This Unusual Toxin Can Prolong Covid Effects

Welcome to Medicine Health. I'm Dr. Paul, and we're in the middle of, just about the exact middle of, a very long set of small podcasts on Long COVID. And as I usually say at the top or the bottom of these things, number one, none of this is medical advice. This is just what we're seeing. This is experience. It's letting you know some of the background of, you know, what we see in Long COVID and things to look out for. You should always check with your own healthcare providers or find a suitable provider that can work with you, whether that's at distance or one-on-one, to work on these problems. So in this section, I wanted to talk about, um, maybe a little less thought of component of Long COVID, which is toxicity. So we've talked about, uh, you know, the statistics and the disagreements over Long COVID. We've talked about dangerous diagnoses that look like long COVID, you gotta get checked out, et cetera. We've talked about some of the more common things that go wrong, like hormone shifts, other infections you pick up while you have COVID or while you're run down, getting in on the act. We talked about neurological inflammation. Well, toxicity can also be a driver or an aggravator to this whole situation of long COVID. So we had a patient who was about nine months into what certainly looked like symptomatically long COVID. They had test positive COVID with classic symptoms. It kind of got better, and then they just were never the same after that. And we did check out the usual suspects. So. There was a little bit of hormonal imbalance like we talked about another one. There was a couple of co-infections that they had picked up, uh, that were, you know, we tried to treat them and they just kept coming back. So sort of this, you know, recurrent immunologic problem, uh, and, uh, we had checked into other things that we were working on. But, you know, you're hitting around 6 to 9 months and we don't encounter the person until they've been sick for 8 or 9 months. There's a lot more set damage going on. So this person, you know, we tried sort of the obvious things— other infections, hormones, inflammatory stuff, all that— and we start to look like, just like their immune system had never fully recovered from COVID because we'd treat the co-infection and it would sort of go down and then it would kind of rise back up again. So labs are like a roller coaster. They had a couple infections, so it was like, well, this might be, you know, this looks like an immune inhibition, you know, or an immune disease, immune dysfunction, but they didn't have this before. So then you have to start thinking, what would create immune suppression that would linger so long after the COVID infection is gone? In their case, we did screening for environmental— so in your environment— toxins. And we look specifically at toxic metals, toxic chemicals, and also mycotoxins, which are a biotoxin class. Mycotoxins are an important toxin that have a production from mold. So you can get in your environment from, you know, your house or your work, or you can be exposed to mycotoxins in a lot of places. But the important thing about mycotoxins is that some of them are direct immune suppressants, to the degree that there are some mycotoxins that are actually used— the same chemical is used as an immune suppressant In the world of immunology. So, there are drugs that are the same basic chemistry as a mold, a mycotoxin, that are used to shut your immune system partially down. Well, imagine if you, you're not taking those drugs, you don't need your immune system to be slowed down, but now you've been sick for 6 or 9 months or a year, and, and the treatments for the infections, the inflammation stuff, just kind of bounce off you. That is kind of a signature, a historical signature, that mycotoxins should at least be ruled out. Now, one of the nice things in modern times, and I say that because screening for toxicity has not always been that easy, especially for some of the environmental toxins, a nice thing in modern times is with urine testing, We can do a screening. That's not the best test in the world, it doesn't look for everything, but you can get a screening test for mycotoxins from molds, the big ones, and while you're collecting that urine, you can do a screening for persistent chemicals, chemical toxins, and also toxic metals. Normally, it's 3 different lab tests, but you can still do it. So in this person, the metal's, uh, not such a big thing. Uh, the chemicals, there were some things there that they had been exposed to that we looked at, but there was, uh, a couple of mold toxins that were very high. And so then you start thinking, well, did this person— like, so they have post-COVID, long COVID syndrome— did they get exposed to these mold toxins Because they had COVID? Like, how does that work out? Well, the big thing to keep in mind with long COVID especially is, like all other post-infectious illnesses, long COVID can shift your sensitivity to toxicity. And that's a very important thing to keep keep in mind. So for example, when you were healthy before you had COVID, you may have been exposed to similar or the same levels of toxins, but your body was in a healthier state. It— your body has natural detoxifying mechanisms, your diet is different when you're not sick, etc. Your body can eliminate stuff And so where you get ex— you have exposure, but you have good elimination, your body doesn't notice it. Now, are these things good for you? No, generally they're not, but a lot of toxicity we don't notice. What happens when you have post-infectious illness is now your body is inflamed, it's off balance, there's all sorts of little problems going on. And so my Sensitivity used to be way up here, and I was, you know, very resistant to being sensitive to toxicities. Now my threshold has dropped way down, and so the same stuff I'm exposed to suddenly becomes a noticeable influence on my health, my life, my symptoms, whatever. Well, in the case of this patient, it was the mold toxins, the mycotoxins, and they were directly inhibiting the immune system's ability to respond to all this stuff. Now, is that the only problem the person had? No, they had other things that were going on, as I said, but those things, treating them wasn't seeming to move their case forward. So in their case, and the same answer, it could have been, it could have been other toxins, it could have been metals or chemicals or whatever. But the mold toxins, mycotoxins, are much more likely to more aggressively slow your immune system and your immune function down. So in this case, that was the bigger problem. Now, that's wonderful to know about, but what do you do about that? Well, your body, like I said, has ways of dealing with many toxins even though, you know, they're Not good for you. And in the second half of this series, we're going to get into specific treatment options to look at in the integrative medicine space for Long COVID. So I'm not going to go deeply into treatments, but the bottom line is when you have mycotoxins or mold toxicity is that you have to do a couple of things. Things. One of them is to, uh, to bind them up in your digestive tract, because one of the ways the body can get rid of things that are especially chemical toxins is through the liver, and then they'll send it out sort of inside of your bile, which we use for digestive function. Bile helps you break down fats and absorb them and do— and helps with other things in your digestive system. Well, if you think about that, if I now have toxicity that's going out through my bile, that's going to go in my GI tract. Now, your body is set up to reabsorb about 98% of the, the leftover bile down at the other end of the small intestine. And so if we do that and we assume that these chemicals are there, Then they're just going to reabsorb, go right back in you. So instead of detoxifying, your body's in this loop of retoxifying. So a binding agent is used to help bind the bile up and have you poop it out, basically. And so binders might include fibers. There are some medication drug type of binders. There's other things that can be used, but that's one important strategy. The next strategy is to help the liver and the other organs that are trying to deal with the chemical insult. And one of the big areas where the chemical insult requires a lot of help is the area where your body is trying to move through, say, your phase 2 detoxification. And that includes a whole bunch of pathways. One of the big ones is sort of a famous molecule glutathione. Glutathione is helpful in moving things through phase 2 detoxification so they can be eliminated. So the binding helps you eliminate them, that's phase 3, but glutathione and support of glutathione helps to move it out. Now remember from other talks that we've done, glutathione is in the middle of what we call your redox triplet, which is your baseline antioxidant status, which is vitamin C, glutathione, and vitamin E. So normally we're supporting those things to also help the liver with elimination. And then, as we'll talk about in the, the last 8 videos around long COVID, the other thing that can be done which really is helpful, especially if you're already doing the binding and you're supporting glutathione, etc., The other thing that'd be helpful is, uh, to stimulate your body to try and get rid of these chemical toxins. So sweating helps with that, and we've done a lot of other things on sweating and how to heat your body up, and you can go look in the either the podcast archives or the YouTube archives and you can take a look at those. But sweating, and then once you've got the elimination part handle sweating, that becomes a really important thing, as long as you can tolerate it. Now, as I said at the top of the podcast here, none of this is medical advice. It's just what we're seeing and what we do. You need to work with a qualified medical practitioner to do that. I will put in the show notes some links to practitioner referral services of people who are more likely to be doing treatment in the long COVID space because that's really what you need there. We're just about out of time, but you might be saying, well, if you're only halfway through this 16-part podcast, what's coming? We're going to talk about therapies coming up: light therapy, intravenous therapies, heat therapies, hyperbaric oxygen, and then we're gonna Kind of also look at what do we do with nervous system inflammation, fatigue, energy deficits, what are some of the integrative treatments that are very, very commonly used, etc. So those things are coming in the following podcasts as well. Please like, share, and subscribe, and do notifications, whatever way you get this particular podcast. We're on really all of the pod burners. We're on YouTube. If you can, if you like YouTube, please join our channel over there. And how do you find all these? Just go to my hub website, which is dranow.com, D-R-A-N-O-W, and it's got links to all of these various sites. So you can pick the one that you like and you can consume the podcast that way. But I am out of time for today, and so I want to thank you for listening and thank you for getting halfway through our Long COVID series. I'll see you all next week.