3 Lesser Known Herbs For Long-Covid

Licorice actually started to be studied in COVID as a potential agent to help with the symptoms of COVID And indeed it also helps in this post-COVID kind of a functional low cortisol state. Helpful herbs in long COVID, botanical medicine. Can it work? Can it help? Well, we wanna talk about just a couple of botanical medicines. There are literally hundreds that are possible to use. And in this 16-part long COVID series, we want to really focus down on things that we see being used and working quite a bit as we go forward. So I want to talk about some of the most commonly used herbs or botanicals and why we might employ them. Again, there's no slam on the other 1,000 herbs that you can use. These are just common ones that come up a lot. So those 3 top herbs we want to talk about today are going to be Licorice root, ashwagandha, and then milk thistle. Now, why would we pick these in looking at a long COVID case? Well, we have patient story, as we usually try and start with, of a 45-year-old patient who had been worked up and they had, you know, no lab abnormalities. They had no pathologies that were discovered. There was a little bit of a functional low cortisol, but they didn't have Addison's disease. where you don't make much or any cortisol. They just had a functional low level, which is very common in long COVID. And the symptoms that they were getting included headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, and they really wanted to use herbal medicine. They were really attracted to that. They'd used it before, and they felt like that would be a worthwhile use of their time and interventions. So why did I pick these 3 of the, you know, hundreds that we possibly could use? And again, this is not a slam on all the other ones, it's just these are ones that keep coming up. So let's talk about it. The first one we mentioned was licorice root. Now, licorice root, first off, you do need to be careful with licorice because licorice can have an effect to raise your blood pressure. So again, as we always say, this is not medical advice. It's just me telling you what we're seeing. And if you're gonna use an herbal or botanical medicine, work with a practitioner that knows about those things. If you have any blood pressure problems, licorice, you need to work with somebody around that. But that being said, licorice actually started to be studied in COVID as a potential agent to help with the symptoms of COVID And indeed, it also helps in this post-COVID kind of a functional low cortisol state. So So licorice can help your body to maximize the cortisol that it has available. And it's very common in long COVID to see people's cortisol levels be lower than they should be. Now they can be higher, which is why you want to check. In this case, this particular person, it was lower than they really wanted it to be. So licorice can be used. Normally we give it in the morning and we give it along often with, you know, their breakfast and usually with some nutrients to be Such as B vitamins and things we talked about in the vitamin section of our little 16-part long COVID session here. But providing you're working with somebody and you're monitoring so that your blood pressure isn't going up, and again that doesn't happen to everybody, but if you're one of those people it happens to, you need to know about that and you'd be monitoring for it. It can be the use of licorice as a Herbal medicine. So we're not talking about like black licorice that you buy at the store or something. This is an actual herbal product. We've used that quite a bit with people when the overall cortisol is just sort of flagging behind. Now, cortisol is sort of made to return back to normal if you help the body out. So in the setting of using herbal medications, you always want to remember that we're doing everything we can to have a good low-inflammatory, low-insulin-stimulating diet. We're getting appropriate sleep. So we have good sleep-wake cycle that we're building on. We're getting a little movement exercise, et cetera. So those things are very, very important. So the herbal medicines then are supportive along the way. Now, the next one I mentioned is an Ayurvedic herb called ashwagandha. And this one we use a lot to help the overall adrenal cortical system and to help related parts of the system kind of come back online. Again, you get a stressor like COVID, you don't thankfully develop any of the big bad diseases that go along with it, but you kind of come out the other side, you've got some fatigue, some muscle pain, headache, and stuff like that. A lot of that can just be the shock to your endocrine system, and the adrenal cortical system is really one of the big ones. So ashwagandha is one of those where there's certainly, there are people who just don't tolerate it. And we always warn people to try that, but I would say in seeing a lot of patients take ashwagandha, it's maybe 1 out of 100 people who have any tolerance issues with ashwagandha. But its job is to kind of where licorice is a little more specific in trying to bring the cortisol, you know, get that working again, make that system feel better. Ashwagandha, you can think of it kind of covering the other bases. Now ashwagandha one of those that can either wake you up or make you sleepy. So what I always tell people to do, especially if they're fatigued already, is to try it in the morning when they take their licorice, or maybe at lunch, so earlier in the day. But if they feel real tired after they take it, just move it to bedtime. Because for some people, ashwagandha will make them tired, and that's fine. It helps them with their nighttime side of the sleep cycle. But for many people, it actually makes them feel a little more energy during the Now, the third one that I mentioned is milk thistle, also known as silymarin. And why would milk thistle come up so much? Well, milk thistle comes up a lot because it does a number of things. It's known as a detoxifying support in the body, which it is. But one of the main ways that milk thistle works is by helping your liver to not only detoxify, especially in phase 2, but also to increase your natural glutathione stores. So in the nutrient section, Again, this is a 16-part podcast series. So the nutrient section, we talked a lot about the very, very important role that glutathione plays in healing from anything, but especially in long COVID. So if an herb, if a botanical medicine like milk thistle can help bring back glutathione stores, it not only helps the detox part, but it also helps the rest of the body with the redox status, with the antioxidant status. Yeah. status, which again, remember, is a balance. You don't want no oxidation and you don't want all oxidation. You want to keep it balanced. Glutathione is very important in keeping that going. Now, as I said, there's probably, you know, hundreds of other herbs that we would use and we do use with people. There are many great things like Ayurvedic combinations, Chinese medicine combinations, Western herbs as we call them, etc. Or you might be in a part of the world that has its own herbal tradition. All of those are great. It's just that these, because they support the areas that take the biggest hit during COVID and then are dysfunctional in long COVID, that being the adrenal system, which is there to help you recover and help you keep your immune system level and do all sorts of other things. And then glutathione, the antioxidant part, and then the phase 2 detoxification part, all very critically important. Now there's one bonus that we use and it's sort of, it's got some herbal components, it's a mixed product, and some nutrient components, so it sort of straddles over. We talked about it in the neuro repair section as well, but I want to put it in here because it's got 6 critical ingredients all in one supplement. Now, I have no financial connection to this, I just use it with patients and we've used it for a number of years for other things and we found with our COVID patients it's really useful. So it's really nice if you can have a lot of things all in one product, and that product is called Cover-3 Neurological Support. It was developed by a doctor who used to be a college football player and had a lot of crossover with traumatic brain injury patients and trying to heal them up. And what we found, we were using it on traumatic brain injury patients, and they indeed— there's a crossover in the neurological research between traumatic brain injury and post- COVID brain essentially. So this has, like I said, mixture of nutrients and herbs. There's vitamin C, which is another antioxidant. There's something from plants called trans-resveratrol, which is a neuroprotective substance. There are omega-3 oils, which again are protective and generally anti-inflammatory. They help with the rebuilding of cells. There's choline, which helps you with cognition and memory. Uridine, which is used by your neurons in Repair, and then a very common herb, curcumin. So this one supplement we use, because it's all in one place— if you were to go and you source all these 6 things, they would cost about the same as the one supplement does, but you only have one thing to take. It's kind of nice because they have a child's version, they have an adult version, and then they have a brain trauma version, which is just a higher dose. They're all the same. Mixture of things. Again, no financial connection. I've just seen this be one of the most potent single things that you can put in. So if you're doing the 3 big herbs we talked about between the ashwagandha and the licorice, help out the adrenal system and the overall hormonal system, you've got the silymarin, the milk thistle to help you out with glutathione function, et cetera. This is a really good add-on to kind of round out the other cellular support. Now, in this particular case with this person, they really wanted to do botanicals, so herbal medicines, and we always, if it's appropriate, we try and match the person and their desires for treatment together. Now, if this would not have progressed, it took a few months and they started to feel better progressively over time, so this is not, you know, microwave healing, it takes time. If it had not been helping as much, we would either go back and look at some other labs to be confirmatory, And/or maybe just try some increasing amounts of other supportive things. In this person's case, we might've added some more of the nutrients. You can go to the top nutrients section that I did. Again, we got 16 sections, so there's plenty to listen to there. We may have done other therapies as well, but in this case, this person's body really resonated with the herbal approach. And so those big 3 herbs being licorice, ashwagandha, and milk thistle, and then the combination product of COVID 3 were key in Really critical in this person's healing, and they're stable now. They're not on all these things; they're just on some maintenance nutrients, and they're doing good job with their you know diet, lifestyle, sleep, all of that, and getting better and staying better. Dr. Paul Anderson with Medicine Health. I'd like you to like, share, and subscribe on whatever platform you like, whether it's a pod burner or YouTube, etc. If you haven't checked out our YouTube, go over to YouTube. If you can't find it, just go to my hub website, Dr. A now dot com. dranow.com, and we've got links to all of it there. You can also just search Dr. A online on YouTube and usually find us. We also will put some links of interest down in the description below on YouTube, and we usually get them over into the Podburners. And then also, I would just like you to remember that this is me sharing information about our patients. You should not try and take our experience with patients and what we did as medical advice and try and put it on to your case, you should work with a healthcare provider that can help you to navigate these things. So don't take medical advice from people on the internet, whether it's radio, TV, or whatever it is that they're doing. Do like, share, subscribe, and do notifications because sometimes we're not so great on the algorithm, especially when we're talking about COVID All right, I will see you all in the next section.