Dr. Paul Anderson describes his severe Omicron infection, which progressed from mild respiratory symptoms to fever, neuropathic pain, and fatigue, then worsened with secondary infections including Mycoplasma pneumoniae and Aspergillus. He started aggressive treatment on day 2 with doxycycline, ivermectin, hyperbaric oxygen, and high-dose supplements, continuing for weeks to prevent long COVID.
Chapters
Welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. This is a show about opening up the often mysterious world of how doctors think. The goal, to empower the listener to gain access to the best healthcare possible. Good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me. I'm Dr. Paul. And today's topic is what happens when the doctor gets COVID? How does that turn out? So this is a story today that's— it's a true story and it's about me. And so you might have, for those few of you who probably listen live every time, you would have noticed that we did a couple of reruns for a couple of weeks. And of the reason was that I was dealing with COVID and more of COVID as a complex illness, which I will get into in a moment. And then also the second week, I felt better, but I was kind of resting my voice because one of the things that we keep talking about around Omicron is that it's more of an upper respiratory illness, which certainly is what I experienced. And some of the other things I had going on were also more upper respiratory. So if I would talk, I would get about 15 minutes in and I'd start to lose my voice. And I thought, well, on, you know, a live radio feed, that's not a way to go. Um, I do have a little club soda here I'll be hitting on just to kind of keep everything moist. But, uh, yeah. Let's let's get into it. And so one of the you know questions that might come up in your mind is why in the world you know would we discuss this? Is is this you know me being you know a narcissist wanting to talk about myself? And really no, I almost didn't do this. And the reason that I did do it was a it's fairly fresh in my mind. I've been recovered for a bit, but it's. Not that long ago, uh, I find that people are intensely curious about what, uh, the, you know, really what it's like, you know, from the inside, uh, view. Although we do have to keep in mind that, um, you know, everybody has a different experience with this. So I thought, well, I have a firsthand experience and I'll share my firsthand experience. And, uh, and a lot of other people around the world are having their own firsthand experience. We have a lot of reports, and I have feedback from patients and all of that. So I thought this might just add to the depth and the flavor of, you know, what, what's it like now to get, uh, COVID and deal with it. The other thing that I thought was important as far as sharing this story, uh, simply beyond the curiosity nature and just sort of the well, what was it like to be sick and all of that? Is I think that my experience is certainly not unique. But as all things, you know, if you look at 100 events that are similar or the same, or 1,000 events, and let's say in this case, COVID positive, you know, generally speaking, not always, but generally speaking, you can distribute the, the experiences of those events across the bell curve, which is basically, uh, like an upside-down U. And so on one end it's kind of narrow, and then it goes up real high in the middle, comes down to the other side, and it's narrow again. And so there's a place in the middle, and then there's a certain amount of number distance on each side, and that's kind of the majority of the bell curve. And then you start to get to the other ends, and the further you get to the other ends, you call them outliers. Well, my experience is probably on the way to being an outlier. I don't think it's a total outlier, but as I describe it, what I want to do is I want to go through actually the— because I, you know, I felt like I would be asked, so I kind of kept track every day of how's it going, you know, how do I feel, all of this stuff. And I think In retrospect, it wound up illustrating a number of things about, you know, somebody who maybe got a little bit worse end of the spectrum with COVID So if we are looking at that Omicron COVID— now we could have done this with Delta or anything else, but I didn't get Delta. So with this particular, we're looking at Omicron and say we've got 1,000 or 100,000 cases. On the left-hand side where it's kind of narrow and thin, there are actually people now who have almost no symptoms and they test positive. Maybe they had some sniffles, maybe they had a little bit of a cough and it was gone in a couple of days. So that's sort of probably, you know, a smaller amount, basically asymptomatic folks. We've known about those. But, and then as you get bigger and you get into the middle, what we see more, and this is what myself and most other people talking about Omicron and the data around the world with Omicron, most of what we see in that big middle part of the bell curve is what we're seeing, an upper respiratory illness more than lower respiratory. So ear, nose, and throat, and a little upper chest, but not going into the lungs and causing a consolidated pneumonia or something like that. Thank God, that's great. People reporting fatigue kind of universally. Some people get headaches, some people don't. Cough kind of universally, although not always. Um, and then the other sort of more standard kind of cold-like symptoms. And then we're seeing those people with those symptoms, you know, sick anywhere from 3 days to, you know, maybe a week, week and a half. And as we go over to the right side, as it tapers off in numbers, we start to get to the lower quantity of folks. And that's the group I was in, and it's a group that just gets sicker. Okay, so we may have all of those other symptoms, but we may develop something unique or something unfortunate and unusual. So in a very thankfully rare number, but still still a real number of people. I have seen patients even with Omicron who have gotten very, very ill, and then they developed a lower respiratory infection, and the hospital was unable to get that under control, and then they developed a more severe situation, unfortunately, even with all the hospital intervention, then they wound up on a ventilator, and then they died. Now, any death is too many, as we always say, but also a realistic part of medicine is with anything, you know, it could be influenza and people die. So there are, you know, people do die. It's terribly sad. Now, as I say, you know, thankfully that is an extremely tiny number for Omicron, but if it's you, a tiny number is still you. So we want to be, you know, respectful of that, even though the numbers are very small. It— we don't want to disrespect anybody who's on the other end of the bell curve. So having been dealing with, you know, a lot of COVID patients over the last 2 years now, basically, I've seen this bell curve kind of flesh itself out through the various, you know, the initial virus and Alpha, and you know, and some of the other variations, and Delta, now Omicron. And I've been reporting on you know the statistics of Omicron. And what have we been saying about Omicron? Everyone, you know, the all the data scientists are saying it's circling the world. Everybody will be exposed. They were assuming everyone in the U.S. would be exposed by this week or next week, and it. kind of is looking that way. One of the upsides of that is if everybody has been exposed, let's just say for the sake of statistical argument, let's say that magically the, the last day of January everybody in the U.S. had been exposed. Um, what we are certainly seeing is, is a precipitous increase in cases, but remember, cases don't always equal hospitalization or death or any of the other bad things. So of course, something that's more transmissible like Omicron, you have more cases than you've ever seen, but you're also gonna have a lot more people on that left side of the bell curve where it's very mild symptomatology or kind of like a bad cold. The upside of this, and we're going to talk about statistics around durable immunity secondary to infection, So natural immunity. Um, the upside of this that everyone was saying, all the immunologists, was, well, um, not all the immunologists. As I usually say, the higher up you are in a government structure, uh, the, the more you soft-soap this. But, uh, now the research is coming out, so they kind of have to. But most immunologists that are just being good old immunologists are saying, you know, Omicron is an opportunity to bolster the herd immunity because you can't run away from it. Now, I do have friends and colleagues who are basically isolationists, and that is the way that they're dealing with it. Most of them do tend to live alone, and most of them have telecommuting, you know, working online. And so I guess if you can pull that off, that's pretty good. You know, they're they're basically, you know, not going around other people and isolating and, you know, sterilizing their food and all this other stuff. So you can try, but there's also a lot of cases around the world of people pretty well isolated who do develop Omicron. And the theories are it's maybe a bit more airborne, easier, just easier to get. So if you, if you're trying to isolate, great. know, whatever you want to do. But what we're seeing is, if you think of now versus back during Delta, I bet you've probably— you probably know personally more people who have gotten sick with a cold or flu-like illness that probably turned out to be Omicron, uh, than you heard of during Delta. And that's the statistical reality in, uh, well, around the world, but we're North America, we're up to it now. So, um, so I guess in a sense it was a, you know, it was a great time to get it. Uh, and also, as I normally do, uh, with illnesses, I don't tend to get, uh, the simple version of anything. I, uh, I tend to be fairly resilient, but I sort of have this, uh, like cliff that my immune system falls off of, I guess. And, uh, so it's really good at resist, resist, resist, and I've believe that's probably because I've been around so many sick people as a doctor. And also, uh, for work, I travel a lot, so I'm exposed to a lot of airplane air and hotel air and people I've never met before and all that. So I think I have a pretty good front wall of resistance. But usually then, once, uh, you know, once we find something that's maybe new and novel, or, um, you know, like Omicron, uh, or transmits really easily, like, let's say, Omicron, or you get the perfect storm of, um, you know, my, uh, my life stress in the last, uh, you know, 6 weeks. Uh, you know, we had a death in the family. Uh, my father died, and I was actually caring for my father, so it was very stressful. Um, he, he lived a full life. He was almost 95. He did great. Uh, he just needed some help at the end, and, and so that was fine. But, you know, it is stressful to lose a parent, even when they're almost 100. And I was also dealing with a lot of new COVID cases in a lot of my consulting practice, COVID patients in the hospital, which is always tough. And then, then people treating at home and, you know, the whole thing. And basically, you know, got a bit more run down. And a bit more stressed out with all that stuff going on. So, uh, it was an opportune time for, you know, so I was somewhere where Omicron was, which is everywhere pretty much right now, and I got it. So I want to talk about, um, what I want to do, and I, and I have it actually written down here. And so in the show notes, um, if you're listening live, there's no show notes. They will come out when we put this over onto YouTube. So, uh, P.S., uh, like, share, and subscribe, please. Uh, make comments. Uh, I get show ideas from the comments and other stuff, so that's great. Always, you know, be kind and be respectful of others. Uh, but the, you know, the liking, sharing, subscribing really helps the, the channel. Uh, and these COVID experiences and stuff I've noticed get shared a lot, which is wonderful. It's why I do them. Uh, so What I want to do is, um, I'm going to just read through the trajectory of my personal experience with getting Omicron and, uh, how it went, the twists and turns. And then I want to kind of take a step back and say, how does my experience, which as I said is a little towards the right on the bell curve, so on the tapering edge, a little more aggressive disease, a little more aggressive treatment, all of that. How does that illustrate a lot of the things that myself and a lot of the other healthcare folks on, you know, YouTube or radio or podcasts or whatever have been saying, especially about Omicron, but about COVID in general? So let's just get the big picture first. So, um, I, I counted day 1 after I realized that I was getting sick on day 2. So when I started keeping my diary of what was going on with COVID I didn't know day 1 was day 1, but I pretty quickly did. So I started out, and I have to— I have to give credit where credit is due. My wife and I, we have a number of young grandchildren. So our 5 kids are all adults, and some of them have little kids. Those are called grandkids. And we were taking care of a brother and a sister of one of the families. And I was asked today if I was going to give credit to the brother because we believe— we call him patient zero for everything. He is a wonderful producer of viral Media. He's just just like all kids, but this kid seems to spread stuff. Is like Typhoid Mary. So his name is Francisco. So we want to give credit to his mother asked if I was going to give Francisco credit, and I said yeah, I would. So want to give Francisco credit. Basically, Francisco and his sister both were ill with a respiratory thing. My wife and I took care of him for a couple of days. which is what you do as a grandparent. And, you know, when little kids are sick, either— and you're taking care of them— either you're going to get it or you're not. Now, every, you know, every, uh, you know, grade school and kindergarten teacher knows that they're likely to get stuff from the kids because usually children, um, you know, their little bodies modify the viruses and you, you get it, a new version. So we had these little guys and they were, you know, we— part of the reason we were taking care of them is because their respiratory system was very stressed and we had to, you know, make sure that they, they survived the experience. Um, so about a day after, uh, Francisco and his sister went back home and, uh, basically were on the way to being better, um, about a day later, um, I started to feel like, well, I had this rhinosinusitis. So it's sort of a, you know, nose and sinus just felt kind of yucky up there. And if you heard me talk, I was a little more, you know, tinny and nasally and all that than I am that way anyway, but more than I normally was. And felt a little in the back of my throat, but really nothing else. Didn't really feel tired or in pain or anything like that. But that turned out to be day number 1. Okay. Um, day number 2, I woke up with a fever. And technically speaking, um, when you get up, you know, near about a, you know, 101, just a little shy of 101, you've got a fever. Now, the older a person gets, uh, the, um, lower their fever often will spike, but mine was certainly high enough to qualify as a real live fever. Woke up with a fever, a headache, and body aches all over. Now, if you've listened to myself or any of the other people who do this, um, not everybody gets body aches. A lot of people have headaches, fever, and fatigue. Uh, not everyone gets all the body aches. I certainly did, so I was working through that. Now, why do you get body aches? You get body aches because your immune system is dumping out all this chemistry that says somebody's in here, you know, some virus or bacteria or something like that that shouldn't be here. And when you stimulate your immune chemistry to go get your B and T cells active and complement and all the other parts of your immunity, um, the chemistry that does that increases other chemicals. Some of them are the kinin family. There's many families of these, and they actually make you feel yucky. They make your joints hurt. They make your muscles hurt. And the theory behind that, that we all believe, is, well, that's, that's your body telling you to don't, don't run around, hunker down and get better. So day 2, I woke. So I counted the day before as day 1 because I was pretty sure that was my post-exposure you know, rhinosinusitis. And, um, because of the fever, later that day, I think it was probably 4 in the afternoon, I was feeling worse. And, uh, I, uh, did a COVID test, and indeed it was positive. Uh, and it, uh, it, it was one of those where there was no, um, ambiguity about it. It was positive very, very quickly. So I'm thinking, okay, so what I've been telling people on the, you know, radio or YouTube, uh, you know, your, um, experience with Omicron is probably going to be like a bad cold, maybe a flu. And so I'm sitting there thinking, all right, well, so far that matches up, lining up really well. Um, and then the next day, day 3, I, uh, still had the headache. I still had a bit of a fever. I was developing, uh, a little throat stuff, so I would kind of cough when I breathe too deeply. had definitely had the body aches and the joint pain was not going away. And then something that is unique to some of my medical history is I started to have a particular kind of neuropathy, a nerve pain. And I know in my body that this particular type of nerve pain— I've never had Omicron before, so I didn't know it was coming with Omicron. But I know this particular type of nerve pain, normally when it comes back up, is because of an old opportunistic infection, uh, that, uh, it's a little family of infections that I carry from childhood. And most of the time when I'm healthy, they don't bother me. That's how opportunistic infections are. But it comes from a family of viruses that like to go dormant in your body and then come out when you're not feeling well. So I started to get concerned with this type of nerve pain that's very remarkable, and I know what it is when it comes, and think, well, what have I also been telling you? It might be like a cold or flu, but what do we have to worry about? One of the biggest things early on is other infections piling on when your immune system is run down. Well, indeed, my intuition there and my pain was telling me the true story. Now here's something interesting that went on on the 4th day. So I kind of gutted out the 3rd day hoping that this pain was gonna, you know, get better. Uh, and I had already started— I'll tell you what I was taking and stuff and how I was being treated, but I'd already started to, you know, take stuff, be treated. So by day 4, I kind of started— it's like the fog lifted a little bit and I felt a little bit better. Okay. And what I know about my patients with COVID is there's always a worry if the fog lifts and you, you feel like you're getting better, because there's a— the people on the right side of the, the bell curve of COVID um, will get a real reprieve, and then they'll get a second wave that hits them even harder. And I believe on my side of the bell curve, the reason we get a second wave is not so much the COVID It's that COVID opened the door then for other infections that were available to us to start to grow. Okay. And if you're like me and you have a few infections that are mostly dormant for most of your life, but they're always there— viruses can do that, some bacteria, as we'll find later— this is the perfect time. So day 4, fog lifts, I'm a little bit better. Day 5, Fog lifts, feeling, you know, kind of this break in the action. I still don't feel great. My pain is about half what it was. My fatigue is, you know, 75% of what it was. Don't have a headache anymore, etc. But because of this, this nerve pain and me knowing my medical history and these opportunistic infections, I actually had some— other things checked. Now, why did I do that? Partly because I did not want to not treat something that was there, like a co-infection. Part of it was because I could hear myself talking to you guys, and I'm almost harping on co-infections because they are that important. And so I thought, well, I, you know, take my own medicine and let's check some of the more common co-infections, plus some ones I know I have. So what happened was day 4 or 5 was sort of better. Day 6, the pain and then the cough got worse. The cough was just a little irritating, and on day 6, the cough got worse and my fatigue returned 100%. So then I'm thinking, ah, this is not good because this is what I've seen with people. And I was treating it very aggressively, we're going to get to that. But in people who usually aren't treating it in the early days, this is often what happens where they get a little reprieve, they think they're better, and the second wave hits them like a Mack truck. And I've, uh, I have known cases where the second wave is where the person gets hospitalized Or even in a couple of cases dies, and so I didn't want anything to do with any of that. Your goal should always be, especially with COVID to stay out of the hospital unless you absolutely have to go for many reasons. And so I was treating very aggressively, but then when I got the test reports back, I indeed had. some of the old viruses that, like I say, settle in your nervous system. That's where that pain came from. There was 2 that were positive. I had a chronic lung bacteria that I have had before and treated and cleared called Mycoplasma pneumoniae. It's chronic. It's an atypical pneumonia organism. That's a bacteria, though. That was back. I had an equivocal, but based on my symptoms, I think it was positive, uh, Aspergillus, which is a fungus. Uh, Aspergillus, if it gets out of control, will kill you. Uh, and if you remember back to my earlier COVID, uh, you know, reports, uh, one of the more common fungal infections that goes along with COVID is Aspergillus, especially from the Chinese varieties. And then, uh, I— and this is probably from Francisco, the grandchild, uh, he actually turned out to test positive for RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, which is dangerous in little children, is dangerous in very elderly people. I'm on my way to elderly, but I'm not quite there yet, I hope. But it just aggravated everything. So I had the RSV sprinkled on top of all this. Days 7 and 8, the fatigue was profound. So I really took a crash down. The pain all over joints, muscles, everything, you know, was very high. So fatigue and pain cranked way up to higher than the early days. The cough, you know, was irritating, but nothing in my lower respiratory system, thankfully. And that's probably because by day 7 and 8, my treatment that I had started on day 2 was at least protecting me from, you know, any more bugs piling on. Another thing that happened is from day about 5 through 12, I had almost complete what we would clinically call anorexia. So not anorexia nervosa, but illness-induced anorexia where you just You don't want to eat. In general, you don't eat much. And I, I don't know if you can tell, I'm not a small person, uh, and I've never, uh, I've never not wanted to eat. Okay, I did. I very— even when I'm at my sickest, I rarely get anorexia. And it was very unique because I, I would, you know, the idea of eating would just make me feel like, you know, turn my stomach, etc. Um, but I had to take you know, these pills and all this medicine and stuff. So I would do the softest, easiest things just to get the pills down, and then I wouldn't eat anymore. So that, and that lasted kind of right through the middle. And it was sort of its own unique thing. And it's very unique because I don't experience that usually. So then we get out, we're at now week number 2. You go on the next 5 days, I'm just progressively getting a bit better. My voice was a bit weak, but I didn't record last week. And then we get up, you know, around the beginning of the, you know, the third week, day 15+, really up to about 3/4 normal capacity. I'm doing work. I just tire out a little bit easier. And then the last, you know, 4 or 5 days, I'm 100%. Don't tire out easy, etc., etc. So longer than the average, that's why I'm saying it's sort of over there on the right-hand side of the bell curve. A lot more, uh, disease state, but a lot more bugs, not just Omicron. Okay, so what did I do and why did I do it? Well, we'll get to— we'll go through top-down treatment now. What I always tell you, don't take medical advice from people on the radio or TV or podcasts. That's dumb. You and your healthcare team decide what you do for your problems. But because this really happened to me, and because, A, I knew how my body processes new viruses, B, I knew there probably were co-infections, and then the testing confirmed that. And C, because the demographic that I usually see crash when they get that second worsening, you know, the, the second wave, uh, tend to be males in my age demographic, uh, and, um, uh, and/or people with immunologic problems. And so I, uh, One is I didn't want to need to go to the hospital. One second is, even if I had a second wave, which I did, I didn't want to, you know, crash during that and be really, really bad. Even though it was uncomfortable, it wasn't really bad. And then, of course, the third thing is I didn't want to be one of the really tiny outlier group that passes away or something. But the fourth thing really was What we see clinically is the better you treat COVID and whatever else you got going on early, the less post-COVID you get. That doesn't mean you're not going to get post-COVID, but the more aggressive you are early on and the more— it's not just COVID. If you've got other co-infections, you got to treat them because they feed into the post-COVID problems. Okay, so I did not want any of that either. So I— and believe me, I would have preferred not to take in any of this stuff because it was a pain. And for a lot of those days, I didn't even want to eat so I could take food with my pills, but I did just because I didn't want to throw up. But what I did was I started— so remember those co-infections that I knew I had historically? So one of the things I do with all of my COVID patients is an antibiotic to cover the atypical pneumonia bacteria because they're so common they come up. Yeah, I told you I had one of them. There's others. So I started an antibiotic. Now what I've told you before, and this is what I did specifically, is I used an antibiotic that has a dual effect, and that is doxycycline. Not only will kill the atypical pneumonia bacteria like the one I had, but also remember I've shared before doxycycline has some anti- antiviral capacity, and even with COVID some antiviral capacity. So it's sort of 2 for 1, right? Then I also did an antifungal to just not let that Aspergillus, uh, get out of control, because once it gets out of control, it's hard to get the genie back in the bottle. So you're better off covering the atypical bacteria and the Aspergillus early. So an antifungal for that. Um, I did, uh, I started, uh, a combo of ivermectin, which has multiple reasons it can be helpful. One is it kills co-infections. Another is it has direct antiviral activity, kind of like doxycycline, even though we don't think of it that way. But the third thing is ivermectin has an immunomodulatory effect that you really need in the COVID experience. And then I did take a low dose of hydroxychloroquine along with it. So you're thinking, wow, that's a lot of drugs. Well, remember my goals— didn't want to have a second wave that crashed or killed me, didn't want post-COVID problems. So I swung for the bleachers. Um, and then there were, uh, uh, there was a couple other drugs that rotated through there. Now, what else did I do? I'm mildly famous for intravenous vitamin C research, so I was getting intravenous vitamin C periodically. Hyperbaric oxygen, which is— not everyone has access to it, but I did. So I did hyperbaric oxygen treatments. Again, not every day. I'd have been better if I would have done it every day, probably would have got better faster, but I did them as much as I could. Another thing that was, I think, crucial to help was nebulized therapy. So that's for— asthmatics know what nebulizers are, but that's that thing that looks like an oxygen mask that you have, like steam. It looks like steam going through. So you put a medication in the reservoir and it nebulizes it and you breathe it in. Okay. So one of the most common and oldest nebulized medications is actually an amino acid. N-acetylcysteine, and, uh, it's used in hospitals all the time for respiratory issues, etc., has other benefits. So I was doing a combination of N-acetylcysteine inhalation, so just the plain old N-acetylcysteine nebulizer drug, and then a custom, uh, medication that's a natural, uh, called quercetin. Now you've heard me talk about quercetin and COVID, usually taking it orally, Uh, and it's a, it's a zinc ionophore like hydroxychloroquine, but quercetin also is an immunomodulator and it works really well in your respiratory system. So I was breathing it in and, uh, along with the N-acetylcysteine, which helps to keep your mucus secretions running well. And so I was doing that as my nebulizer therapy. I did that a little later in the game. I didn't I don't normally use nebulizers, so I had to order one. But thanks, you know, thanks for the delivery service. They brought it to me because I did isolate through this. So people have asked, well, did you, you know, isolate and you were not spreading it to others? No, I isolated. I did not leave my house. I did not see people. No one came to see me. And any work I did was on you know, online telework. Um, and then I, I had a group of over-the-counter things. So I had my vitamin C powder that I put in the water, and just the water I drank all day had vitamin C in it, uh, which is a great way to go. Um, although I take a multi-mineral, uh, when you're sick, topical zinc is better. And so I used a zinc spray because topical zinc just tastes like zinc, which tastes great. But I have this nice zinc spray that I would spray all day long, or you can have lozenges, zinc lozenges, but I chose the spray. I took a moderate dose iodine, B complex, just— there's some old research in my newsletters about B complex and just keeping your energy up. I took oral N-acetylcysteine, so I was inhaling it and took it as a pill. I kept up on my regular fat-soluble vitamins. So vitamin D— remember, better your vitamin D level is, the better your outcomes are with COVID Vitamin A and K— vitamin A is very good during virus problems. Bit of glutathione, which again is structurally related to N-acetylcysteine. It's N-acetylcysteine is— or cysteine is in glutathione, but they kind of had 2 purposes, so I kept on that. And then something that I worked with my physician consultant— so you're thinking, okay, just, you just come up with all this in your head and prescribe it? Well, I'd been prescribing these combos for my patients for so long, basically yes, but the nebulizer things specific to COVID. And then this other thing I'm going to tell you about, I got bounced off of those I feel are brighter than I am in certain areas. And so the one thing that one of my colleagues was doing that they were finding really good because of the immunomodulatory effect was high-dose melatonin. Now, melatonin, many of you take it for sleep, 3 milligrams or something. High-dose melatonin is— we use it in cancer all the time, so I'm familiar with it. But It turns out during, you know, the more aggressive types of COVID it can be very good as an immunomodulator. And so I was doing that. I do not recommend that you just go out and do any of these things, but especially don't do high-dose melatonin without somebody guiding you who does that. I'm just telling you what I did. Remember, don't you do any of this. And then I rotated a few other things here and there, you know, but mostly for those first 10, 12 days, What I knew is you have to have your head down and you have to treat aggressively. And then as I confirmed that I had these other co-infections, um, I didn't really have to add to it because I was already empirically treating for the fungal issues and the atypical bacteria, uh, and the other viruses, etc. Uh, so I already had that all put together. Now, the one thing that I did that I always recommend to patients, and I did start fairly early, was just taking some probiotics at bedtime. And that's hopefully for obvious reasons, but when you're using antibiotics and a lot of medication that you're swallowing, it can throw off your microbiome in your GI tract. So probiotics kept me from getting too far behind and out of the way there. So, um, how did it go? Like, um, when did I start all of this? Well, pretty much I started my normal empiric therapy even before I had all his lab tests back. I started on day 2. Okay, why did I start early? I started early because I know, number one, my body, and if the door gets open from a novel virus or something like that, these other co-infections always find their way back to me. I know in my COVID patients that get very ill, that's part of the problem. And I also, uh, know that almost all of my COVID patients who have crashed and done very badly have been lulled into a sense of security after those first 3, 4, 5 days when they sort of get that little window where they feel better. And if you're not treating aggressively early on, the window fools you. And then when you get that second wave that hits you harder, largely because some of these other infections now have spun up and they're doing their job, when that second wave hits you harder, that's often when people go into more respiratory distress and other problems that might lead them to need to go to the hospital. And so, as I said, a lot of my goals revolved around second wave. Now, the second wave happened, but the second wave didn't put me under. Okay, second wave didn't make me need more respiratory support, didn't make me need anything. Okay. So I started early, I started aggressive, and I stayed aggressive. Now, again, You and your doctor do whatever you need to do. But in my population, um, what I recommend to people is that whether they have 4 or 5 days and then they feel better, like a lot of people do with Omicron, or whether it's 7 or 8 or it's 10 or 12, as soon as you start to feel better, generally whatever medication and natural product strategy that you're doing I have people continue on that or a version of it for 2 weeks after you quote unquote feel better. And this also gets me a lot of, you know, quote unquote hate mail. It's not really hate mail, it's just a lot of doctors, you know, thinking, well, you're overtreating the patient, this, that, the other thing. Well, here's the bottom line. When I was having people stop all of their therapies, uh, when they felt better. That was all right. But a lot of those people would either have lingering symptoms or they would develop full-blown post-COVID syndrome. And fairly early on in this COVID mess, I decided, well, for those who will listen, I'm going to have them, uh, continue to treat Past quote-unquote feeling better, because feeling better is a really good marker, means your immune system's got ahead of the things and all that. But as you know, with, with COVID illness, there is the post-COVID syndrome, which is all number and manner of things. But what else do you have? You get post-COVID potentials for organ damage and clotting. and all manner of other stuff that you really don't want. So yes, you don't want post-COVID fatigue, you don't want post-COVID headaches, you don't want post-COVID whatever, but you really don't want post-COVID thrombosis and, you know, all kinds of other, you know, lung scarring and all that. And what I found is— this is my experience, it's anecdotal, but there's other people writing about this too— is if, um, the person can wrap their head around the fact that You may feel better, but the COVID experience is still cycling in your body. Do your treatments like you did through COVID for another 2 weeks. In everybody so far where they've been compliant with that, we have had no post-COVID anything. We checked their kidneys. They're working fine. We check their clotting studies, they're working fine. We check all manner of other things, and they don't have post-COVID symptoms, you know, such as excessive fatigue, muscle pain, joint problems, etc. So while it seems pretty aggressive to do that, um, my experience would say, uh, you know, COVID doesn't go away the day that you think you feel better, and you need to cover all of these other things. Because something that, you know, I know from recovering cancer patients and from people with chronic infections and immune dysfunction is that these, these co-infections that pile on— my case, it was that group I told you about, could be a million others— these co-infections that pile on, once they're in your body, Those don't leave as quick as, say, the Omicron does, right? So if you've got an atypical bacteria, uh, and you've got one or two of these other opportunistic viruses and a fungus, they're not gone the day you feel better. So you— in, in my calculus, you do want to treat for a couple weeks. Now, did the treatment change a little bit? Usually what I do is I kind of You know, unless some— now, if someone's like me where they have these other infections that have been verified, they're going to be on the drugs for those infections all 2 weeks. But let's say somebody's your garden variety, you know, 4 or 5 days of COVID very light medication schedule, just enough to keep the pressure on, a lot of natural supplements I talked about. That's what they're going to do for the 2 weeks after. In my case, it was sort of a hybrid, uh, because I knew about the other infections. I want to be aggressive with them and treat them, and I did. And, um, I, uh, kind of adjusted the natural stuff, uh, to, you know, be a little more, um, you know, immune-enhancing things. Started taking some, uh, some immune mushrooms and stuff like that. So not— whenever I say mushrooms on YouTube, people think I'm talking about psychedelic ones. That's a whole other thing. I don't generally do psychedelic mushrooms during acute infections with patients, and with myself I did not either. So it's the immune kind that I was taking. So, um, so that was my experience. Now, um, I had pretty much what everybody else did. Um, I had my own unique neuropathy from the other viruses that I told you about. I was very achy. I did have the not wanting to eat. I was very kind of fatigued, brain fog pretty bad. And, you know, my job, most of it is thinking, so brain fog is not very good. The cough was just irritating. It never went below, you know, my upper respiratory system, which is wonderful. And I never lost my voice. But there were many days where I simply just didn't speak because my voice was that weak and I didn't want to lose it. So that's not the direction I wanted to go. So how do you feel now? I feel 100% myself. I have absolutely no post-COVID signs or symptoms. The early investigations on things like clotting and kidney function and my lungs and all the, all the important stuff, uh, would say that all the organ systems and the biochemical systems are humming along, uh, in a very healthy manner, which is what I was going for. And so I think that that's, um, that's a great outcome. All right, um, so that's the arc of my experience. And as I say, you know, you might say, well, why did You know, when the people in the middle of the bell curve maybe are sick for 3 to 6 days with a cold-like illness or maybe a cold-flu-like illness, why did it take you, you know, another week and change? Well, remember, um, it was largely all of those other infections. And that's when I always talk about co-infections, and we doctors need to check for these things when people aren't getting better. That's what I did with myself because I knew they were there, uh, but also that's what they do. That's what tanks you. That's what pulls you down. And as I said, that was not part of my plan, to be pulled down. Now I just want to end with a couple of things that I kind of got out of the news, uh, about natural and vaccine immunity. And remember I kept saying that, uh, you know, there the epidemiologists and the immunologists around the world were saying, well, Omicron will be great because it won't matter whether you want to get vaccinated or not, or you are, you aren't. Omicron is going to infect everybody pretty much and be like a booster shot for the world. And so the first one here comes from the CDC, and it's a quote that they just published. This link I will put in the YouTube, in the show notes. In the description box. And of course, hospitalization rates are highest in people who've never had COVID before, which makes sense, right? Because they've never had COVID before. But by October of 2021, so very recently, anybody who had survived a prior COVID infection had lower rate of infection than people who were vaccinated alone. First time the CDC is admitting this. So vaccination alone versus somebody who just had COVID before— having COVID before actually gave you a lower rate of infection than vaccination did. The data from Israel came out, and I'll give you a link to this. It's a preprint, so it's not fully published yet, but here's basically what they say. Natural immunity confers longer-lasting and stronger protection than the 2-dose vaccine immunity. And so they looked at people, compared them head-to-head of prior infection versus 2-dose vaccine immunity, and you had better, longer, and more robust immunity if you just had COVID before. Now, if you also then got one dose of the vaccine after you had COVID, even got more. But this is the opposite of what a lot of the, especially North American scientists, were saying early when they were guessing, and they were saying, well, natural immunity doesn't last. Turns out that's totally not true. And the other one that came out from OHSU That's Oregon Health Science University, the medical school just to the south of us in Portland, Oregon. It makes no difference whether you get infected and then vaccinated or vaccinated and then a breakthrough infection. Either way, you'll get really robust immune response. And so it's— their research looked at, you know, well, should you get vaccinated first or just wait for the infection or whatever? And basically it was pretty equal. And I think that the, the final thing in the last seconds here that I'd like to leave it with, and I'll put the link in, you can read the article, do what we do, what you will with it. But it's, you know, time for a rethink. Public health officials ruined many lives by insisting workers with natural immunity to COVID be fired if they didn't get fully vaccinated. But after 2 years of accruing data, the superiority of natural immunity over vaccination is clear. By firing the staff, employers got rid of those likely to infect others— like, least likely to infect others. Um, and that's, that's been going on. And now you have what? Now we have many hospital administrations, uh, telling, uh, us healthcare providers, well, if you have COVID, you know, try and get back to work as soon as you can, even if you're still positive. Okay. most of the— most all of the healthcare workers in hospitals right now who have breakthrough COVID infections are fully vaccinated, and yet they want you to go back to work. So why take the people that, that we fired, who turns out have probably more robust immunity, uh, and, uh, make them, you know, unemployed and not able to work? So it's just basically— and you can look at it, it gets into the numbers and all of that. Um, But the bottom line is they look at the CDC data and says natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective, so 2.8 multiple in preventing hospitalization, and 3.3 to 4.7 times multiple as effective in preventing COVID infection compared to vaccination. So it's not saying vaccination bad, it's just saying this whole thing that we had built up around really not well-done antibody studies about natural infection. None of that panned out. So let's look at natural immunity. Let's let natural immunity also be a way to get immunity, because that's how the world gets herd immunity anyway. And probably some data I'll share next week. There are, there are hospital systems now reporting from Canada Where the hospitalized people are 3 to 1 now vaccinated over unvaccinated. So it's not vaccines are bad, it's not any of that business. It's just let's be real and let's be realistic about this. And pretty soon we're going to be endemic, the pandemic is going to be gone, and Omicron is just going to be with us forever as a cold or a flu. Well, I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. It's the end of the show because they're telling me that. If you're on YouTube, please like, share, and subscribe. Check us out on Contact Talk Radio, and I will see you all here next week. You've been listening to
