In this video Dr. A, an integrative/naturopathic physician with 30 years of experience, outlines a comprehensive, individualized approach to evaluating and managing long COVID (post‑acute sequelae of SARS‑CoV‑2). He begins by contextualizing long COVID within the broader spectrum of post‑viral fatigue illnesses, noting its unprecedented public awareness. The most common lingering symptoms—persistent fatigue, brain fog, muscle pain/weakness, shortness of breath, exercise intolerance, tachycardia, dysautonomia/POTS, and poor recovery—are listed. Dr. A stresses the need to start with a “blank slate,” taking a detailed history, identifying top‑line versus unique symptoms, and then ruling out other medical conditions that could be contributing (thyroid dysfunction, autoimmunity, other infections, digestive issues, etc.) through broad laboratory panels and organ‑specific testing (cardiopulmonary, neurologic). Once comorbidities are identified, he recommends core lifestyle interventions: balanced nutrition that stabilizes blood sugar, adequate protein, timed eating/fasting, generous hydration, and graded physical activity. He then details a tiered supplement protocol aimed at supporting cellular energy and repair—B‑complex, fat‑soluble vitamins D/K, trace minerals (iron, magnesium, zinc, selenium, chromium), amino acids, omega‑3s and phospholipids, and antioxidants/glutathione precursors (alpha‑lipoic acid, N‑acetylcysteine, liposomal glutathione). Dr. A frames recovery as a stepwise, “crawling out of a hole” process where each small gain in cellular function enables more movement, strengthening core muscles, and further energy improvements. He acknowledges possible setbacks but maintains a cautiously optimistic outlook. The video ends with a brief plug for continuing‑education webinars for clinicians and a call to subscribe.
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So when you're doing it, you kind of have to build from the outside in. We have to find out what your specific problems are. You have to rule out or rule in other medical diseases that are piling on top. And that could be things you had before or things that you didn't know you had before, but you got them now. Then you have to work on— Hey, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to my channel. I've been involved in research and teaching in the integrative and naturopathic medical community for over 30 years now. I've been seeing patients a very long time. I use this channel to get into things like post-viral illnesses, long COVID, recovery from treatments, all kinds of things. And that's what we're gonna do today. So the first thing is that there are people worldwide now having post-infectious, post-viral complications or illness after COVID, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, as it's known. These lingering signs and symptoms are very much similar to all of the other lingering signs and symptoms we've seen in other chronic fatiguing illnesses. Post-viral illnesses, et cetera. The difference is that COVID became obviously a national health concern. It was on all of the news. It was on social media every second. And so everybody was aware of it all at the same time. So as opposed to before COVID where you might have somebody have very, very bad post-viral illness that turned into chronic fatigue syndrome or some other chronically fatiguing illness, now you have millions and millions of people who are focused on an infectious illness and then a group of them wind up with lingering symptoms. So we think about those symptoms. There are many, and every research paper you read about long COVID kind of delineates them differently. But some of the more common ones are persistent fatigue, brain fog, which is just what it sounds like if you've never had it, chronic muscle pain, muscle aches, weak muscles, shortness of breath, exercise intolerance, and on and on. There are many other things that people have. I was talking to a A patient's relative just 2 days ago, and they were saying that the patient, patient of mine, had developed some tachycardia. It's easy to stimulate high heart rate. So there's fluctuations in blood pressure, heart rate. There's connections to other illnesses like POTS, dysautonomia, and many, many other things. And then just a poor ability to recover. So like I said, this is common with post-sequelae of COVID but it's also long COVID. It's also common with other fatiguing illnesses. So if we want to categorize ways to approach that sort of treatment, the first thing is that everybody is an individual and is going to be somewhat different. So yes, there are categories of things that are going to be the same in most people with long COVID, and then there are going to be categories that are unique to you versus your neighbor, et cetera. But the first thing that I and others have seen in dealing with people with post-acute COVID syndrome, long COVID, or other, you know, post-viral syndromes, et cetera, is to start with a blank slate and say, okay, Your top-line symptoms that you would like to go away are, you know, fatigue, brain fog, et cetera. Your unique symptoms are these other things. And then you start as you normally would looking at how was your health beforehand? How did it change? And how long has this been going on? Then the next things that need to be looked at are what else could cause these symptoms? Because in medicine we say, you know, first do no harm. So the first thing would be we should probably make sure you don't have other medical illnesses that might be creating these symptoms. So that could be something we check with lab tests. Maybe you have poor thyroid function. Maybe you have autoimmunity. Maybe you have other infections that aren't COVID. Maybe you have digestive dysfunction. Maybe you have, you know, any number of other things. So a lot of times there needs to be a pretty broad look at your laboratory and physical examination. There might also be testing if you have a lot of heart symptoms or lung symptoms. There may be cardiopulmonary testing that's done to make sure you're not having any particular with those organs. If you're having a lot of central nervous system symptoms, you may have already been referred to a neurologist to be worked up, make sure you don't have other neurological problems that are going on, and on and on. So the first job beyond, you know, classifying your signs and symptoms, seeing what's bothering you and what your history is and everything, is also seeing is there anything else that explains these symptoms or could be piling on top? Because a lot of people, especially during COVID and Now, you know, all these years through that we've seen started out and they felt like they're pretty healthy. And then they, you know, got COVID and they never really recovered. It turns out they had a couple of things going on before they felt healthy, but they weren't completely healthy. And then the kind of COVID effects stacked on top of those. So another thing. Now, the other side of that coin is a lot of people have been to, you know, COVID specialty clinics and other stuff, or maybe your primary care arranged this and you've had those tests done and the specialists say, or your primary care says, Your heart's totally healthy. Your brain doesn't have anything wrong with it. Kidneys are working, your liver's working, but you're fatigued and you have brain fog and the other stuff. Well, on one hand, that's great cuz you don't have some other medical diagnosis. But then the frustrating part is a lot of these patients will tell me, good, I, I didn't want to have a heart problem, but now I, I've got all these functional issues where if I exert myself too much, I get really tired and my, my pulse rate goes up and all this stuff. What do I do about that? So the first thing is that we want to do this stratification of What are the things wrong with you, not with everybody else who has long COVID? The next thing is, let's make sure your organs were working and we don't have a disease state to work up. And then the following thing is, what do we do with all the things that are still there? Quick plug here, if you're a healthcare practitioner working with patients with these issues, I have a CE website and I do webinars on this topic and others. So we're going to put a link in the description below to the CE website link and the particular webinar of interest. Thank you. What would be an example of something that kind of falls and maybe hits all of those categories? Because we see these things a lot. One of the things is you didn't have a medical issue in an area before you got COVID and now you do. So it may be COVID triggered a sensitivity in you or something else, and now you have this problem. Maybe COVID was just incidental to developing the problem. But even, you know, in the research around COVID, we see that there is more activation of chronic viral infection. In people during COVID we see that there is more derangement of hormonal things like thyroid, reproductive hormones, even blood sugar and stuff. We see that through COVID there's activation of autoimmunity and other things. And one of the things, because those things sort of snake their way all the way through what I just described as you know kind of the workup event, is I've had people come in and their brain fog, fatigue, muscle energy problems and stuff. And because before COVID they didn't have these medical problems. During their workup, nobody checked for them because they said, "Well, you weren't autoimmune before. You didn't have chronic infections before. Your thyroid was fine before. Your reproductive hormones were fine before. I'm I don't need to check those now." And commonly in medicine, just so you know, if you go to primary care and you're healthy, and they say, "Well, you didn't have all these problems before. We're not going to check for them unless you have symptoms." That's normal. Well, with a viral infection, especially like COVID, that changes the thought process a bit. So the The first thing then is if you've not had those things checked out, and I've seen people where they've gotten echocardiograms and treadmill cardiograms and all sorts of, you know, brain imaging and everything else, but none of those other lab values were tested. That's a good time to go back and fill those things in, call them fill-in labs, right? Because it's very common for people who had no problem with their thyroid before COVID to now have a problem. Well, that can aggravate your fatigue quite a bit. Derangements in your reproductive hormones, same thing, all these other things. So that's the next thing is really making sure, have these thing's been looked at all the way around, then there's going to be an effort to certainly treat what comes up there. So if you have some thyroid issues or if you've developed some autoimmunity or you have a chronic infection that reared its head, you have to treat what you see there. You have to treat those things. And there's going to be some core level diet and lifestyle things. We get into this in other videos, but having time during the 24 hours where you're eating, eating in a way that regulates, you know, your insulin and blood sugar, you get enough protein, you have enough other nutrients coming in, all that stuff. But then you stop eating and you stay hydrated and have a bit of time when you're not eating overnight, et cetera. You're going to be encouraged to start to move your body, not to the point of fatiguing you, but just, you know, if your normal thing is you're working, you know, whether it's from your office or from home, and the most exercise you get in the day is, you know, walking up and around or walking to the bathroom or whatever, then we would encourage you to start to do a little bit more walking. You don't have to go too far, but just to progressively move it forward. Going to have You hydrate more than you think you need to, because hydration not only helps, you know, the grandma told you to drink enough water and all that, but hydration actually helps your cells take the junk out. And the more junk we build up around ourselves, more dysfunctional they are. We've done other videos on that. So more hydration, proper nutrition, proper macro and micronutrients, probably then going to have you take things that would help to support energy function and cell repair. Now those things are just general nutrients you're going to get from food, but on top of that, the reason they call them supplements as they supplement your diet. So you might be told to do some juicing. You might be told to take some supplements on top of your diet. The supplements are going to be in areas that are supportive to cell function and health. The B complex of vitamins is very important. For some people, fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin D and K are very important. Other fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins, trace minerals. So we hear about calcium and magnesium and potassium and iron. Those are important. Other minerals though, like zinc and selenium and chromium, maybe important. You might be asked to supplement those. Then there's some other things beyond the vitamin mineral world. You might, you know, if you're really, say you've lost weight or you're trying to get your body working again and you're having a hard time getting up protein, you might be given amino acid supplements because they can be helpful on sort of the regrow side of the equation. Then you might be some fatty things you would be given like omega-3 fatty acids and phospholipids like phosphatidylcholine or glycerophosphocholine, et cetera. And then there may be other things that you are recommended to do beyond your diet that might be in the antioxidant realm. Might be given things to support glutathione like alpha-lipoic acid or N-acetylcysteine or liposomal or acetyl glutathione, et cetera, et cetera. So when you're doing it, you kind of have to build from the outside in. We have to find out what your specific problems are. You have to rule out or rule in other medical diseases that are piling on top. And that could be things you had before or things that you didn't know you had before, but you got 'em Then you have to work on dealing with anything you find and then also rebuilding your cellular energy. As you do that, then that is going to have a feedforward effect on your ability to heal. And then as you are healing, you're going to be able to do more movement with your body to strengthen your core muscles, which is going to improve your energy. And each step takes you closer to feeling better. With my patients, we often talk about it as crawling out of a hole. And it literally feels when you start like you're in a real And generally you don't jump out of a deep hole in one step. It takes all of the supports and each step can be a baby step, but it's a step moving forward towards you feeling better. And yes, there can be some reversals and ups and downs and all of that, but the idea is that even if it's baby steps, you're taking baby steps to get up and out of the hole that was created by what we call long COVID, post-acute sequelae of COVID et cetera. All right, I'm Dr. A. Thanks for listening. I wanna thank all the subscribers, both the new and the old subscribers. Do notifications, like, share, subscribe, and I will see you all on the next video.
