An unconventional approach to long-covid.. (Nervous System edition)

And again, this doesn't usually come back like boom, like immediately, but it helps to retrain the senses. And if you put together what we're doing to kind of heal up the nervous system and the inflammation with this retraining of the sensory apparatus for smell, olfaction, then those 2 things can collide together to help to undo some of the damage. What happens when the nervous system is inflamed or damaged with Long COVID, and what can we do about it? One of the most frustrating areas for people who are dealing with Long COVID or post-COVID syndrome can be that their nervous system has various signs and symptoms and dysfunctions, et cetera, that they maybe either didn't have before they had COVID or are worse than when, uh, You know, prior to having COVID. It reminds me of a particular patient where we had a patient who was 45 years old, and she was dealing a number of months out from COVID with a lingering kind of a cognitive issue. We call it brain fog. It's how she referred to it. She had a very disordered sense of smell, so she could smell, but everything smelled funny or odd or sometimes very unpleasant. She was having headaches that were really unrelenting for her and a few other symptoms as well. So this particular patient had been into her primary care clinic where she gets her regular healthcare, and they had checked her out for, you know, the big bad problems that can go along, uh, you know, all of the dangerous diagnoses as we've talked about earlier in this series. And really there was Nothing found as far as anything dangerous, and there was also really no prescription or no advice given. So the patient was you know unhappy with that outcome. As we said earlier, remember this is a sixteen-part series on long COVID. One of the parts that we did was let's be safe first. So first do no harm and make sure you know that these things are not coming from a clotting problem or some other you know gross inflammatory problem or triggering of maybe an autoimmune condition. Et cetera. And so all of that was done and that was really great, but the patient still was not getting any guidance on what to do next. What we did in intervening and looking over the case, et cetera, I said, okay, well, none of the bad things are happening, so that's wonderful, but you still have these symptoms. You have the brain fog going on, you've got chronic headaches, your sense of smell is not— correct at all, and it's certainly not like it was before you had COVID. So what can we do about that, and where's that likely coming from? Well, the place that we were assuming it was coming from turned out to be correct. Now, we're not always correct, but when you have this collage of signs and symptoms and they're all related to nervous system neurological function, a lot of times in the post-COVID setting, you wind up with an inflammatory Neurological condition that again is is not at the level of having a diagnostic name, but it's also above the level of normal function. Our goal with this particular person was to calm down the inflammation in the brain, to work on retraining her sense of smell, and then we added some other therapies as we went along. Now, this particular patient had some direct targets for their nervous system that we wanted to work on, and they were a number of months out, somewhere between 6 and 9 months out away from COVID so they'd had these for a long time. So the first thing is when you have neurological inflammation, one of the things that's been brought out again and again in the neurological papers that have been published on this is that you have sort of 2 colliding problems. One is that you have an injury to the nervous system that's very similar to a traumatic brain injury, like you hit your head, only you didn't hit your head, you had an infection. The other problem that goes along with that is the protective membranes around the brain get what we would call leaky. They, they're not appropriately managing what goes in and out of the central nervous system, and so the first target really had to be the inflammation in the brain, which is very important. So, What we did there was to start a couple of therapies initially to work on this brain inflammation. Now, the first one, which in a separate one of these 16 segments, we're going to talk about supplements and herbs and other things that we've used with people when they didn't really need the level of, you know, a prescription medication. And that is a supplement that's a combination of neurologically specific and helpful supplements all in one, you know, nice little package. So you have, you take one thing and it kind of covers 6 different areas. I'll break that down in the supplement discussion, but it's a neurological formula that was originally made for people with traumatic brain injuries and that sort of thing called Cover-3. We'll put a link to it. I have no connection to it other than I use it with patients. The next thing that we did was another additive that we're going to talk about in the supplement section, and that was coenzyme Q10, which is very useful in helping the, uh, the cells operate, help their energy come back online. It's, it's used sometimes in other cognitive, uh, you know, brain and neurological types of settings. And then in this particular patient's case, also there was a prescription-oriented treatment that we did, which we use with a lot of our neurologically inflamed brain-injured patients. And the category is called neurosteroids. Now you might hear that and think of like anabolic steroids, you know, like androgens, testosterone, that sort of thing. Or you might think of like, you know, corticosteroids like prednisone, and it's none of those things. Neurosteroids are a particular category of steroid hormone that has crossover in the peripheral body for the reproductive system, but in the brain they're used to help heal up inflammation, help with the regeneration and kind of putting things back together. And these tend to be high-order steroids. Now there's others, but the ones that we use therapeutically are progesterone and pregnenolone. These are very high up in the production chain of steroid hormones. So they're not being used in this case for reproductive purposes, they're being used to help heal the brain up. So that was put in with the Cover-3 supplement and the CoQ10. The other thing that this patient wanted to do, and we had available, was a— it looks like a bicycle helmet. It's a red light therapy, infrared therapy, that comes in an array that you can put on your head, and it's often used in the United States by dermatologists and a few other specialists for photodynamic therapy. Again, we're gonna have a whole section on photodynamic therapy, but this person was able to Obtain one of these units, these infrared helmet units, and they added that to their protocol. And then the other thing that they were able to do is to use a home sauna. They already had a sauna at home, and they had heard maybe heat would help. Now we're going to do a whole section on heat as well, but that was their combination. There were some supplemental things. There was the neuro steroid type approach, and then there were the infrared photodynamic therapy and the. Those things together started to help. One thing you have to keep in mind, if you've injured sensory apparatus like taste or smell, or you have this brain inflammation giving you brain fog and headaches, etc., these things don't heal immediately. And in this case, you're going out 6 to 9 months. You've got 6 to 9 months worth to unravel of damage and dysfunction. So the thing to keep in mind there is that this took some time and the patient knew it was gonna take some time, but we had to kinda follow up fairly regularly, make sure everything was working well. But essentially the trajectory of their healing was that the first 3 or 4 weeks were a little bit slow and they sort of felt like, oh, maybe I feel different, maybe I don't, but that's really not terribly different. Now I do wanna make mention that this was all done in the setting of also some of the basic things. So making sure they were getting enough sleep, Sleep at night, making sure they were moving their body to get their blood moving every day, making sure that their diet was not inflammatory or triggering a lot of insulin release, etc. So specifically, I get asked a lot about how do you retrain your senses if your smell or your taste has kind of you know gone off the rails. And in this case, what usually happens is you get an odd sense of smell, and it can be very unpleasant because you're not used to smelling things that way. Well, there's a lot of research around this with. Uh, smell sense retraining. And so that involves just a couple of things. One of them is going to be looking at lowering the inflammation and the blood-brain barrier damage that's gone on. The next thing is going to be some direct smell sense retraining, and then the more that you do to heal the rest of the person, the faster the smell sense comes back. Same can be done with taste. You do need to keep Keep in mind though, this can take some time. So if you've got 6 months worth of damage, the nerves don't just jump right back in immediately. So in this person's case, we did a particular protocol there. There's a number of them published in the ear, nose, and throat and neurological data that's out there on COVID and long COVID even now. But basically you use some pretty recognizable oils that have an essential oil type smell. And you can get these really almost anywhere that you can. A lot of times they'll use them in cooking or other things, and you're not really taking them, you're smelling them. So the way that it's done is that you get something, and you don't want something that's, you know, obnoxious, so you wouldn't use like ammonia or something. What you want to do is use something like a cinnamon stick. Citrus, you know, orange oil or lemon oil. So you, you tie your cognitive sense of this is lemon smell, for example, or orange, with smelling it and sort of retraining. Cinnamon is also used. Lavender is used. You can use any of these that are sort of very identifiable. And again, this doesn't usually come back like boom, like immediately, but it helps to retrain the senses. And if you put together what we're doing to kind of heal up the nervous system and the inflammation with this retraining of the sensory apparatus for smell, olfaction, then those 2 things can collide together to help to undo some of the damage. Now, the sense of smell started to improve again around a month into treatment, but it took a number of months to really come back and, uh, and be completely normal again, so to speak. So you start getting sensory apparatus working again, and sometimes things still smell funny, but you're smelling more things, and that was very useful for the patient. Now, keep in mind that all of this and the healing timelines are very dependent on how long you've had the problem, how inflammatory and how bad things were, and if there were any other parts of your body that were really a problem. So in summary, if you have neurological inflammation, neurological signs and symptoms, even fatigue, brain fog, chronic headaches, et cetera, most of those things, if you've ruled out all the big, you know, bad diagnostic problems and they're not there, most of those things come from inflammatory activity that's left over after the infection, very common in lots of infections, and it can be undone. The sooner the better, but even like this person, six to nine months later, there's still hope in getting these things working again. So today, that's what we went through. Now, first off, keep in mind that this podcast is for information only and/or your entertainment. You should get your healthcare advice from your healthcare provider. If you get any good ideas from any podcast, please run them by a healthcare provider. Don't take your advice from people on the radio or YouTube, and also. Please do like, share, and subscribe on whatever platform. Check us out on dranow.com, D-R-A-N-O-W dot com. There's a hub website you can take us take you to the YouTube channel, and we're growing that community. And so please consider like, share, subscribe, and do notifications because sometimes we're not always really big in the in the algorithm over at YouTube. Sometimes we are. dranow.com. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine and Health, and I will see you on the next installment.