptive immune system comes online. And they see what's happened. It's kind of like the parents just came home. Sure, okay. Yeah, right. And they're like, wow, all of these cells are infected. Go to it. And now you have an immediate reaction that goes against all of these cells, especially the cells in the lungs, because that's where the virus got into. And that's why these people start to have inflammation in the lungs. You got your tennis court now being Swollen.

Interesting.

Exactly. So the problem is in COVID 19 failures is that the innate immune system is too weak and the adaptive immune system is too strong.

So what can you do in those first seven days to make sure it minimizes that?

So what I propose, and we're looking at this. But if you look at history, if you look at history, this seems to pan out. Boosting. Enhancing the innate immune system is a great way to suppress it. How do you do that? Well, interferon, one of the ways that has been tried and looked at is by increasing core body temperature for about 20 minutes at a time at a time. Multiple times a day, up to two or three times a day. It's been done. Yeah. And then cooling it down. And then doing a brief cool down. Hot, Very, very hot. And then cold. So where did this come from? A couple things. There's a guy by the name. We talked about this before, I think Dr. Yorag, he took these neurosyphilis patients in his clinic and he noticed that when they got a fever, they got better. So he injected them with malaria. Okay. So he took out blood from people with known malaria and then injected the blood into. Oh, yeah.

That's crazy.

Yeah, this is what he did. I mean, it was. It was well controlled. He monitored them very carefully and they developed high fevers. The high fevers caused the interferon to go up. There was a study experiment where we checked in a study the amount of interferon coming out of cells at various temperatures by the time it got to 39 degrees Celsius, which is about 100 and 102 somewhere in there, don't quote me on that. But around that area, a fever interferon level spiked tenfold. Tenfold. Interferon does a great job at killing viral infections. Do you know we used to have patients with chronic hepatitis C? Hepatitis C was a big problem. I was trained in the VA system. We have people, they got it from tattoos, from intravenous drug use. Hepatitis C, chronic hepatitis C, it's basically a bloodborne virus and it infects the liver and causes cirrhosis after many years. Do you know today we can cure hepatitis C? Do you know how we do it? High doses of interferon. It's called pegylated interferon. And we can do that.

Does that cause a fever?

No, it makes you feel like you have the flu.

Really?

It does, because it's exactly what it does.

It fights against it, it kills it.

It just eliminates the virus.

So. So do you want to. So when Someone gets a fever in general, do you not want to eliminate the fever? Do you want to keep the fever?

Exactly.

You want to keep it.

Exactly. Unless it's causing problems. Now, remember, not fever is a good thing. Fever is a good thing. Wow. It's a great thing to have. And so what are we doing with fevers? We're giving Tylenol, paracetamol in Europe.

We don't want to do that.

We don't want to do that. Unless the fever is so high that it's causing the heart rate to race or the patient is becoming delirious.

I used to always just put a cold rag in my forehead, and it made me feel, do I not want to do that if I have a fever?

That's fine. Cooling down. Your head is fine.

Okay.

The rest of the body. So what do they do in these things? And it's interesting what has been done in history. If you look at the 1918 pandemic in the army hospitals where the soldiers were coming back and they had the flu, they thought. The doctors at the time thought that they were dying from the symptoms of the flu. Fever, muscle aches. Hey, we have aspirin. Aspirin just came out in 1899. So they were dosing them up the wazoo with aspirin for the muscle pain, for the muscle pain and for the fever. It took care of the fever. Some of these people were probably toxic. I mean, we killed a lot of people, unfortunately, with aspirin. The saying was that the German. The German Bayer aspirin killed more patients than the German bullets.

Oh, my goodness.

In. In the first World War. Wow. Now, there was a group of hospitals at the time in northeast United States that was not doing that. What they were doing was the opposite. Instead of bringing the fever down, they were doing these treatments.

The fever up.

They were putting them. They were placing very hot packs on them, increasing the temperature so they were sweating. They were putting their feet in hot baths. This is 1918. These. These sanitariums, as they were called, those hospitals. They didn't have the modern medical things that we have today.

Hot, cold, hot, cold. That's about it.

And so what they found was this. This is really interesting when they looked at how many people came down with the flu and then progressed to pneumonia and then finally to death. They found that in the hospitals where they were practicing what they call fomentations or hot packs, that they did the best job at preventing the patient from going to pneumonia. But once they got pneumonia, it's hard. It didn't work there was about a 50, 50 chance of them dying. By the way, it was about a 40% chance of them dying in the army hospitals. So the army hospitals were doing a little better job at once they got pneumonia going to death. But the thing was is that in the sanitariums hardly anybody was going to pneumonia. And so at the end of the day there was about a 1.5% case fatality rate in the sanitarium and over 6% in the army hospitals. So what happened? So this led to a lot of intrigue and studying this. And this is where Wagner Yorag got his idea from. It was this melu, this environment of understanding of heat and cold and hydrotherapy and this sort of stuff. And he got the Nobel Prize for doing this in 1927. Very intensive. It's difficult. You've got to place the patient down. It takes time. You have to set it up, you have to heat the water up, you have to do all of these things. And so by 1928 we discovered penicillin. Penicillin is a pill. Manufacture it, you can give it to people and it's a lot easier to do. So you have a choice. Do you do the hot fomentations or you just give them the pills? You give them the pill. And so that's where we as western society. And look, I'm a critical care physician. I give medicines out all the time. It's useful when a patient comes in with a stroke, I give TPA to break up the stroke. I'm going to do that before I do hydrotherapy. That has to work really quickly. So just because I'm talking about these things doesn't mean that I'm not. I want the best of both worlds. I'm the Swiss cheese model. Yes.

Everything that works, let's do it.

Exactly. And so, and not to say that because this works, we don't have to do this. Not to say that because we're sterilizing the equipment we don't have, the surgeon doesn't have to wear a mask. Right? Everything, all of the above. Because that's really what we deserve.

Could you give me, if you were a lawyer, could you give me the top five pieces of evidence or mindful information for and against taking a vaccine? Okay, Just say like, here's what the data is saying, here's what.

I'm going to play devil's advocate.

Yes.

Okay.

I want you to be a lawyer on both sides.

Okay?

Here's why you should get it and here's why you shouldn't get it? Because there's a lot of people who are, you know, saying no to it. I don't want to have it. It's not what I want. Here's all the reasons why. And there's a lot of people saying you're crazy is why you need to have it.

Yeah. And it's almost like these two populate. There's no. I mean, usually with a population, there's an overlap where you can meet in the middle. There's no overlap.

There's a right and a wrong.

Exactly.

And it's almost worse than like politics right now. It's like it's breaking up families, it's breaking up friendships, it's breaking up business relationships. If someone's not doing something, then they're bad and wrong or on both sides. So could you give the case that's.

Going to be a good. That's a great question. Okay, so case four and against. Okay. Each side of this, I'm going to. Which one should I do first? I'm going to give you the case.

For getting the vaccine, maybe the top five reasons and the top five for not getting.

Got it. All right. All right. So I'm going to go with the pro vaccine one first. And. And that one, I'll have to admit to you, is a little bit easier for me to do. Do. Why? Because I'm a critical care doctor and I've seen the worst of the worst. I mean, I have seen families ripped apart, wiped out because of the virus.

Really?

Yeah. I've had a. Situations where we're intubating somebody and we say call the husband and they call the husband and he's down in the ER himself. Yeah. And they're in the same room and people. One dies and the other one's still there. Yeah. So this is the type of. I've seen these things and we've got to call up family members. So. So this is. These are not just war stories. These are things that happen. And it's hard to tell.

You're seeing this on a weekly basis, on a daily.

There was a period there in February where I worked literally five weeks in a row. I got up at six in the morning, went in at seven, didn't get home till eight. And I did that for five weeks. Wow. Because there was just nobody else. Who else is gonna do it? And to see that. And I mean, we had nurses that instead of seeing two patients at a time, they were seeing four patients because we had nothing else we had to write up. Maybe these are the reasons right here. Basically, we had the state of California, and I don't think the state of California is unique in this. I think all 50 states were doing this, were making their hospitals to come up with plans as to what we would do if people came to the hospital, and we just didn't have resources.

What'd you do?

Yeah. So we had to come up with a protocol that would say, who are we going to give treatment to? And who are we not going to give treatment to? And the reason for that was. I'll explain. Has to do with exponential growth, which we'll talk about. Sure. But it was interesting. In that protocol, we could not use age as a determining factor. It had to be based on medical futility, basically.

Interesting.

Yeah. So that's very hard to do. I've been a physician for 20 years. 20 plus years. Never, never thought about that. That's like disaster medicine. Okay. Disaster triage. So one of the reasons for this is. And I think one of the things that is the reason why people don't understand why things are going is because of this idea of exponential exponents. Okay, so let me explain. I'll give you a. I'll give you a choice, Louis. I can give you a million dollars right now.

Yes.

Or I can give you a penny right now. But tomorrow I'll double the penny, and the next day I'll double it again, and the next day I'll double it again for 30 days. What would you take?

I would take the second option.

You would take the second option of exponential growth. That's because, Louis, you understand exponents. Yes. So if you do that to 30 days, you'll realize that on the 30th day alone, going to be paying you over $5 million. Okay? So, but to someone who doesn't understand that. Think about this. I give a million dollars to somebody, and they go out and buy a house. That's logical, right? If someone. A million dollars, and they went out and bought a house, what they're doing would be commensurate with what they got.

Yes.

Okay, now imagine I give somebody a penny today, and I'm about to give them two pennies, and they understand exponents, but nobody else does, and they go out and they buy a house, and they go out and buy a boat, and they go out and buy a car, and they go on a big vacation, and you're like, whoa, this guy is crazy. He's way overspending. He's got. By the end of the first week, I think he has, like, 64 cents in his wallet.

Wow.

By the end of the second week, he's got a few hundred dollars. So clearly this guy is way overspending. And that's the thing that I think a lot of people see is they see a few hundred cases here and there and the government's coming down like a ton of bricks and they're saying, you're just using this as an excuse to. But what they don't understand is that it's going to go like that for a long time. And then right at the end, things start to pick up and go real fast, real fast. And we have examples of this. This happened already. I mean, the delta variant came from India. It was first discovered in India. And what happened over there was, I mean, if you look at some of the stories, they showed up to the hospital, there was nothing there for them. There was so much. There was such a demand for oxygen. They, they ran out of medical grade oxygen. They had to use industrial grade oxygen. And the problem with that is it wasn't sterilized. And so they're getting pumped full of oxygen and two weeks after they get off that they survive. And they get off. Now they have black mold in their sinuses and it starts to eat through their skull and into their brain and they have to get this cut out. Yeah. So this is the kind of stuff, I mean, there's whole situations where ICUs, basically the oxygen just ran out and everybody in the ICU died at the same time.

Really?

Yeah. So this is the problem with exponential growth. Start to learn about exponential growth and you'll see why. Once we get to exponential growth, there's very little that we can do about it.

Okay.

And so one of the, one of the pro points of a vaccine, that it could potentially reduce the spread and prevent you from getting to that exponential growth. Okay. So that's called the R naught value. If you look at the R naught, that'll tell you, is it out. If it's at 1, that means that there's going to be no growth. One person infects only one person. So it's going to stay the same. Everybody. The number of people that are infected is never going to change. If that R value goes down below one, that means the pandemic is going to just go out, fizzle out. Yeah.

Where are we at right now?

We are at one point something, and it's going up. So One person infects 1.1 people. This is on average. And so long as that number stays above one, we're going up.

The chance for Exponential growth is going to happen.

That's correct. Okay, so the natural history of these things, have you noticed that they go up and then they come down? So what's happening there? Something is changing. You know, this last time in February, it came back down. A lot of people said, oh, it's the vaccine. It's not the vaccine. What caused it to go down? Louis, remember back when things started to get really rough, did you notice that a lot of friends of yours said, hey, you know what, we were gonna get together Saturday night, but we're not gonna do that this time. That's exactly what happened. And that happens when that happens across the board.

The virus can't spread, spread unless people gather.

Exactly. And so what really is causing this to stop and come back down again.

Is people's behavior, the actions they take.

Remember in California we had a mask mandate.

Yes. For a long time.

Did you see anybody doing anything about it?

Doing what about it?

Were they actually wearing masks? Some of them were.

Well, you couldn't go into stores without masks.

Correct?

You know, but yes, outside.

But here's the thing, here's the thing that we didn't have. We didn't have sports, we didn't have concerts. Those are big places where things can spread. And so things stayed low for a long time. Then we started to open up things. So people say mask mandates don't work. They're right in a sense. The thing that works the best isolation is when people isolated is when people start to see what's happening. It's almost a self fulfilling prophecy. Things are going well. And then when things start to get really bad, people start to hear about relatives that are in the hospital. People start to hear about things personally in their own friends. They change their habits. Whether it's a government that tells them to do it or it's their own personal choice that does it. It doesn't matter who's telling you to do it or why you're doing it, it's the fact that you're doing it. Yes. And so when you do less risky behavior, the virus can't replicate and it comes back down. And that's why even the delta variant, look, look at the delta variant in India. It went up, it spiked. How many people in India are vaccinated? 3%.

Really? That's it.

It came back down. So it's not the vaccine that takes it down. That would be one of the reasons to say, I mean, those are one of the reasons against vaccination. Right. It's not vaccination that ends the Pandemic. It's not, let me put it this way. It's not vaccination that causes the wave to come back down. It's a change in personal behavior. Got it multiplied across the board, right? That's what causes it to go down. Now, if you want to eliminate the virus, you've got to eliminate the ability for it to reproduce. Because variants happen when viruses reproduce. They can't. You. The only way you can get a variant is if the virus makes a mistake when it's reproducing. So when the virus is reproducing your body a billion trillion times, it makes a slight mistake and then that spreads to another person. And that mistake can have two effects, three effects. It can have no effect. It can have a worsening effect on the virus, which means that it doesn't infect as well, in which case it's just a dud anyway, just one out of a trillion. Who cares, right? Or it can make it more infectious, more lethal, whatever it needs to be. And if that virus then gets to reproduce now you have a delta variant and it just takes over. That's exactly what happened. So the way to stop variants from happening is stop replication of the virus. The way you stop replication of the virus, that's tricky. Some people believe we'll never be able to completely eliminate this virus and we'll go from a pandemic to an endemic.

What's that mean?

That's like the flu. The flu comes back every year.

Right?

Okay, so that's the question.

Okay, so it's another case for it.

Then what's another case for getting the vaccine? Well, before the delta variant, we had really good data that showed that getting the vaccine prevents not only hospitalization, but also transmitting it to somebody else. Because of the delta variant, that amount of infection aspect of it has gone down. In other words, people with the vaccine are more likely than they used to be to contract the virus, but still less likely to contract the virus if they weren't vaccinated.

Okay.

What we have been seeing up to this point is that the way that the vaccine keeps you out of the hospital has not really changed. It's still above 90%.

So you get the vaccine, you're still going to the hospital?

No, if you get the vaccine, it keeps you out of the hospital.

Keeps you out of the hospital.

According to all the data that we've seen so far, greater than 90% efficacy even with the delta variant.

Okay. You have to get vaccine. You're going to be sick, but you don't need to Go to the hospital.

Correct. Got it. Exactly.

So it's not stopping you getting the vaccine. People are still getting Covid.

Correct. So they might get a positive test, but they're like, oh, I just have the sniffles. And they don't. They don't end up going to the hospital. That's where we're seeing the slip. Whereas before, they weren't even turning positive. Okay. Now, the latest news is that in Israel, and the reason why we looked at Israel is because Israel was the country that vaccinated everybody first.

So we see everyone got vaccinated?

Oh, just about everybody. Like 70%, 78%. So we look to Israel to see what's going to happen next, because when we see what happens in Israel, we can see what's going to happen here in the United States because we're maybe about a month or two behind. What they're noticing in Israel is they're starting to see an uptick in people who have been vaccinated who are ending up in the hospital with mild to moderate cases.

Really?

Yes.

Why is that?

Excellent question. So when they looked at who these people were, it was people with two characteristics. Number one, they were older, and number two, they were vaccinated way at the beginning.

What does that have to do with it?

Well, they're thinking that the vaccine effects of keeping people out of the hospital is wearing off.

Last six months or eight months.

Exactly.

So you got to constantly be getting new shots.

So this is the thing. Israel has already made up their mind, and they said everybody over 60 gets a third shot.

Wow.

So it's not like they're getting another two shots. They're getting. Actually it's just one shot. And within. Within a day or two or a week or. No, within a day or two, antibody levels come up immediately. So it's like. It's kind of like you were studying in college. It took you a long time to study the Krebs cycle or whatever you. I don't know. What was your major in college?

Sports management.

Sports management. Okay. I don't have a good one for that. But you studied something. Right. Okay. How many? I don't know how many holes there are in golf? 18. Right. Okay. So you learn that. Right. And then when you go back to it, it just takes you very little time to remember what that was. Just a flashcard and you're right back to it. That's the same kind of thing that they're talking about.

Got it. Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. What's another case for getting it?

Another case for getting the Vaccine is. So let's review hospitalization. Hospitalization, preventing infection. Those are the big two right there.

Okay, cool.

Okay, so and also, if you don't get the infection, you don't get the long Covid stuff.

The long Covid.

Long, long Covid.

What's that?

I mean, there's a symptoms of COVID that last for more than two months.

Okay, wow.

Three months.

Wow, that's not fun.

Actually, the official, the official definition now is if you have symptoms for more than 12 weeks. Okay, that's a long time.

That's a long time.

In other words, how to recover from that? Well, if you have it for less than 12 weeks, you think that's pretty long. But that's actually par for the course, to use another golf analogy.

Sure, sure, sure. Okay, so now you're standing in front of the judge and you are defending not getting vaccines. What are the points, the evidence, the proof that you could show for everyone that's saying, you know what, I'm not gonna get the vaccine, or I don't believe in it, or I've seen cases of people who've gotten sick right after getting the vaccine. I don't want to get side effects or sick from this. It hasn't been enough time that was pushed through faster than any other vaccine in history. What's the.

So the strongest arguments, the strongest arguments for. Against vaccine is this idea of we don't know the long term effects. Okay. That's the strongest argument. Is there, are there antibodies? There's a lot of talk about something called antibody dependent enhancement. What is antibody dependent enhancement? What it is, is basically when you have something in your body that makes antibodies to it, but instead of the antibodies neutralizing it, which is what they should be doing, okay, the antibodies somehow bind to it and allow it to go into the cell better. You understand what I'm saying? So in other words, your immune system is kind of shooting itself in the foot. That's antibody dependent enhancement. You can see the whole meaning is right there in the term. So the question is, is that happening? There's some data to suggest that in vitro in a test tube with the delta variants, there's some evidence to suggest that the antibody, that there may be antibodies that could do that, but they haven't seen that in real life. And I would just say, to tell you the whole truth, when you look at who is ending up in the hospital right now, 95% of them are people who have. 95% of the people who are ending up in the hospital with COVID have not Been vaccinated. Really. So if we were to have, if we were to see antibody dependent enhancement, I would have expected that to be worse. Now in Israel they're starting to see that, that 95 is eroding. They're starting to see more and more people who have been vaccinated, but realize that in Israel almost everybody's vaccinated. So if there is going to be breakthrough cases, it's going to be likely in vaccinated people because that's who you have to start out with. So that's that another strong case against, against vaccination. I mean, let's go with the stuff that's been actually proven or actually been shown. So in the Johnson and Johnson case, there was a number of cases, about six in six million shots. And remember the Johnson Johnson is a one shot deal. So there was about six, mostly women, younger women, who developed something called a superficial venous thrombo or actually intracerebral venous thrombosis. Sinus thrombosis.

Thrombosis. What is that?

Thrombosis is a blood clot in the brain. And the concern was why was this happening? There's some data to suggest that because the Johnson and Johnson vaccine was using an adenovirus as a vector. So in other words, in the messenger RNA vaccines, they were using little lipid droplets with the MRNA in it and that would fuse with the cell. The Johnson and Johnson and Astrazeneca, by the way, those vaccines don't use the little lipid droplets. They use basically viral shells and the virus then infects and then it dumps the DNA in there and it can do what it needs to do. So when they did that, that was sometimes associated with thrombosis. So that's kind of scary, right? Thrombosis. Who wants to get thrombosis? Right? Six in six million. So it was about a one in a million. Now there could have been some underreporting of that. So maybe it's, I mean those are the ones that got reported. Right. So there's probably more of those. So it's probably not one in a million. Probably more than one in a million.

Sure.

But it's still kind of rare. To give you an example of what, what, what else do we engage in every day that has a 1 in a 1 million chance of dying?

You're supposed to do the, against, you're.

Supposed to be going, I know, but, but I want to do it. Yeah, it's, it's driving a car.

Yeah, exactly.

Right, so. So you Wouldn't May not realize this, but $100 million, 150 million people drive every day in the United States. And I didn't realize this, but 16,000 of them get into car accidents every day. That's why we have body shops now. 16,000 people get into car accidents. How many people die? 100. Die every day.

From car accidents?

From car accidents out of 150 million. So that's a one in a million chance.

Right.

Okay. So that's kind of what we're talking about.

We still drive every day.

We hear every day about car accidents. Yes. And we still drive every day because we have to weigh. And here's the key point. The risks versus the benefits. So that's. Now, Pfizer and Moderna have their own issues, this issue of myocarditis. So again, spike protein. We talked about the spike protein, right? The spike protein was that thing that bound the ACE2 receptor. And that ACE2 receptor was like a big enzyme in your body that was supposed to be reducing the oxidative stress and reducing antioxidants. Right. Or increasing antioxidants. Right. So what happens when you give a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine? You're actually causing your body to make spike proteins. So it's a lot, lot less and it's localized. I mean, think about it in terms of this, right? The virus is making billions upon trillions of virus particles, each with their own spike proteins on them versus the injection. Small amount of spike protein. There's some studies that show that the spike protein, very small amount of it gets in the blood actually and starts to go other places. The question is, does that spike protein cause problems? Well, after the second shot, there's some data now that they're looking at in Europe and also here in the United States, also about one in a million in Europe, there's about. In the Moderna vaccine, there was about 19 cases of myocarditis in about 19 million shots. So again, about one in a million. Probably underreported.

Underestimated.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably underreported. So probably higher than that. And so the question is, there is. Yeah, so there's a chance. So most of these patients had myocarditis. That's basically inflammation of the heart usually goes away on its own after a couple of weeks or some treatment. But again, one in a million shots. So there's someone that actually did a study. So the question is, should I get the vaccine or not? The question is, well, we know about the risks of the vaccine. What are the risks of or not. Because there's two possibilities on or not. The or not could be that you get the virus or you don't get the virus. If I had a crystal ball and I were to look down in time and I would see that you would never, ever get the virus, then why do you need the vaccine? I would say don't get the vaccine because clearly you are not at risk for getting myocarditis from the virus, because you're not going to get the virus. The problem is that in a pandemic, in an epidemic, in an endemic, there's a very good likely chance that you might be infected. And so what we have to say is, do I get the vaccine or do I get the virus? And when they did that kind of a study, you were about six times more likely to get myocarditis from a viral infection than you were from the vaccine.

Myocarditis is the inflammation of the heart. Interesting.

Yeah. And so it's very important for athletes, especially like yourself, you don't want to be exercising or doing things, because that can actually make it worse. So you want to make sure that.

You'Re resting when you get.

When you get myocarditis.

If you get Covid.

If you get Covid.

Or rest.

Yeah. And. Or the problem with the heart. So let's bring everything together, okay? The pros and the cons. The cons against all of the arguments against the vaccine are very, very strong. When you don't have a big incidence of the virus because you're looking at the risks of the vaccine versus nothing happened to you at all. Right? Right. Okay. But when we're in that exponential growth phase, when the hospitals are being flooded, you don't want to need hospital care when the hospitals are full. And I'm not talking just about COVID I'm talking about if you're having a baby, if you're in a car accident, it's going to be very hard to get the appropriate care that you need when the hospitals are filled. So you may be saying, I'm fit, I'm healthy. I. There's no way I'm going to have a problem with COVID 19. This could still affect you because you could be driving and get into a car accident, or you can get a bout of appendicitis. You've got to go to that same hospital that's full. It's full. And so, yeah, so now the pro arguments of getting the vaccine start to become very powerful when we're in a wave.

Right.

Because now the chances of you getting the virus go up. And so the question about whether or not to get the vaccine and the risks and benefits are mitigated. It's a dynamic interplay in the scale of back and forth is where are we in the pandemic right now? As it stands, cases are surging, and that's a problem. So, I mean, those are really the arguments for and against. Now, again, I'm coming from a side where I'm a little bit biased, I'll say that, because I see all of the absolute worst things. Right. And somebody who hasn't been in the hospital and somebody who hasn't seen these things isn't going to see that, and it's not going to weigh on their mind. So I use data, but I also have this irreparable image in my mind of my work and what I do to try to save patients and all of these sorts of things. So I could understand how some people who don't have access to that, not of their own faults, could come up with a different opinion.

Sure. Got it. How much does fear play into contracting a virus or getting sick? So, fear, fear, anxiety, stress.

Fear, anxiety, stress, absolutely.

How much does that affect? I guess maybe getting inflammation, which would then cause you to get sick.

It's more likely. It's huge, really. Okay, so let me tell you about a study that they did. This is a study out of McMaster University. Heather Heiss did this. She's the. She's in charge of the Fit Lab at McMaster and on her campus. Six weeks before final exams. You can remember, final exam, Very stressful. Right. So six weeks before, she had three groups of people that she randomized. One group did nothing. Okay. They just went through the six weeks and they measured them at the end. The other group did moderate intensity exercise training. Moderate intensity. So they had their heart rates up into the 140s, let's say three times a week, 20 minutes a day. Third group had their heart rates up into the 170s for 20 minutes a day. And she wanted to know, how does this mitigate how we go to the end of the term. So your question was about fear and anxiety. This is the time of the year where students have a lot of fear and anxiety because their careers depend on how they perform here at the end, on these exams. One of the striking things that they found in the control group, this is a group that did no exercise, was that compared to their baseline, six weeks before the end of the term, when they got to the end of the term, their depression scale was Significantly higher. And they used a validated Beck inventory depression scale. It was significantly elevated because they did zero working out. They didn't do any working out. They were the life. Yeah. They just lived their life, studied really hard and took their exams.

They had more depression.

More depression and higher levels of anxiety, both on a scale that was measured objectively and also self reported stress. Both. Right. So very high.

They said they were stressed and the markers were showed they were stressed.

Correct. Then she went ahead and she measured the amount of Interleukin 6. What is Interleukin 6? Interleukin 6 is a surrogate marker for inflammation in the body and tumor necrosis factor alpha. Those were increased as well. Now, in the moderate to severe, I think you'll find this interesting if you're interested in exercise, who did better? Who did better, the moderate exercise or the high intensity exercise? In terms of stress, depression, perceived stress, and inflammatory markers.

Oh, man. So one group did three times a week.

Three times a week.

Moderate.

Moderate.

The other one did three times a week. Intense.

Correct.

Gosh. I feel like this is a trick question. Part of me wants to say the intense was better off, but for some reason I feel like you're going to say the moderate was better off.

You're smart. This is something that they describe in the literature as the J curve. Okay, so here's the point, here's the point for everybody listening, that you don't have to be an athlete to get the benefit of exercise.

Right. You don't have to go super hard every day.

So just enough, just enough to get your heart rate up actually did better than pushing it. Than pushing it. Because the people that pushed it. So first of all, let's back up here. So remember I said that the control people had higher levels of depression. Higher levels of depression. Not only was moderate intensity exercise able to eliminate that increase, it actually went down.

Wow. It actually went happier.

They felt happier. Now, that happened in both. The depression went down in both the moderate and in the intense groups. So they both did well. But when they asked them about stress and perceived stress, the moderate did much better than the active.

Interesting.

Yeah. Then when they measured interleukin 6, same situation, the moderate intensity exercise training went down. So what does this all tell us? There is a relationship between the body, the mind, and that is connected through the immune system. It's connected through the hormone system, it's connected through exercise. All of those sorts of things, things that we don't. Things about that we learn about in textbooks that are in different chapters actually Underneath the surface are connected. And so you talk about stress and fear. Here's another study that they did. So people in Japan, they took these CEOs, high, high stress people that are the tops of their companies, and they took them out into the forest, okay? Into the forest. And this was a forest bathing. For this forest bathing, this was hinoki cypress trees. And they basically spent. To make a long story short, they spent about two nights there and they measured everything. They measured the white blood cells, they measured the amount of granules in the white blood cells. And to make a long story short, at the end of the three days when they measured everything, and also the phytocytes in the air that were coming off these trees, their immune system, their innate immune system was much better at the end, and it lasted for at least seven days. So a walk in the park every weekend, in other words, could do one. It's another one of those Swiss cheese slices that goes in there.

Nature.

Now, when they, they did the same experiment, okay, but they put them, they checked them into a hotel in Tokyo, not going up to the big mountain, they checked them into the hotel in Tokyo, and instead of having them walk around for three days in a forest, they infused this hinoki oil into the room. Huh.

Okay, what happened?

Same effect.

Really? The oil.

The oil. What is this oil?

I gotta get this.

Hanoki cypress oil.

Do you use this or no?

You know what? Here's the, here's the. Here's the good news. It's not just with cypress. This happens with just about all of the. The oils that comes from these trees. Eucalyptus. Another one that they, that they studied, eucalyptus oil has. It's been shown to improve the innate immune system where they actually in vitro dropped eucalyptus oil on these cells and they basically turned into these cells that were activated and ready to do what they needed to do. By the way, in the pandemic in 1912, Australia's eucalyptus trees were almost completely cut down because of the essence of that eucalyptus soil. Have you ever had Vicks?

Yes.

You know what the major ingredient is in Vicks? Eucalyptus. So if you ever smell a eucalyptus, so you say, oh, this is Vicks. That's what it is. That's why they use it. So now, I told you, though, that the people in the Japanese forest and those people in the hotel room, they both had the same effect. I didn't completely finish because there was one difference. And the difference was is they measured urine cortisol levels. So cortisol is a stress hormone that goes up when you have fear Anxiety and stress. So where do you think the urine cortisol levels were the highest? In the people in the hotel room or in the people up in the forest actually naturally getting their hinoki oil from the trees themselves.

People in the hotel room, Unless there was like they're afraid of like a bear. I don't know, like heard sounds every night in the woods. And maybe you'd be more afraid, but.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. So here's the difference is that you're not getting the full benefit when you're out in nature. And there's a study that showed that the more green that you're exposed to, just the green coming at it, looking at scenes of greenery and nature, it has a calming effect on the body. The cortisol levels plummet. And cortisol is a major problem in terms of your immune system. It's been shown over, over and over again that cortisol inhibits your immune system. And so to get those levels down, it's really important. So, yeah, they got half the benefit in the hotel room. They got the hinoki oil, but they didn't get the full benefit because those cortisol levels were still elevated. So here's the point is try to figure out as many slices of Swiss cheese that you can find. Try to line those up. So I approach this in a very different way than a lot of people might think that I would. A lot of people try to find things that work so they don't have to do other things. I try to find as many things and just try to line them up. Do them all, do them all. And what you'll find is that the slices that work to cut down on coronavirus are the same slices that work for just about every other disease and.

Just living longer, healthier, happier.

Exactly.

If you could only do five things yourself, five natural organic activities, whether that's sleep, a certain amount of hours, have oil in your bed, whatever. These things are non medical related things.

Non medical related things.

What would be the five things that you would do on a daily basis?

That's a great question.

To prevent disease, to prevent inflammation, to prevent Covid and optimize your body.

Okay, number one is sleep on the list. And I'll tell you why that is. We talk about antibody levels and vaccines and these sorts of things and we get all hung up about how much antibody levels are there. Here's a study that was done the night before somebody was vaccinated with the flu vaccine. This was a study out of Pittsburgh. If they had greater than eight hours of sleep, Their antibody response was twice that than if they didn't get enough 8 hours of sleep twice. So sleep is really important. I'll tell you another reason why sleep is important. Just I'll take a little detour as to why. When you look at how you sleep, you go to bed. Let's just say. Let's just say you go to bed at 11 o' clock at night, 10 or 11 o', clock, and you get up at about 6 or 7 in the morning. Those hours of sleep are not equal. There are different stages of sleep. There's deep sleep, which usually occurs at the beginning of the night, and then there's REM sleep, which occurs at the end of the night. Deep sleep is extremely important for physical, mental, restorative sleep. It's also tied to growth hormone. Yes. So when we talk about growth hormone, you know what I'm talking about. This used to be known as the holy grail of the fountain of youth. Exactly. Delta wave or slow wave sleep is directly tied to secretion of growth hormone from the pituitary gland.

Okay.

Once you pass a few hours of sleep, you've lost that ability that night to get that growth hormone secretion. So in other words, let's put it this way, the hours of sleep before midnight are worth twice than the hours of sleep after midnight. Wow.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay.

Go to sleep before midnight.

And by the way, it's also redundant there, because guess when your melatonin starts to come on right before. Right as you're going to sleep. Wow. And we didn't talk about this, but melatonin is a very, very powerful antioxidant, even to the point where we were actually giving melatonin to patients in the intensive care unit who were on Covid, who had Covid.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

So if there was one thing that I would say is try to get at least seven hours of sleep and try to make sure that those hours of sleep are before midnight. I mean, not all of them after midnight. Before midnight, that'd be hard to do. But get two hours of sleep, maybe go to bed at 10 o' clock and try to get as much of that as possible. It's not to say that at the stroke of midnight you're not going to get any more, but it starts to decrease after that.

Okay.

Wow.

Interesting. Okay, that's number one.

Okay, that's number one. Number two, we talked about diet. Okay. So for reasons that we've already enumerated, whether it's sialic acid, whether it's inflammation. Start to look at diet and to look at that now I would say this, here is the temptation. The temptation is to look at your diet and say I don't want to do that anymore. And then look at the new diet and say I'm going to switch to that. Don't do that.

It's hard.

That's hard.

It's hard to make a huge switch.

It is, it is. Because the problem is it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. And then what you're going to do is you're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So what I would do is look at your diet and find the worst thing about your diet and say that's what I'm going to work on eliminating and do it for a month, then figure out the next thing and do that for a month.

That's smart.

What you will find. And I've done this because I used to eat meat, I used to do these things and I started to. It wasn't an overnight change, it was something that gradually changed. So I went to the University of California, Riverside and I was a chemistry major and there was a Carl's Jr. In the cafeteria. And that's. I mean it was so easy. Just go in there and get the burger. Right, Exactly. Nothing against Carl's Jr. They're good burgers and they tasted good. But then after a while I started to go away from it. Well, it wasn't an absolute for me. So when I went back to it two or three months later to try it out, because I was in a situation where, you know, I was there on campus, I didn't have any food, I'll just go get a burger or whatever. It didn't taste the same. You would be very surprised at how your brain and your tongue. It's actually a two way communication. It goes back and forth taste things that if you stop eating something for three months and then go back to it, it will taste different. And the point is that the satisfaction that you're getting from it now, you won't get from it later when you stop eating. Sure, it'll be different. You'll get satisfaction from different things. Your tastes actually change. We don't think about it, but it actually happens. So I know that this whole issue about diet is very, very personal. Yes, people have very personal habits. It's not only just personal habits about what they eat, it's also ingrained in their family. For a lot of people, they're not the ones making the food. It's somebody Else making the food. And it's very complicated. But what I would say is that despite all of those barriers that I believe a lot can be gained by looking at some of these things and trying to make some changes. Okay.

Nutrition. Okay.

Yeah. Number three, should I group it together or not? Sunshine and fresh air. They come together.

Yeah.

Getting outside.

Yes. Nature.

Nature. So we had on our Medcram channel a guy by the name of Dr. Joseph Allen out of the Harvard Medical School and talking about ventilation and sick buildings and the things that. And the end. The air turnover. And he talks extensively. Very good, very educational for me to listen to him about how built. When buildings were designed. Buildings were designed so that they were energy efficient. So a lot of the data that came out and a lot of the stuff that has kind of influenced how we build buildings came out of the 70s. And what do we have in the 70s we had the energy crisis. How can we make buildings so that they are extremely efficient? And so antithetical to efficiency is high turnover of air because you've got to heat and cool that air. So it's a real problem. So that's when we started to see in the literature, Dr. Allen says, is when we started to see this whole thing about sick buildings. People who work in sick buildings, who get sick. Correct. In these buildings. The buildings aren't sick. Yeah, the people in the buildings. Right. So. And why is that? He says you'll notice this. And you know, when he brought it up, I started to think about this. You'll be in a room, it's kind of stagnant, not a lot of airflow, and you have a hard time. And as soon as somebody opens the door, it's kind of like, ah, you know, it's interesting. Right. And so this idea of airflow, he's like cracking some windows open. It could be as simple as just cracking a window open. He showed us in his video about how you can buy a meter that can actually measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the. The air. And it's a surrogate for measuring how much ventilation is going on. So that's really, really important is getting outside. What else is about getting outside? Vitamin D. There's ultraviolet radiation. There's a study that came out that showed this is really fascinating, is that there was a connection between how much light somebody got and their COVID 19. It was either infection or mortality. I can't remember what it was. Yeah. And so the thought was that this was vitamin D mediated, but it wasn't. They controlled for vitamin D. There was Another effect above and beyond vitamin D that people were getting from being outside in the sun.

What's that?

We don't know.

Happiness could be joy, peace of mind.

Right.

Less stress.

Exactly. Well, we know that there's something called sad. It's aptly named seasonal affective disorder. This is where people become very depressed in the winter months. Why? There's not a lot of sunlight. And again, it's this idea of the mind, the body and the spirit being connected. And so that leads us to the last one. I don't know. Am I number three or four? Three.

Number four.

Oh, you're going to push it out of me here.

Okay. Yes.

I've got one more that I can definitely think of. I don't know if I can come up with five. It's the spiritual aspect. And this kind of comes from my. It's informed from my upbringing. You mentioned that I lived at Loma Linda, which is a blue zone. What's a blue zone? It's where people live longer. And so this has been this kind of the secret sauce. I think so. So Dan Buettner, who worked with National Geographic, came up with these blue zones. He went to Sardinia, he went to Okinawa, and he went to these places. Why? Because these people live like they've got people in their hundreds, which is very, very unusual. The one thing that Loma Linda. Loma Linda was the other place. The one thing that Loma Linda was different in is that the people in Loma Linda were not of the same genetic genetics.

All different genetics.

All different genetics. So Okinawa, immigrants and this. Yeah, exactly. And in Southern California, of all places, like, where the air. Like. I remember people telling me when they got to Loma Linda in July to start school, they didn't even know there were mountains until December.

Right, right.

Okay. I mean, because it was just this haze of fog, of smog. So the one thing that was really unique to Loma Linda as a blue zone that the others did not have is that it wasn't a genetically homogeneous population. There was Caucasian folks, African American folks, Hispanic folks, and they all sort of. The short of it is basically, yes, there is community. Yes, they do follow a diet, but there's other populations that do that, too. And so the question. What was the real special sauce? Here's the real special sauce. I think that's that last one out of. Out of the group. And that is having a connection and resting, resting, resting. So, you know, we have. We sleep. We talked about how important sleep is. We talked about how important sleep is. Sleep is something that we do every day to recharge ourselves. But is that all that's needed? And I would submit to you that the answer is no. There's something else. When you go through a week, you know, we have a work week of five days, most people rest for two days or they have a break. But the question is, do we ever, do we ever stop what we're doing and relax? And relax and sort of remit ourselves to a higher power? Okay. So there's a lot of literature on faith and the faith literature in terms of believing in a higher power and taking those things that give us stress and giving it over to something else.

Right. Not carrying the weight.

Exactly.

The spiritual or emotional weight.

Exactly.

Interesting.

Now that can cut both ways because some people can get into faith based things where it can cause more stress. So you've got to make sure that that is not the case. But being in a situation like that where you can truly kind of get off the roller coaster, you know, as the rat wheel, as the wheel is spinning, have a chance to get off, recharge, think about other things, spend time with your family, spend time, you know, with your God, whatever it is. These are things that I believe that benefit us. There is some evidence to believe that inside of our bodies. And I'm not prepared to talk about some of the research, but I know there is research that says that not only is there a circadian rhythm, circadian means is Latin for about a day, but there's also a seven day cycle. And it kind of goes. Yeah, it kind of goes back to this thing with these guys walking in the forest. That effect of them walking in the forest lasted about seven days after the fact. Yeah.

So connecting to nature, connecting to something greater, Letting go.

Correct.

Lasting for seven days.

Yeah. And let's look at the French Revolution. In the French Revolution, they wanted to get rid of everything that they had known. And they had a seven day week. And they said, we are not having a seven day week, we're going to go to a ten day week. It didn't last. Right. They couldn't do it.

That makes sense.

It did not. Right. So they went back to the seven day week. We are programmed as individuals to have a seven day week. If you think about it, we know why we have a year. We have a year because it takes a year for the earth to go around the sun. Right. We have a month. Why do we have a month? Because it takes a month for the moon to go around the earth. Right. We have a day. Why do we have a Day. Because it takes one day for the earth to spin around on its axis. We don't have anything for a week. We have no astronomical sign that gives us a week. And yet every single culture in the world is on a seven day week.

Why is that? There you go. Something higher.

Yeah, think about that. Every single culture in the world operates on a seven day week. And there's nothing that guides that. If you were to ask me why that is, it's because I believe the Judeo biblical historical record on why there's a seven day week. It was instituted from the very beginning. But I think it's interesting evidence. And if that is fact the case, then maybe the instruction manual should be followed.

Interesting.

Or maybe, let's put it this way, there's benefits to be derived if the instruction manual is followed. Right? Right.

Speaking of the spiritual aspect, as someone who's been practicing for over 20 years now, can you think of one or two instances in your practice where people have healed themselves that they shouldn't have been able to medically, you're like, this doesn't make any sense.

As soon as you said that, I know exactly who I'm going to talk about.

Go ahead.

Okay, so there's a condition in medicine where if not enough blood is getting to the brain because the brain needs oxygen continuously after about four minutes, there's irreversible brain damage.

You might still survive.

Correct.

But you could have, you know, you just want to be able to function.

Correct.

Memory loss, speech loss, motor function, all that stuff.

Exactly. So there was a young gentleman, this was when I was in training, this must have been in the early 2000s. And he had testicular cancer, unfortunately. But at that age, testicular cancer is pretty curable in most cases with chemotherapy and surgery and that nature. So he went to surgery and there was a problem in surgery. The patient didn't do well. The blood pressure went, he may have coded. I can't remember exactly what it was. But he came back up to the floor, up to the intensive care unit, which is where I was training in the intensive care unit. And, and when we picked him up, he was, you know, we lifted the sedation and he was just not there.

He was dead.

He was, he was, he, he was alive. But he was, but he was not responding to our commands. He was not, he was not acting appropriately. And we could see that there was twitching, maybe even seizures going on. And this was a young Hispanic gentleman who had just been married in his 20s. In his 20s, yeah. And so he was there for the better Part of the month, by the time I got on service.

In that process.

In that process. Correct.

Not responding.

Just there. Yep.

Just on, like on life support. On a violator.

He was on a ventilator.

It was pretty much going brain dead.

Correct. But he wasn't brain dead. He was still alive, technically, but he was just not there.

He didn't move.

Correct.

Was he in a coma?

Essentially, yeah. We would today, at the time, we called it persistent vegetative state.

Wow.

Yeah.

Where there's pretty much no coming out.

Of that, generally speaking. No. And that's exactly what we told the family. And we even had a neurologist come in and the neurologist did some special things with mri. They were able to look at co choline levels in the brain and all this sort of stuff that was hopeful in predicting whether or not these people would get better or not. Now, the one thing that he had going for him was that he was young. Generally speaking, people over his age, they really wouldn't have a chance of coming back. So, yeah, I mean, we would meet in rounds and we'd like, what are we going to tell his wife? His wife, she's there every day. She would come in and she would say, can I put. I made some. Some. We would. We would feed the patients with tube feeding. So there was a tube that went down and it would be like a milkshake, basically, that would go down. She would make. She would blend the stuff up and she would ask, say, can I put this in?

Oh, my gosh.

And she would bring some, you know, energy drinks, or not energy drinks, but healthy things. Yeah. To put it down there to help him.

Wow.

And we would just shake our heads. It's like, what do we get? I mean, she's. She's just. She doesn't get it.

Every day for a month.

Yeah, for at least a month. And so one day she came in and she said to us she was right at his bedside and she wasn't. I wouldn't say that she was a unhappy person, but she was, you know, she obviously understood the situation and she would have tears and things. One day she came in and she said she would look very happy. She had a smile on her face. And we're like, well, why are you so happy? What's going on? And of course he's, you know, kind of shaken like this and doing this sort of stuff. And she said, I had a dream last night. I had a dream that he got up, shut up. That he was going to get better and he was going to Walk out of here. No way. That's what she said. And she was so. She was so sure.

Certain.

Certain that she. Her countenance changed. That's what she looked like. Yeah.

Her energy. She, like, younger. She liked everything.

And we. And. And, okay, so remember, I'm in training. Okay. So I'm looking at the attendings. I haven't seen this kind of stuff before.

It's 20 years ago.

This is 20 years ago. And so I'm looking at this, and they're like, she just doesn't get it. Right.

Because they know this is no coming out of this.

Well. And I'm looking to them because they've been doing this a lot longer than I have. I'm like my first or second year. Right. Yeah. And so we said. Okay. You know, I think at this point, he'd been trached. So the tube normally goes down into the mouth. Now it's through the throat. Yes. Because he's there for long term. Right. So we're working in a circle. The hospital rooms are round in a circle. And in the center is the central nursing station. And this is up on one of the high floors. And this is with the intensive care unit. We're rounding around, so you can kind of, like, be in the center of the circle where you're rounding, and you can kind of look. Look through the door and see the patients in the room. And one day there was a little bit of a change in him, something different. And he would kind of shake like this, doing this kind of a thing. And I could see his eyes were kind of open, but we didn't know if anyone was there. And this had been going on for some time. And we looked through. I remember one day. I remember this distinctly. I was looking through the door, and I saw him there. And I just saw him come through. And I just. I don't know what. What I did, why I did this, but I just kind of put my hand up like this, and I kind of waved. And I'm not kidding you. He put his hand up and did this and put it back down, and I was flabbergasted. Wow. I'll make a long story short. Three months later, he walks into our unit to gives us flowers to thank.

Shut up.

To thank the staff.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

Like healthier. Like, speak fine.

He's walking on his own. Speaking, talking. The whole thing. Wow. With his wife. And I am so glad that that happened early in my career because it changed my thinking. Whenever I was. Whenever I was in a similar situation, wanted to make sure. I realized that that was either a miracle or something very, very rare. Okay. It's one of those two. I believe in miracles, and so I know that these things can happen. We don't. I missed the day in school where they told us how long someone was going to live. Have you ever heard this? The doctor said I was going to live 31 days. I missed that day. I have no idea. I don't know where this comes from. But I am now very cognizant to know that when I have a patient. Patient who's not doing well in the hospital and I'm talking to family and they want to know what are his chances. I've seen miracles happen. Wow. So it's. It's. It's. I'm. I think about those every day. I think about that. That gentleman. Wow. And it was very early in my career. So when you asked me, you can see why when you asked me, that was the one that came to mind.

So you've seen other cases similar since then in the last 20 years, or you've seen other things happen that are like, wow, that usually doesn't happen. And it's amazing that it did.

Yeah. I mean, I've had patient. I had a patient once that he was a young guy and he had bad asthma, really bad asthma. And I don't know if he was smoking or what he did, but he came in and he could not breathe. And when I say he couldn't breathe, we put him on the ventilator. And the thing that happens in asthma is the airways get so small that you can put air into the lungs, but you're waiting for the air to come out. And it can take up to 20 or 30 seconds. This guy, it took about 20 seconds.

Feels like a lifetime.

Yeah. So that means the most we could have him breathe was about three times per minute. Oh, man. And so the carbon dioxide levels were building up in his system. His PH was dropping. We literally. I had to get. I had to get a respiratory therapist to bag him. That's called bagging. When we push air into his lungs through the ventilator tube. We had a helicopter land at this hospital. We got the patient into the helicopter. I got our respiratory therapist to go in the helicopter with him. And that's not easy to do because they have limited fuel and they can only be so many pounds. And this helicopter went all the way down to a hospital down in Los Angeles where they had to put him on a heart lung machine because his lungs just could not breathe. And two Weeks later, when I came back to the hospital, I said, how did that guy do? And they said, oh, he just called us up yesterday. He's having breakfast at his grandma's house.

My goodness.

And to realize how close this guy was to not making it. So, yeah, I've seen some. I had another guy where we. He basically had a heart attack so badly that his blood pressure wasn't even up. We couldn't keep it up. And so I gave him. As a last ditch effort, I gave him a bolus of calcium. Blood pressure came up enough, we were able to get a helicopter in there, get him in there and ship him off to the tertiary center where you could get cardiac bypass. So I didn't know what happened. Two weeks later, I'm in clinic, and where I work in clinic, the pulmonologist and the cardiologist work right next to each other. So I'm in clinic and the cardiologist comes down the hallway and knocks on my door and he says, hey, I got somebody here that I want you to see. Wow. So he takes me down and sure enough, it's the guy in the helicopter. And now he's in clinic. So, yeah, I've seen some amazing. Some amazing things.

Do you think we can heal some of the worst cases of disease and pain with the mind?

I believe that a lot of problems that we have come almost entirely from our mind.

I speak my language. I like this.

Tell me more people. You know, there's a saying, the mind is a powerful thing. It can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven. If you look at survival camps, what I mean by survival camps, concentration camps where people have survived almost exclusively. The people that survive those kind of situations do so because of their thinking. Hope. Hope is a very powerful thing. And so absolutely, the mind is irrevocably connected to the body. If you think that you have a problem, if you think that there's going to be issues, that in and of itself sets up a situation with stress and cortisol where you're going to lead to this problem. We have something in sleep medicine called psychophysiological insomnia. So it's psychophysiological insomnia. Let me explain it. You can't go to sleep, okay, so what do you do? You go into your bedroom and you sit there and you don't sleep. And when you don't sleep, you feel like, oh, my goodness, I'm not sleeping. So now I'm going to be very, very sick. I need to get sleep. So you Wake up the next morning and you do your. And say, tonight, I'm going to get some sleep. I'm going to go to bed earlier to get some sleep. And what happens if you go to bed before it's time to go to bed? You're not going to sleep.

You sit there and you're stressing about it.

Exactly. And so what happens is you get this performance anxiety for sleep. And so the very effect of you not being able to sleep prevents you from going to sleep. Imagine if we were to walk through this school of greatness sign, and on the other side of the sign was a. Was Carnegie hall stage. Okay. And I were to ask you, do you play the piano?

No.

Okay, pretend you were. Or even better, you can't play the piano. And there's a big grand piano sitting on the stage at Carnegie hall, and the place is packed.

Yes.

Okay, go ahead and play a piece on the piano. There's no way that's gonna happen. That's performance anxiety. Now imagine if instead of a piano, I put a bed, and I tell you, go into that bed and sleep. There's no way. And for some people with insomnia, and, you know, I'll have to say that we talked about at the beginning about make sure you get enough sleep. There's some people out there that are watching this to say, I would love to get sleep, and I can't do it. And this is part of the reason. And trying to figure out how to get people to sleep when they have insomnia is like trying to peel an onion. It's very complicated, and you've got to sort of dig down to it. But here's the. Here's a classical story of what I see with psychophysiological insomnia. And it has to do with the brain. And to unravel it, you have to do cognitive behavioral therapy. But to do it is you have the situation where they want to sleep, but because they can't sleep, they have anxiety. So they're out in the kitchen, they're out in the living room, and they feel tired, and they say, okay, it's time to go to sleep. Great, I'm gonna go to sleep. And they walk into the bedroom, that one room in the house where they are battling their demons on a nightly basis and all of the subconscious stuff that comes with it. And then what happens? They're like, oh, performance anxiety. I can't go to sleep. And so they walk into the bedroom, and now they're not sleepy. Now they can't sleep. And this Is the problem that we have to battle. When I see people in my sleep clinic to try to get them to sleep. So I do ICU work, I do pulmonary work and I do sleep work. And I see it. It's all connected.

Right, but you believe that the mind can heal the body as well? There are things that the mind can do to support.

Oh, yeah. I mean, well, this is a perfect example of that. Because the treatment for insomnia, more than medications. It's been proven, scientifically proven. Medications don't substantially sustainably treat insomnia. You know what does? Cognitive behavioral therapy. That is completely a treatment of the mind.

It is absolutely. There you go.

Addictive behavior, cognitive behavioral therapy. This is really where the real money is in terms of treating these kind of conditions. Absolutely, yes.

I love this. Dr. Shult, you're amazing. Is there anything else that you would like to add before we wrap things up?

Yeah, this has been a far reaching discussion. There's a lot of things that we could talk more about, but I think we talked about enough. Sometimes people can get information overload and they might have to watch this video again. But if they are interested, there's our first interview that we did so they can watch that as well.

It's almost 2 million views right now, so people are loving that one.

And of course, there's the medcram channel as well.

And what do you guys teach on MedCram? What's the main subjects you guys cover?

So before the COVID pandemic, we were geared toward healthcare professionals and trying to teach them things that are difficult to understand in an easy way so that they could understand it. Since the pandemic, we've done a lot of our YouTube videos, have been on.

The pandemic, trying to teach the population.

Correct. Exactly.

How to understand these things.

Exactly. So we've kind of pivoted there. But if you go to our website, medcram.com, it's primarily for healthcare professionals. If you ever wanted to learn how to read an ekg, that would be a place to go. If you ever want to know what a chest X ray shows you and what you can interpret from that, that would be a place to go. You know, there's some interesting devices you can buy now. You can put it into your wallet, pull it out. You can actually see what your EKG is.

Really?

Yeah. For like, for 100 bucks, you can buy it.

Used to hold your kind of like at the gym where you hold it.

Yeah, exactly. And you can see your thing. So, you know, if you Ever wanted to know what that shows? You can come over and read. There's even devices now that you can get for your phone that tells you how you sleep, what your pulse rate is.

Right.

So if you want to understand a little bit more about that stuff, you can all@medcram.com yes.

And then you're on. Are you on social media as well?

Yeah. So we're on Twitter, both me personally and also Medcram is on Twitter. We're also on Instagram as well.

What's your personal.

Just Roger Schweltz. Okay, Maryland.

Yeah, Maryland. Okay, cool. And the last interview we did, we talked about your three truths and your definition of greatness. So I'm going to have people go back and there we'll link it up below so they can see what your three truths and your definition of greatness is. Other than that, Roger, I appreciate and acknowledge you for constantly doing the research, for constantly diving in on this, for giving us the information on all sides, for being a spiritual practitioner as well. I really appreciate your approach spiritually towards hope, towards the mindset type of things, which maybe next time we can go into mindset as medicine and how to approach your life with a mindful, you know, with the mind and all the different things you can do with the mind to heal yourself. I think that'd be interesting from a doctor's point of view. What you can do, what you've done personally, what you prescribe to people when there seems like there's no hope medically. So if people want to hear that conversation, leave a comment below if you want to hear that. And I really appreciate all you do. Thank you so much for being here. The vast majority probably shouldn't embark on.

A prolonged fast, three or four day.

Fast, because we store heavy metals, we store pesticides, we store herbicides in our.

Fat to protect us from.