Dr. Anderson explains long COVID as a body-wide fatiguing illness and identifies overlooked causes that slow recovery: hormonal dysfunction, mold and chemical exposures, reactivated infections like Epstein-Barr and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, and mitochondrial damage. He emphasizes thorough testing and finding a practitioner willing to act on results.
One of the problems that we see with not all, but some specialty clinics is they may even run the tests, but they'll find positives. They'll say, well, that's normal for people. It's not normal if you're sick and not getting better to have those things be positive. Welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. A. I've been researching and teaching in the integrative and naturopathic communities for 30+ years now. Been seeing patients a long time in the chronic illness space, and I use this channel to answer questions about those topics. Long COVID recovery and And why is it taking so long? It seems like a glacier trying to heal. Well, there's a number of reasons, but the first thing is, is that long COVID is a constellation of signs and symptoms that are different amongst different people. But what is in common with them is they have COVID in the background, and at some point after they recovered from the acute COVID infection, they wound up with something in the neighborhood of a chronically fatiguing illness. Possibly brain fog, possibly chronic pain that comes up, possibly organ dysfunction, possibly endocrine dysfunction, and on and on. There's many different lists that you can look up about long COVID, but it's basically a body-wide fatiguing illness. So one of the biggest reasons why people have a long protracted recovery from long COVID is the parts that sometimes now not always but sometimes. These other parts that we call comorbidities are not looked at. And so what I want to do in this brief video is tell you what those comorbidities are. These are very worth looking at in regard to testing. And then as another commenter brought up last week on one of the videos, it's not just about testing. Someone commented, they say, oh yeah, test, test, test, and then don't do anything for me. I'm sorry that that happens some places in medicine, but that's not what we do. So what you need to do is you need to get these things assessed and tested, and then And you need to find a practitioner who's actually going to do something about them so that it will help speed up the recovery process. And these don't go in any particular order, but the first thing is your endocrine system. The most common areas we see in long COVID patients, endocrine is hormonal. Those can be things such as thyroid deficiency or resistance. So that needs to be tested for. Again, we have longer form content on that. You can get derangements in your reproductive hormones, male or female, that can be Decrease in testosterone, men or women, increase in estrogen, which can create problems in males or females, and any number of other things that go on there. So checking the endocrine system is critically important because if your thyroid has become resistant or slowed down and it wasn't a problem before COVID sometimes they won't check it when you have long COVID. But if your thyroid slowed down because you have long COVID, you have to treat that to help you pull out of the problem. The next would be toxic influences. I've seen people become very sensitive to mold mycotoxins in the environment that weren't sensitive before they had COVID. I've seen people who have exposures, ongoing exposures to metals or chemicals. All of these things can be assessed. Are the tests perfect? No, they're not perfect, but it should be something if your case is not getting better that you maybe find somebody who does environmental medicine to look into toxicities. And again, it can be environmental things like mold mycotoxins, other biotoxin illness, chemicals, or metals that go on. And you weren't sensitive before COVID but now you are after. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and you have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. We'll see you over there. Thanks. The next area would be infectious slash autoimmune, 2 areas of the immune system. So in the autoimmune area, we know by research now that people during and after COVID infection have developed positive antinuclear antibodies that indicate autoimmunity, positive thyroid antibodies, positive other autoantibodies. The bottom line there is maybe you didn't have it before and it was never tested, but you have long COVID, you're not getting better. This is something that should be looked at. What we do in people, regardless of their history, they didn't have them, did have them, whatever, we will screen the autoimmune markers, generally the ANA family, which you, if it's positive, they can do the other tests. Rheumatic autoimmune families, the thyroid autoimmune families, and just look at them broadly. Very, very critical because if you have now a comorbid autoimmunity that you didn't used to have, that can be another explanation for why you're not getting better. The other infectious end of the immune system, and we know now lots of people, so almost 100% of your humanity by the age of 20 is exposed to chronic viral things like Epstein-Barr and other stuff. What we see in the research is that COVID has a way of unmasking these And reactivating them. So again, if you're fatigued, you got headaches, you got other stuff like that, and nobody has checked for chronic Epstein-Barr infection, the other things that we check for are other chronic infections. Mycoplasma pneumoniae is very common. Chlamydia pneumoniae—that's the one for the lungs, not the other one—and then we generally also will run an anti-streptolysin antibody ASO to see if there's any reactivity to chronic strep going on. You can test for a whole bunch of other stuff, but those are your basics. Now, if you had a chronic infection before, like Lyme. Or Lyme coinfections, and now you have long COVID, please make sure you check back up on those that you had before. Then the final one, which is a little harder to assess, are mitochondrial dysfunctions. And you can kind of assume anybody with a fatiguing, non-healing illness has mitochondrial dysfunction. And the bottom line with that, there are some kind of expensive, high-tech sort of tests you can do, which are great, and that's fine to do. But generally speaking, everybody with a non-healing illness needs mitochondrial support. And I'm not going to go into what those things are, because we have tons of content on supporting the mitochondria and hyperbaric and red light therapy and nutrients that support it. So just go look at that other content. But that's another big area. So the first thing, if things aren't getting better, is think about the undiagnosed comorbidities. And as I said, the biggest thing that happens is people go into a clinic and they'll say, well, you didn't have any thyroid or autoimmune problems before, so we're not going to check that, or we'll do just rudimentary testing. Well, now you do. If you don't test, you don't know. So make that you get these areas tested if you're not getting better, and then find a practitioner who's going to do something about the testing. One of the problems that we see with not all, but some specialty clinics is they may even run the tests, but they'll find positives. They'll say, well, that's normal for people. It's not normal if you're sick and not getting better to have those things be positive. All right. I'm very sorry, by the way, to the people who sent in this same question. It was a big group of people who have long COVID and they're being treated, but they're just not getting better very fast. Sorry that's happening. Hopefully is pointing you in the direction of the places to look, and like I said, we'll link to a bunch of other videos and just go on the main YouTube channel and look at long COVID longer form content. We can get into it. Thank you all you subscribers. If you're not subscribed, please do subscribe and do notifications. We will see you all in the next video.
