WHY CAN’T I GET BETTER? Chronic Illness, Post-COVID, and More: **CELL & MITOCHONDRIAL DAMAGE

This is a show about opening the often mysterious world of how doctors think and how science works. This program exists to educate and empower you, the listener. Good day and welcome to Medicine Health. This is Dr. Paul Anderson, and we're in our series of, uh, Why Can't I Get Better? And this segment, we're going to do a dive into the parts of your cell that get damaged when you have chronic illness. Or even a bad acute illness that turns into maybe a subacute or a chronic illness, and what we, uh, what we gain and what we lose when that happens, and then also what we can do about it as we're going along. So getting right into why can't I get better. So we've done other segments that were about things like toxins and other infections and many other things like that. So We're just going to keep going along there, but I was thinking about it as we were working on this series, and I thought, well, one of the things that really becomes quite problematic is damage to cells due to an illness, and then the cells not getting healthier after the illness is over. So when we're thinking about why can't I get better and what role does my cell health play, it actually plays quite a lot of a role, of course, in, in your body because we are, you know, more than the sum of our parts. But the sum of our parts largely is a lot of cells that are trying to work together to do what they do. And there's, you know, every cell has a specific job that it's supposed to do. And we put them together and, and those usually make tissues, and then the tissues can make organs and other things of that nature. So you can imagine if we damage ourselves enough, we're going to wind up having dysfunction at a body-wide level. So this particular, you know, series that we're doing is really for people who have some lingering problem going on, whether it's a long-term chronic illness, or maybe they were healthy and then they got some acute illness, acute infection, and now they have sort of a lingering illness Or maybe now they have a long version of that particular illness. And it, you know, could be COVID, it could be pneumonia, it could be any number of other things. This also happens after traumas like surgery or accidents, things like that. And you wind up not being the person that you were before. You're chronically ill in one way or the other. So when we get to yourself, Your cell does a lot of work, and we've all seen little pictures of cells with the little organelles inside. And what I wanna focus on is a couple of parts of your cell that are implicated in you not feeling well. So your cell first has a membrane around the outside. So we could think of that like the walls and the roof and the floor of a house. So the membrane is there for a number of reasons, but one of the big reasons is, is that we want to regulate what goes into and out of the cell from the point of view of putting nutrition and other good things into the cell and then exporting things like used up chemistry and toxins and just waste products to get out. And then those used up, you know, chemistry and waste products, et cetera, are gonna circulate around and usually be filtered out through your liver or kidneys or a little bit of both and get outta your body. So the membranes around your cell are one of the big areas where you can get a lot of damage. Now, one of the areas of damage is on the outer part of the membrane. You can collect a lot of toxic material, and we did a little section on toxins and chronic illness. But the idea there is, is that you have this very dynamic— the cell membrane. So it's not— I likened it to the house walls and roof and You know, floor, but it's very dynamic. It has a lot of little passageways that let things in or out. It has a lot of communication devices to communicate with your immune system and sometimes your nervous system, etc., depending on what type of cell it is. So the membrane has a lot going for it. Well, when we get sick and traumatized, etc., the cell membrane will actually start to change the way that it does business. And that can be because, like I said, of things like toxic influences. It can also be due to the fact that you've had a lot of inflammation. And so the lipid and phosphates that make the phospholipid bilayer that are the bulk of your cell membrane, they can become more and more inflamed. And an inflamed cell membrane is not a healthy cell membrane. So that's a real important thing as well. So they get damaged. Well, then when cells get damaged, what happens? Well, if the cell membrane is damaged, then its ability to crosstalk with other cells and other parts of your system become diminished. The ability of that cell to get information from the outside, such as hormonal input, hormonal information, energy substrates that come in to try and help make energy and all that stuff, and even sometimes getting rid of junk, getting, you know, taking the trash out of the cell slows down. The other thing is on the inside of your cell, you've got all these different little— they call them organelles— and things like ribosomes and all sorts of other cool-sounding things. And they float around in this fluid called your cytosol. And inside the cytosol, there's going to be a number of mitochondria as well, which is another one of your organelles. We talk a lot about mitochondria because their job is to create the energy that your cell operates on. And so one of the things that I've usually said is one of the most common complaints of people that have some chronic problem going on is that their energy is diminished. It's not like it used to be. And your energy comes from a couple of places. One is your brain and your brain's perception of how you're doing energetically, but the other is the sum total of all of your cellular metabolism and activity. Well, the majority of your cell metabolism for most cell types comes from the mitochondria. So if they're cooking along and they're making the normal amount of energy, you are going to have a normal amount of energy output. You're going to feel more energetic, and you're going to feel more normal, quote unquote, for you. So if I go and through chronic illness and inflammation and trauma and all this other stuff, and I, uh, you know, attack your body with those things, and then they're still hanging around, your cells are going to become damaged. So the membrane part that does the crosstalk with the other cells and with your immune system and your nervous system sometimes, etc., that slows down. Then the energy-producing mitochondria on the inside, they can slow down because They may not be getting enough of what they need moved through the cell. This is a very dynamic system. So you have good stuff going in like oxygen and nutrients and things like that, and they go in and some of them go into the mitochondria and then they help to run this process called OXPHOS that then helps give us energy units. Well, then they pump out carbon dioxide and waste products, and then the cell makes waste products. Then those have to be packaged up and like I said, sent else, like taking out the trash. Well, if you get a little backup in that system, what happens is it changes the dynamics of the good stuff coming in. It slows them down. So the upshot of that is that your cellular and mitochondrial damage will start to make either tissue and organ function problems, meaning you could get an inflamed or dysfunctional organ. You know, that happens with your brain, your liver, etc. It can also just affect your overall feeling of energy. So then it comes to, well, what, what do I do about that? Well, the first thing that you have to look at is, am I still involved in the, you know, active process? Am I still have an active infection? Uh, am I still recovering from a bad trauma, an accident or surgery or something like that? If you are, you just kind of have to take care of yourself till you get on the other side. If you're on the other side and you're healed from the original event, but you still don't feel well, then your goals really are to try and get your cells tuned up, so to speak, and working as well as they can. So one of the things you can do is to start kind of forcing the intake of good things and the output of bad things from your cell. by starting to move your body more. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to go from doing nothing to, you know, running marathons or something like that. But what it does mean is you need to get your blood moving a little bit. And you need then your, you know, your liver and your spleen and your other organs to kind of percolate that blood through to help filter it, to help remove some of these, you know, metabolic toxins and other stuff. Your lungs can take care of the carbon dioxide and the oxygen. And that will start to help. Now, initially, if you're really, really tired and you're not doing very much. You need to start low and just move a little bit, but any little bit helps. The next thing is something your grandmother probably told you is very popular nowadays, which is hydration. Literally, the highway that all of these things run on to go in and out of your cell is fluid, and most of that fluid is water. And so the more dehydrated you are, the worse you will feel because your little fluid superhighway of moving good stuff in and bad stuff out. It's going to slow down on you. The next thing that you could do, go to the whole other end of the spectrum of, you know, so, you know, eating, drinking, and moving your body is stuff that you have full control over. In a lot of people, we'll do hyperbaric oxygen therapy, for example, because it also forces more oxygen saturation in the fluid part of your blood, which forces more oxygen in and gets the mitochondria running again. Now that, of course, you need a healthcare provider to help you with. In the middle, and again, this is just for information, you should run any of this by your healthcare providers. Don't take advice from people on the internet as far as your healthcare goes. But things that we will often do with people to help the cell membranes and help the mitochondria function include things like the nutrient alpha-lipoic acid. It's very good for a number of things, including your mitochondria. Coenzyme Q10, you've heard a lot about that. That's a real good one for cell health, mitochondrial health. Basic vitamins and minerals, especially the B vitamins, and then multi-minerals, you know, beyond what you get in your food. Vitamin C is also helpful there. And then amino acids from the protein that you're eating. And if you're really kind of protein-bound, Or that's another reason that things will slow down and you don't want them to. So all of those things can be helpful, but keep in mind that the cell is the basic unit and the mitochondria is the energy producer of the basic unit. So if you have some of these other things that have gone on that we've talked about in previous shows, or, or we're gonna talk about in our coming segments, such as toxicity or hormone problems or whatever, you have to do all this cell work to help clean things up and get the energy moving back again. And you have to try and rebalance the other problems that are below or above your cellular issues. And that could be hormonal, that could be toxic, that could be infections that aren't cleared. It could be any number of things. All right, well, that's the end of this session. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine Health. Please like, share, and subscribe. And, uh, we're going to put links, uh, for a number of things in the show notes, and they'll also be over on our YouTube channel as well. But for right now, we're going to pause and move on to our next session in just a moment.