Post-Covid Heat Therapy (Sauna Effect)

Basically, this kickstarted their healing. So all the other things that they were doing kind of went into overdrive and they got to a resolution phase with most of their signs and symptoms of long COVID over the course of about 6 weeks. So it really did help. Heat therapies and long COVID, can it help? Well, we've done a few other sessions on sauna, hyperthermia, heat therapies, et cetera. And so we'll put links to those in the show notes, but They got a lot of attention, but also a lot of questions. So what I wanted to do is both speak to heat or hyperthermia therapies specifically in regard to long COVID, but also kind of answer some of the questions that came in as well. This I have seen since the very beginning of COVID and you'll listen in this. So this is a 16-plus part series just on long COVID, but if you listen to a lot of the discussion on long COVID, a lot of the things that we saw with primary COVID that were helpful to heal people up during primary COVID turn out also to be useful in long COVID, and heat therapies are one of those things. So I wanted just to get back, and there's a particular patient, 2 patients actually I thought of, but it's the same exact story, just 2 different people. One was early, very early in COVID in the US anyway, when we started to have a name for it and everything. This particular patient had called me, and again, you know, back then there were— we were doing our normal sort of, you know, antiviral approaches and all this, and there weren't a lot of other elaborate therapies available. And this person was very used to doing sauna hyperthermia, so heating the body up. And they said that the thing that probably made the biggest response that was positive for them, other than resting and hydrating and all that stuff, was that they got in the sauna every day and got themselves very hot. And they were in their 70s. They're still alive. They are in their 70s. And they, um, they did this on their own. This was not a recommendation from anyone. They were just reporting after the fact. So they got through it even at the age, you know, in the— in their 70s, uh, and, you know, higher risk age group for COVID, as we know now, especially the original versions. And, uh, they had absolutely no long COVID, no sequelae, etc. Very healthy afterwards. So I started thinking, well, we know heat Heating the body up helps with infectious illness, so it's probably going to be good with COVID Well, what about long COVID? Well, the other story then, fast forward a couple of years, is a patient and they were quote unquote doing all the things. So they were doing early treatment, they were, you know, on the right types of, you know, supplemental things and medication, all that stuff. But they were in long COVID now and they were having kind of slow progress. They're getting kind of frustrated. And so we were talking, it was telemedicine, and they were— I said, well, do you Do you have access to something that can heat you up like a sauna? And they said, yeah, I hadn't thought about it, but we have a sauna at our house. And that's, of course, you know, the easiest if you have it right there. I said, well, here's what you can do. You know, we go through the safety issues around heating the body up, which you can look at the other videos or the other podcasts for. But after the safety issues, basically it's, you know, get your body heated up. If you can do it once a day, that would be wonderful. Even every other day is wonderful, whatever you do. And this person, went from very slow progressing long COVID treatment. So they were getting better. It was just sort of a painstaking snail's pace. And the way that they described it, so this is an anecdotal case report. This is not certainly a study, but the way they described it, which I've heard before from other folks, is basically this kickstarted their healing. So all the other things that they were doing kind of went into overdrive and they got to a resolution phase with most of their signs and symptoms of long COVID over the course of about About 6 weeks. So it really did help. Now, in the other hyperthermia sauna sessions that we've done, we get more into the technique of what if I don't have a sauna or whatever. And so go listen to those if you, you know, have questions around that. But big question that came up was heating the body falls under the medical classification of hyperthermia. And this is certainly done all over the world. Heat is probably one of the oldest medical treatments known. It's written about by, you know, Hippocrates and people like that. And we know that the human body can create its own heat through the fever response, okay? So there's that. But something that I mentioned that unless you've been, you know, teaching or studying in the hyperthermia world may have gotten by you is that there's actually 4 levels or grades of hyperthermia, and that's literally how hot you get the body. Now, what you should know is this is not measured At least in the scientific world or in the research world, this is not measured by like taking your forehead temperature or putting a thermometer in your mouth or anything. When we do this and we're really trying to figure out how hot the human body is getting, we use a rectal thermometer probe, an electronic thermometer, same as you would get if you were, you know, during surgery. They'll do that sometimes, etc. Now, that might sound like, well, You know, I don't really want to sign up for that. But that's a way to figure out how hot is the core temperature of the body and are we in this, you know, level 1, 2, 3, or 4. You don't have to do that at home. I'm just saying this is how we would know. It's not, you know, sticking a thermometer in your mouth or something, because when you're heating the body up that much, there's a lot of variation in, you know, in, you know, dermal or oral temperatures. So that's how we know how hot we're getting a person. Big picture, this is how you think of it. Level 1 and level 2, you can achieve, or at least get near, uh, with outpatient things like, you know, sauna and that sort of thing. When you get to level 3 and 4, you're getting to high heats that are a little more quickly therapeutic. And there are papers, uh, written mostly from Europe where they practice hyperthermia a little bit more in the hospital than we do here, where they go into these designations of 1, 2, 3, and 4. And so in the hospital, what we will do is, again, the person's closely monitored, they normally have an IV, a hydration IV going into them, and then in some cases, if you're getting up to real high heats, the patient may be actually sedated. Okay. So obviously you're not going to do that stuff at home, Right. In one of the settings where I help to manage patients in a hospital, we have availability of a few different types of hyperthermia devices. And so we have in the outpatient section, we have grade 1 and 2, we do a sauna and that sort of thing. And then in the inpatient section, we actually have 2 types of hyperthermia devices, one being a whole body hyperthermia unit. Right. And that's the one where we push people up into, you know, grade 3, 4, which is quite high heat in the body. And then again, the higher you're going there, the more support you get. So again, you've got an IV of hydrating solution going in, you've got monitoring of your core body temperature, and you're being monitored, of course, by the medical staff. That, I hope, answers the difference between low and high grade. And one thing I'd Do want to say, in case these folks are listening who commented, I said, well, you know, actually our video people put out, well, you don't need, you know, high-grade hyperthermia. And that's, that's really not what we meant. What we meant was you can do much of the hyperthermia business for things like long COVID, et cetera, with outpatient treatments such as sauna and heating the body up. Uh, Grade 3 and 4 that we would do in the hospital is definitely needed for more aggressive infections. We use it in cancer, use it alongside of chemotherapy, all sorts of other things that it's done. So I'm not throwing any shade on high-grade hyperthermia. Certainly, that's very, very necessary and needed. Now, remember from the other material that we've done on hyperthermia that heat— your body makes heat when you get a fever, and we go into that in the other videos. The bottom line is Why? What's it doing? Well, what it does is it increases the activity of some enzyme systems and other chemical reactions in the body. Not all of them, but some, because enzyme systems have temperature and other parameters under which they work slower and more quickly, et cetera. So in the case of fever, we're inducing fever in the body by doing some kind of hyperthermia treatment. And these enzyme systems and other chemical reactions Often are promoting of immune function. Now, it promotes other things too. Certain of your detox enzymes work faster and many other things, but it really helps with kind of waking the immune system back up and saying, let's complete this process that we started earlier. Now, there's another factor when it gets to long COVID, which is, as I've just mentioned a couple minutes ago, there are certain types of detoxification that go on when you are warmer. This would happen even if you're just working out at the gym and you warmed yourself up a bit, or, you know, you warmed yourself up at the gym, then you went in the sauna afterwards. Your body is going to dump more stuff out. And remember, with Long COVID, there's always at least a small component where the body just has metabolic toxins and other junk in it that it should be getting rid of. Well, in some people, there's a bigger amount of those things. And again, if you're looking at toxins and all that, if you have a lot of that going on, you need to be working with somebody who takes care of those things. But that's basically the reason that it, uh, that it helps. There's a lot of other reasons and there's a lot of things written about heat therapies. And again, we'll, we'll link to, uh, one or two of the old, uh, they're not that old, the prior, uh, heat therapy, uh, videos or, uh, or podcasts, and they'll have links to some information on these things. Well, I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. This is Medicine Health Podcast. Really glad that you joined us for this long COVID series. Remember, it's, uh, we're heading towards 16 parts. And now with all the questions, we're probably going to be up around 20 parts by the time we're done. Please like, share, and subscribe and do notifications, whether you're on a PodBurner or YouTube. And if you haven't checked out the YouTube channel, please go over and check it out. If you can't find these links, just go to my hub website, D-R-A-N-O-W, dranow.com, and it will take you to anything that you need, including newsletters, et cetera. But I'm done for this section for today, and I will talk to you all later.