In this December 30 2021 episode of Medicine and Health, Dr. Paul Anderson reviews the current state of the Omicron wave, emphasizing that while the variant spreads rapidly, it generally causes milder disease. He explains the difference between infections, diagnosed cases, symptomatic cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, noting that most hospital admissions are incidental Omicron infections. Anderson then shifts to the central theme: practical, at‑home management for people who test positive. He outlines a three‑tiered home‑care framework—Tier 1 (pre‑treatment with high‑dose IV vitamin C for high‑risk patients), Tier 2 (basic hygienic measures such as sleep, hydration, easy‑to‑digest nutrition, and sauna for those accustomed), and Tier 3 (a multi‑drug regimen that includes doxycycline or azithromycin, antifungals, zinc‑ionophore agents, monoclonal antibodies, and oral antivirals). He supplements the drug strategy with a detailed supplement protocol (vitamin D, zinc, vitamin C, vitamin A, B‑complex, probiotics, N‑acetylcysteine/glutathione, quercetin) and practical dietary advice (low‑sugar, soft, nutrient‑dense foods like broth). Anderson cites data from a collaborative early‑treatment network of roughly 2‑3 thousand patients, showing very low hospitalization, mortality, and post‑COVID sequelae rates, and he addresses the political controversy surrounding early treatment, arguing that it is not vaccine‑hesitancy but a necessary response to a highly transmissible, low‑severity variant. The episode concludes with calls to follow the linked resources, share the content, and stay updated as the situation evolves.
Chapters
All right, good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today, uh, we're doing a, a 2-parter here all in one. We have some quick updates, but what we really want to talk about today is, uh, so you or family member or everybody has COVID, what do you do now? And one of the reasons I decided to do this was there's a lot of good material out there. I've done a couple of updates on Delta and Omicron and tried to get through some of the kind of quasi-mysterious data about how bad or not bad it is, etc. et cetera. But the events of the last couple of weeks have showed me that what we have been saying, and by we, I mean myself and people with certainly a lot bigger reach in the scientific community who have podcasts or updates or whatever on YouTube or radio, et cetera, is coming true. And that is that Omicron spreads very quickly. even though in most people it's a very low-level disease, which is great. So you're gonna get sick, but you get some real good immunity from it. And both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are getting sick. So it's like a booster, you know, so there's a lot of quote unquote good. But what I've noticed in the last couple of weeks is I've been doing a lot of work with people who are acutely ill with COVID And because this is unlikely to send most people to the hospital, Most people now are interested in, well, what in the world do we do about it now that we're treating this at home? So I wanted to get into that. Now, the first thing is I'm going to mention links below, and we're going to put those when we transfer this. If you're listening live on Facebook right now, there won't be any links here. If you're listening on CTR Radio Network, we won't have links there, but we'll move it over to YouTube tomorrow or so, and I'll put the links in the description box that I'm talking about. So, um, I wanted to go through a couple of things. One was some updates that, that were originally going to be this show, but I'm going to shorten them up. And then the other are going to be some things I have links for, but also just some practical experience about what are some strategies that you can use should you get the Omicron variant and have it be symptomatic. Now, as I've said on the other programs about Omicron, Pretty much they figure 100% of, you know, everybody's gonna be exposed. There's gonna be a lot of people who are exposed who are asymptomatic. And you may, you know, other than, you know, clean living and resting and all of that stuff, you may not need to do anything differently depending on your immune status. But I do just, I wanna go through, you know, one thing. I think we'll only have one graphic this time. I know some of you really liked the Lego graphics I used last time. So if you're interested in the Lego graphics about Proportionality of hospitalization. Go back to the previous one, and the first two links when we have them in the description box on YouTube are going to be the two links to the last two shows on Omicron. But this one here, if you all remember, I added some color to it again. My low-tech graphics here. The outer box is infections. That's the biggest number. It's always the biggest number, and it's always the number that we don't really know the number because. You cannot just continuously test 100% of everyone, although there are some smaller countries that get pretty close to that. But we're not, you know, we're talking about North America where I am, especially United States. It's not going to happen. We, you know, I had talked to people this morning who've been exposed and they've been contact traced and they can't find any testing. I know it's not really that funny, but it's just the way it is. So, um, Thank heaven that Omicron is a fairly low-level disease-causing variant. So outer one is infections, always the biggest number, always the one that we don't know the most about. Next number that people get all worked up about is called cases. That means there's a diagnosis. Now, a case can be either asymptomatic and you happen to get swabbed and it's positive, or symptomatic, and you got swabbed and it's positive and you have symptoms. And so a number that is smaller than that one here in the yellow is symptomatic cases. So infections are the biggest, cases are next. So when people say cases are going up, and if you go and you look at some of the links I'm gonna share with you about, you know, the Omicron cases just going crazy, but hospitalizations are going down, great. the cases are going crazy because everyone's going to be exposed and it infects so quickly and so easily. But a case does not a disease make. Symptomatic cases, on the other hand, that means it's a smaller number. That means that you've got some symptoms. Now, we've talked about symptoms, so we don't need to get deeply into it, but with Omicron, you're— Fatigue early on, a cough, fever, some other things like that. You're not usually getting into pneumonia, etc. I do wanna make one caveat that there's still some leftover Delta in North America. And so a lot of the people in the hospital right now that you're looking at are probably, who are doing worse, probably more Delta patients than Omicron patients. But Omicron will overtake Delta because it has a better derived gain of function that it has, meaning it can infect more people more quickly than Delta. So there's that. And if you want all the background on that, I've got some, some links there. But then what do we have? So we have symptomatic cases, then we have little tiny hospitalizations, and this little dot is deaths. So you always want to keep in mind when you're reading, oh God, the cases are going crazy and they're going straight up, which they are, um, that's great, it's good information. It just means everyone's getting exposed. And like we've been saying for the last month, everybody's going to get exposed. Whether you become symptomatic or not is another thing. Hence the topic today. Now, one thing I'll just remind you of, if you are watching on YouTube, please like, share, comment, subscribe, all of those good things. And as a disclaimer, remember, I am a doctor, but I'm not your doctor. I'm giving information from the medical science and the news and all of that. It's interesting. And I'll give links to information, but you need to make healthcare decisions with your medical team. And as with all things, if you're medical team doesn't, you know, want to do any of the things you're talking about, you can always get a second opinion. But don't just take talking heads on YouTube or TV or the radio at face value for anything. Most of us will tell you, you know, do your own checking, do your own work with your own healthcare providers. I'm just telling you what's going on from my perspective. Now, The first part of this program, I want to do a really brief update. And instead of doing the whole program about these things, because they were really curious and interesting to me, and I think interesting to other folks, I'm just going to leave you some links to some trusted sources that some are video, some are reading that you can go through. But when you get to the YouTube and you look down into the description box, the updates I wanted to talk to you about first, the first 2 YouTube links are going to be the Omicron updates that I did, which nothing's really changed from those. And the ones that I did, you know, 3 or 4 weeks ago, still pretty right on with our predictions there. Um, the next is a YouTube by a scientist in the United Kingdom. So remember, Southern Africa first, and then the UK and Scandinavia next, and Europe are experiencing it now, and then North America kind of lagging behind there in this worldwide spread of Omicron. So we look to, uh, Southern Africa and UK and Scandinavia and the rest of Europe to see kind of what's going on. So the first one, it's, uh, labeled most Omicron hospitalizations are incidental. And what that means is, I believe now the stats are up around 80% of people in the hospital with quote-unquote Omicron are not there for Omicron. They're there for some other disease that they had. And because they swab everybody when they go to the hospital, these people didn't even know that they had Omicron. They're just positive for it, but they're there for some other disease. 80% in some cases. So that means that the symptomatic nature of people needing to go to the hospital is quite low. And so that's a good one. But that, that 20-minute video that I put a link to there from a European scientist goes into the data in great depth and goes into signs, symptoms, dangers, you know, all of those sorts of things. Another one that I put a link in from the United States is a White House update, I believe from just a couple days ago, that the cases are soaring. Like we've said, 100% of people are going to be exposed probably in North America and everywhere else in the world, but deaths are on the decline because Delta is getting pushed out. People in the hospital are not getting sick and not dying at the same rate. In fact, the rate is minuscule. And there, if even if you go into the hospital because it's more or respiratory like many coronaviruses are, your chances of coming through it are quite high. The next one is just— this is going to be like a ping pong, a political ping pong thing, so I just put the link in. It's to a Politico article about the CDC defending their altered guidance on Omicron and you know, stay-at-home mandates or not, or whatever is going on. And a lot of those were because they don't want the economy to shut down. A lot of what you hear is, oh, my hospital is overwhelmed right now, is really because of 2 things. One is, you know, we let go of a lot of hospital people who didn't get vaccinated. But then the other one is, if, you know, if you get exposed, you have to quarantine. So they're, they're sort of shortening up the isolation times and quarantines. That's That's only if you want to look at that. That's, as I said, it's going to be a big political football. It goes back and forth all over. And then the next one, which I want to talk a lot about today, but I'm going to move on to treatment really. But this is some really interesting information from a scientist who is in drug development like myself. His primary job is in the world of oncology and oncology drug development. He's very interesting to listen to. But he's talking about recent research that came out about myocarditis, so the inflammation of the heart muscle, and immunization versus wild infection. And up until now, we've been thinking, and a lot of people have been saying, well, it's worse with wild infection. This data is showing essentially in some groups of people where the myocarditis is more common, it's actually more common in immunization-caused as opposed to infection-caused. Now, it's a lot deeper topic and subject. He does a great job, and you, again, you can go to the Myocarditis Update, click on that link, and he does an awesome job talking about it, so I don't need to do that. And then the final one was a paper I put in that I think we might have talked about before from the New England Journal of Medicine, and this one is about prior infection and future immunity. And so One of the more common questions that, you know, we get is, well, if I, you know, if I had COVID before, um, will I carry that immunity? And there's been some speculative reporting that a lot of people latched on to as hardcore science that said, uh, oh, you know, your natural immunity wanes. Well, we've been through this, and I'll put a link way down below in the links in the other Others Ran links about that's sometimes going going off B-cell or antibody immunity, but they ignore half of the immune system, which is T-cell immunity, which stays rather robust if you've had the infection. So more information in that paper, which does show that, you know, if you've been infected, you have fairly robust immunity actually. And then if you go to the B and T-cell updates that I've done, you can see, you know, why that probably is. So this all again going to, you know, You're starting to see countries and political systems starting to say, look, we're going to get as many people immunized as possible, but we know that immunized folks can still spread the disease. They still get the disease. In fact, in that one Danish study I showed last time, double and triple vaccinated people were 80% or something of the infected people. So it's not like, you know, it covers you on the front end. It probably does help you on the downstream end if you have to go to the hospital, keeps you from maybe worse disease. But there's a lot of reasons for that, and those are in the links there too. So what I really wanted to do though, so that was that sort of quick update that was going to be its own show, but I just put the links in. You're interested in any of those topics, go in the description box after you like, share, and subscribe on the YouTube and You know, uh, take a look at the links if, if any of that interests you. And again, there's just 2 scientists who are very, very good at what they do. They're very level-headed, um, they're very reasonable in their approach to the science, and they present things very, very well, much better than I could do probably on some of those topics. So you can go look those guys up. They, they also have much larger followings than I do. All right, so what in the world do we do, uh, when we have COVID? Now, on the description, I think it says something like, um, what should early treatment look like? Now, early treatment is something that has become, um, again, another one of these sort of like political football things that's gone back and forth. And, you know, to be completely straight up about early treatment, a lot of early treatment, especially before the vaccine, was squashed down because they didn't want people thinking they could treat it instead of getting vaccinated. And at least in North America, anything we can do to get everybody vaccinated is what we're supposed to do. That's sort of the line, you know, from the government. So you see things like Dr. Fauci's saying, well, we should make, you know, domestic air travel— you have to have vaccination card to do domestic. Now, that's not a rule, that's just his opinion. But he goes right on to say, well, that we need to do anything we can to, um, you know, to move people towards vaccination. You could call it coercion, you could call it some other thing, but it's moving people toward that. So that's the thing. And the way that they look at this, uh, from the point of view of public health is Because our goal is vaccination, we don't want to focus on early treatment. Now, there's a lot of really famous intensive care doctors and people working in hospitals who do early treatment, and they, you know, they do a lot of that. I've done a lot of it, and I'm not one of those famous people, but I've done a fair amount. A lot of people doing early treatment, but we've had to kind of keep it, you know, under wraps, so to speak, because early treatment, uh, was interpreted as you're promoting vaccine hesitancy. And, uh, you know, and I've had people, you know, accuse me that online and all this stuff, and that's not the point. The point is just sharing information. And, uh, and, you know, people are going to get vaccinated or they're not going to get vaccinated, uh, probably no matter what anybody tells them at this point. Early on, maybe it was different. But we're at a point where we really should talk about early treatment, because when you now have this overwhelming surge of something like Omicron that a lot of people will be asymptomatic with it, a lot of people will be low symptomatic, most people are going to be treating it at home, uh, you ought to have an idea what to do other than sit around and stare at the wall and wonder if you're treating your Omicron appropriately. So a couple of things. Um, the first thing is, I think we covered the question of why is early treatment controversial. And, and really the bottom line is that, you know, there, there— I don't believe this, but there are people that believe that early treatment equals vaccine hesitancy or vaccine pushback. And there's nothing further from the truth in my mind. Early treatment— and I've been involved in a lot of early treatment with patients, and I've mentioned this before, that I'm part of a group of clinicians around North America that shares data just amongst ourselves. To my knowledge, none of it's been published. Some of it's been published somewhere, but the mass has not been published anywhere. So for those of you who want to say, oh well, publish it and then we'll believe it, you know, yeah, right. In the future, someone probably will publish it, but at the moment, you know, everybody's just too busy treating these actual patients. But one of the things I think I put into the description was what is, um, over 2,000 patient cases at this point. Now, these are not my cases. Some of them are, uh, but these are some, uh, coalition members who do early treatment. And some of the early treatment is very similar. Some of it is very diverse. Uh, but what do we see with it? Well, one of the things, and I'll start to describe then some early treatment and the varieties of early treatment, One of the things that we're seeing, and this is, you know, at this point over 2,000 patients, it's probably going close to 3,000, and I've got a colleague and a friend who has a large clinic who's done, you know, a few hundred more, and they're going to start sharing as well. What we're seeing, and this is even with the original and alpha, beta, delta variants, etc., so not just Omicron, We're seeing very low hospitalization rates with early treatment, which is great, even in people with comorbidities. That's number one. That's a real silver lining there. We're seeing very low amounts of post-COVID illness, and right now, rightly so. Post-COVID illness and organ damage are two things that people are saying, well, Omicron may not be bad or kill you here, but you're all going to get post-COVID, you're all going to get organ damage. Well, What we're seeing with this mass of a few thousand patients is if you're treated early appropriately, you do not develop a lot of the organ damage and you do not develop a high propensity towards post-COVID illness. Some people get it. That's a whole other thing, and I've done programs on that. But with earlier treatment, you don't tend to get those things going on. So— You know, again, why not do it? Okay. And at this point, a lot of the people— and if you're looking at, well, early treatment leads to vaccine hesitancy— a lot of people that we're treating now with early treatment are already vaccinated. So they're sick, they're already vaccinated, we have to treat. So there's no hesitancy there. They're, they already, you know, are vaccinated. So you got all that going on. And, and the other thing with these, you know, few thousand patients is that, you know, not only is the hospitalization super low, but the death rate is extremely low. You know, early on it was zero. There might have been, you know, one or two people who passed away, and we don't want anyone to pass away. But if you look at the overall numbers of just sitting around and waiting for COVID to happen to you, early treatment seems like probably a good idea. So a couple of things to consider in the last, probably the last week, I think. By the way, I always do this. It's December 30th, 2021. Any data I share is current as of December 30th, 2021. Anything that happens after this moment, I cannot predict. So some new thing happens or whatever, I'll have to update you on that later. But December 30th, 2021 is what talking about today. Uh, so I believe in the last week, um, I've had a couple of experiences with this big Omicron surge of symptomatic groups where an entire family has, uh, become ill. And, um, uh, so now don't write in and ask me to do this because it's— I would not be able to because I'm not your doctor. But, um, I've made a some more house calls with COVID probably than anything in a long time, where you go and you sort of, you know, interact with an entire family. And so what I'm seeing now with Omicron and where, you know, an entire family pretty much becomes symptomatic, there's kind of a couple of levels of intervention that you do for home care. Now, a lot of the home care intervention that I work with, and certainly these other clinics that are seeing a lot more patients myself are, you know, instructions that I, you know, I'm gonna give you some examples of things that you can just do at home that will be helpful with something like this. And so there's sort of a 3-tiered, you know, setting that I look at with home care. The first tier is, do I have somebody who's maybe high risk high comorbidity. We hear about, you know, people with underlying heart problems and other things. Maybe they got a rapid onset disease, etc. Just, you know, there's— they're kind of a critical one. In those people, sort of as tier 1, where we really want to truncate big problems, this is an area where I've used pretreatment. So before any of the home care, With intravenous high-dose vitamin C. Now, I've published about, and I've written and talked here on YouTube about vitamin C. There's now 2 randomized controlled trials showing that in the hospital it's pretty helpful. And what we find is we catch somebody at home early on and we give them even a higher dose than they would— than we would in the hospital. We can sometimes really shorten up the early disease course, and what happens is as the science shows, and you go back to my vitamin C videos, you can look at that. Um, one of the big things that the, the IV vitamin C does is it cuts down the IL-6, which cuts down a lot of the downstream organ damage cytokines and things of that nature. So if, again, we got a critical case, we were more likely to try and get the person with a first strike with IV vitamin C. Now, if they're lingering, we also do that as well, but that's sort of one on its own tier. The next thing are hygienic and nutrient things, things that you— most people can pull off from home, and I want to go through those. And then the third tier is at-home medication strategies that can be used while you are, you know, at home on your own or with your family fighting, you know, with COVID to try and again make you weather it well, not develop a lot of comorbidity, coinfection. and decrease the amount of, you know, post-COVID syndrome, but also post-COVID organ issues. To the degree that where it comes to some of the nutrient recommendations, I'm working with a group to, you know, author a recommendation to the federal government. Some of you know I do work with the federal government now and then. On drug approval and other things of that nature. So some of us who do that are getting together and just recommending that you know since Omicron is going to be so ubiquitous, it really wouldn't hurt for the government to just say you know at least try these things people. But we'll go through those things now. I wanted to go through, and there there will be in the second part of the description. description on YouTube when we're there. Again, YouTube, please like, share, subscribe, comment, do all those good things. But there'll be some representative, uh, links to science, uh, there about these different things I'm going to talk about. Now, um, will the representative link cover everything? No. You know, and I had someone comment a few months ago about, oh well, you listed this one paper and its conclusions don't match what you said on it. You know, so stop lying or something like that. Well, come on, I'm not going to list 45 papers about one thing. I try and find one that kind of gives you the flavor for it, and then you can look at the references below and you can read all of them if you want to. Um, and what was funny is this, uh, comment was about an area around co-infection, uh, where, yeah, I put a paper up that wasn't, you know, it was a great paper, it was the authors weren't you know, they were sort of on the fence about how bad it is. But there's at least, you know, 15 or 20 other really high-quality papers that prove, you know, beyond any doubt, in my clinical experience with it, you know, co-infections are a big problem with COVID patients. So, you know, whatever, you can say whatever you want, I guess, on the internet. Um, so we'll go here kind of in order, and hygienic and nutrient things go from the things we have to do— eating, drinking, sleeping, all of that stuff— and then verge into supplemental things that we might do on top of it. So let's start out with the things that we have to do or we hope we're doing. And so the first thing when you're sick is to sleep and rest. Now, if, as one of the families I visited this week where the whole family had Omicron, apparently because of the symptoms— I did not have genomics, but Based on the data of what's going around and based on their presentation of not having lower respiratory disease and having these other symptoms, I'm pretty sure it's Omicron. Sleep isn't going to be a big problem if you get Omicron, for the most part, because you're, you're likely to be unconscious-level sleepy for at least 2 or 3 days. Some people don't get this, which is curious to me. Some just kind of feel sluggish. Uh, but most of the people I've talked to, it's just like they're— I was like, well, are you sleeping? And they're like, yeah, I could barely stay awake, you know, for a couple of days. Average is 2 days. I've seen people with none, 1. I've seen people with 3 or 4 days of pretty profound fatigue. So sleep and rest. And the bottom line with that is if your body is asking you to sleep and rest, it is trying to shut down Because when you sleep— and this paper that I linked about sleep and the immune system kind of goes into this— when you sleep, your immune system does a lot of resetting. And so if you're getting sick or you're trying not to get sick, so you're on the preventive side or maybe early illness side or just plain old sick, the worst thing that you can do is not sleep. And I know, you know, in Days passed when my MO was not taking care of myself very well, and I would, uh, you know, I would just to get all of my work done, I just wouldn't sleep. I wouldn't sleep very much. I was always getting sick when stuff came around because I was chronically sleep deprived. That was one big reason. Now, I also am in a profession where I'm exposed to a lot of illness, so that, you know, it's probably a bad combo. Uh, but, but sleep is extremely important. Now, Omicron kind of does this thing where it takes the option away from you because you're so fatigued that you probably will sleep no matter what. But sleep and rest— if your body is asking you to rest and nap and whatever, you need to, you need to just unplug and shut off. Now, one of the things that slows this down and can be a real problem for long-term, you know, immunity and healing and stuff Is, um, we have a lot of great over-the-counter drugs on the market and some prescription drugs on the market, certainly, that allow us to not feel symptoms when we are sick. Now, that's always a balancing act. So if you need something for pain, uh, don't be in pain. Take whatever you need. There's lots of options there, both in the natural realm and in the pharmaceutical realm and all that. But there's a lot of drugs that kind of, you know, have a combination of, uh, pain relief and some, you know, cytokine stimulant in them so that you can, you know, keep, uh, keep awake, go to work and all this stuff. Now, in modern times, it used to be that was really common for people to do. Now, in modern times, you go to work and you— they work finds out that you, you're working with COVID you know, there's, there's a lot that's going to hit the fan after that. Because, you know, your work— certainly your people at work don't want you spreading your COVID around just because you took a, you know, some daytime cold medicine or something like that. So, you know, not maybe giving in to just being in pain all the time, but, but resting when your body asks for it is probably one of the wisest things you can do. And I think that people don't realize that some of these basic, what I call hygienic things, the things that we do to live, like eating, drinking, sleeping, actually have a huge effect on our immune system. And I'm starting with sleep because it's probably the most overlooked part of immune support. So sleep as much as you need to, rest up, and when your body's done asking for rest, you can go back to working out and doing all that stuff. The next is around hydration. And I've got, you know, there's tons, and I've put 2 2 papers in here about hydration and immunity. I have talked about this since forever, but especially COVID began. And that one of the big things about hydration is if we are looking at this virus that comes in through the respiratory system or bacteria or anything else, as we will talk about, the more dehydrated your mucous membranes are, the less immunoglobulin A is hanging out in there. the less it can trap the virus. So the last thing you want to be is dehydrated. So this is one of the reasons that we tell people, uh, not only to drink a lot of fluids and liquids, but not to do dehydrating things like a lot of caffeinated beverages or alcohol or other things that tend to dehydrate us. Those are sort of at odds with good mucosal function. So hydration and sleep Like, you, you know, because legitimately, you know, I've heard people say, well, not everybody, you know, can afford like all these supplements or they can't do whatever. Great. But we all do have to sleep. We all have the ability to sleep, hopefully. We all have to hydrate. We should have a source of water somewhere near where we live, at least certainly in North America. You can do those 2 things and you're gonna have to do 'em anyway. You're gonna die. So sleeping and hydrating is very important. Now, the next thing, and to a degree I'm kind of going in an order here, but the next thing sort of divides up into a couple of sides, eating and then nutrient supplementation. So it's all nutrition. But it's really 2 different things. So again, if we're going with pretty much you have to eat or you're going to die eventually, you got to hydrate, you got to sleep. Well, when you're sick, we've talked about this a lot, like the last thing you want when you're sick is a couple of things. One is a lot of effort being expended by your body to digest things. Okay. Yeah. What that means is you want to eat things that are easy to digest and give you nutrition. Also, when you're sick, you often don't feel like eating anything anyway, so you just want basic things. This is why your mom or your grandma or some other, you know, kind person when you're a kid and you're sick, you know, would probably be on getting you to sip some water and stuff, try and have like soup or something of that nature. The reasons that soup can be good, we all know that, you know, there's research like chicken soup actually has some anti-infective and immune properties. But the reasons that soup can be good, and especially what we know now with, you know, augmenting the nutrient status of soup, like with bone broth and other stuff, you can get a lot of nutrients. It's liquid. It's fairly easy to go down. And even if you go back to you know, over 100 years ago, there were recipes that doctors had. There was this doctor named Dr. Beeler, long, 100+ years ago. And he had a thing he would give his patients called Beeler's broth, which basically was just a soup. And then he would add, you know, some high-value vegetable nutrients that were just cooked down. You know, now we might make like a smoothie or Or, you know, or, or a, you know, blended soup or something. He just had this way of cooking it down like that. But bottom line is it's easy to get down, it's easy to digest and all that stuff. The next thing is, though, that the last thing you want beyond a heavy meal when you're sick is you want high nutrients and low junk. So you don't want a lot of insulinogenic foods. You don't want foods that stimulate a lot of sugar and insulin activity. So when we're sick, often we do crave comfort food, and a lot of comfort food is sugary. And what I'd recommend early on, certainly in an illness— sleep, hydrate, do things like soups and soft foods and stuff like that, and, and just have like as little sugar at all as possible. Okay, the reason being that the more you're working on processing sugar in your body, the more your insulin spikes, the more muted your immune function actually goes. So when it comes to diet, you know, the hygienic part you're gonna have to eat anyway is keep it soft and easy to digest and high nutrient value. If you have available to you, whether you make it yourself or you buy it off the shelf or whatever, like bone broth, you know, or really good quality broth. Those are real good because they bring a lot of other nutrients along. You can also just, you know, you can make your own things, or someone, if you have a non-sick family member, they can do that for you. But keep it easy, keep it with, you know, a bit of a lot of nutrients from the plants and some protein sources. And also, you know, soup is Somewhat hydrating too. Now, on the supplement side of food, that means that beyond eating light, easy, well, you know, well-hydrated, high nutrient value food, we can add supplements on top of it. And I want to go through the top supplements, and I'll have a link to a newsletter I wrote about supplements. and early COVID and all that stuff. But before I get there, I just want to make one point, and this actually was underscored by a colleague of mine who very early in, uh, 2020, uh, developed COVID. And, uh, you know, she's over 70, um, relatively healthy, but also was over 70, and it was early on. We didn't know how COVID was going to go. And she had 2 pretty sick weeks. Remember, this is early when COVID was hitting people with the pneumonia and everything. Never had to go to the hospital. She did, of course, you know, sleep, rest, hydrate, did all of the supplements. But one of the things that she did, because she had available at home, was to sauna. And I put in a link about heat, and there are many, many, many links and research papers about heat and the immune system. But But kind of like hydration, it gets overlooked. Now obviously don't start saunaing if you're not used to it or if you have underlying heart conditions or other things without getting cleared by your doctor. But if you're used to doing sauna like she was, she just started to navigate. She couldn't leave her house anyway. She had COVID. She just took in a lot of fluids. She slept and rested, and then she would sauna 2 or 3 times a day. Uh, and, you know, maybe she went a little overboard, but it seemed to help her. And what she said was it not only helped her pain, uh, because of the cytokines you get, achiness and stuff like that, uh, it helped her sleep better, and it helped a number of other things. And, uh, she didn't even need any of the medications. that we're going to talk about. So I think that was pretty impressive. So beyond that, I'm going to have a few things in there. Like I say, I've got a newsletter that kind of goes through a lot of the nutrients and references for them. I put in some new— newer ones about zinc and vitamin D and how vitamin D and zinc levels, the higher they are, the lower your severity of COVID So, you know, people, you know, get upset and say, well, you're telling people they can prevent you know, disease with a vitamin or whatever. No, this is, this is pretty good science from hospitals that just shows what we know. You know, your immune system is heavily manipulated by vitamin D through vitamin D receptor systems and a bunch of other ways. And if we are low, which most of us are, even if you're out in the sun a lot, and the darker your skin is, the lower your levels usually are. Vitamin D, if you only had one thing to take, I would make it vitamin And the other thing is, yes, vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, so you don't want to take it forever. It'll build up. But if you haven't been taking vitamin D or you've been taking a low amount like 1,000 or 2,000 international units, you can easily do it for a couple of months and then get your levels checked. And by more, I usually give people 10,000 to 25,000 IUs. Now, You do this with your doctor. I'm not your doctor. I'm just telling you what I do. But you can do that early on, and then, and then you get checked at this point. Usually we back off on the dose over time. Now with zinc, the thing that I usually recommend to people is, number one, zinc will make you throw up if you take it on empty stomach. Most people, some people not, but most people. So take all your mineral things like in the middle of a meal. I'd recommend you take all your supplements that way for the most part. So eat some food, or eat half your soup, take your minerals, your zinc, whatever, and eat the other half of your soup. Drink a lot of water. That way it keeps you from getting a tummy ache. Now, what I normally do with people— a lot of people are taking zinc but none of the other minerals. Zinc goes along with many other minerals. I usually have people get a multi-mineral. It's got a decent amount of zinc, you know. 30 to 50 milligrams in a dose. Might take 2 or 3 pills to do that, but then you get the other minerals along with it. Very, very important. We talked about vitamin D. Another fat soluble that I usually use early on is vitamin A, not as beta-carotene, but as fat soluble vitamin A. Tends to have good effects on respiratory problems, et cetera. What I would usually recommend though is if you don't have the guidance of your healthcare team on how much vitamin A to take, I wouldn't start it. Just, it's a little more tricky than vitamin D, but vitamin A is another one I use with our patients. And then vitamin C, and of course we go into this in all the vitamin C things. Go back and look at those. It's in the newsletter I'll link you to. But biggest danger of vitamin C, it's water soluble, so there's not a lot of danger other than you get diarrhea. if you take too much. So divide it up, start with 500 to 1,000 milligrams with each meal and at bedtime. And as soon as your bowels get loose, that's enough, back off a little bit. Some people, you'll notice if you're really sick, you can take 10 times as much as you can when you're not sick. Fine, take it. Your bowels will tell you when you've got too much. There's also probiotics. Most people are familiar with those and B vitamins. So again, if, you know, we're kind of prioritizing vitamin D and minerals like zinc, kind of top of the heap with vitamin C. Then we get to, you know, vitamin A and probiotics and B vitamins for collateral support. And then there are the thiols. So thiols are things like N-acetylcysteine and glutathione. Now, N-acetylcysteine is also a drug that we use in people when their ventilators get too thick. It's a mucolytic substance, but it's, it's a supplement. Now, right now the FDA is trying to make N-acetylcysteine not available as a supplement. There's a big legal battle going on over that, but there's actually research that shows that N-acetylcysteine is actually very useful at the ACE interface with COVID and the human. So if you can find NAC, great. If you can't— it's water soluble too— if you can't, you can find glutathione. these days. And NAC also is a part of glutathione. So if you can't get NAC, you can use glutathione. Glutathione, again, I've done this, other more in-depth things about glutathione. And so NAC or glutathione. There's also, you know, one of the contributors in our early treatment group, they do a lot of botanicals, so plant medicine and homeopathy and other things like that. Those are very specialized, so I don't tend to talk about them because you need a practitioner who does those things. But there's a lot of options in there. If you have a healthcare practitioner on your team who works in either of those areas, please, please avail yourself of them. And then there's, you know, many, many other things. Now, the one other thing that I, that I think is kind of a top-tier thing though is quercetin. It's a bioflavonoid. And it actually is immunomodulatory, but it also helps your body take the zinc up into the cells. It's zinc ionophore, and that's very important too. So again, just to really quickly go over the nutrients: minerals, especially zinc, but minerals, trace minerals, vitamin D, C, vitamin A, B vitamins, probiotics, and then NAC or glutathione, whatever your available to get in your locality. All of those are very, very useful. And I just have people take those from the get-go. You can also take them for maintenance. Now, if you're going to take these things for months and months and months, work with somebody to work on what's appropriate dosing. But early on, if you're stuck at home, as so many people I've been talking to the last week with Omicron and your whole family's got it, You can just start taking these things and take them with food and take them with enough fluids so you don't get nauseated. Now, what do we do on the medical side for early treatment? Now, early treatment involves— and, and I'm going to talk about it conceptually. I've already told you early treatment in a critical case, I'll do intravenous vitamin C. Uh, in a hospital case, if they, if they will allow it through the formulary will recommend continuous IV vitamin C, as I published about in that paper. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It's a small number of hospitals in the US doing it, but they are— a few are, more in other countries were able to pull that off. But at home, what do we do? So what did I take in the home delivery for these folks? You want multifactorial drugs if you're going to go to the drug layer. And with the drug layer, we have things that have triple, quadruple purpose, like doxycycline. It's antiviral. It's antiviral actually against COVID. It's an antibacterial antibiotic, but it's also immunomodulatory. So we use that or azithromycin, a macrolide, because they also cover some of the hanger-on or the coinfection bacteria that get in your lungs. So why not do dual, triple, couple, uh, effect. I also give people an antifungal drug. Uh, there's a few options there, but that's because there's so many fungus that will pile on when you have COVID, especially in your lungs. So there's an antibiotic multifunctional like doxy or azithromycin, antifungal drugs that we use, um, and then there's the drugs that I can't say their name or, you know, they'll deplatform, uh, but some of them start with an I, some start with an H, some start with an A or an M depending on where you are in the world and what you're able to get. And we use those drugs because they will provide collateral comorbidity, lower the amount of co-infections. They are also, some of them, zinc ionophores. They are all immunomodulatory. And in our experience, if you add those in the things like the doxycycline, the azithromycin, and the antifungals, uh, on top of all the goodies that you're doing, uh, you get a lot better, uh, long-term outcome. You truncate the disease. And as I said earlier, you have less organ damage, you have less hospitalization, much less death, and less post-COVID. Earlier you do all this stuff, the less all those other bad things. Now, can they still happen? Sure. But But based on our few thousand people that we're watching over time, the numbers are very small who are transitioning over to organ problems post-COVID and hospitalization, certainly over to death. Now, um, when we talk about these medical things, you know, and as I said, there's, uh, you know, there's some things that, uh, like, I just can't talk about the names of some of those drugs that we use, uh, because it's just too politically dicey right now, but you can probably read between the lines and figure out what we're talking about there. And I've talked about on other programs, there's certainly the monoclonal antibodies you can get through your hospital. We've got some new oral COVID pills and we got some other stuff coming out, but just for when I show up at the house and the whole family's sick, or, you know, when I'm working on the phone with a family and they're all pretty sick, we do all of those things. We do the diet and nutrient stuff, we do the supplement stuff, and then we do the medication strategy. And then if we need to add things on, or if a person needs to go to the hospital, sure, they go to the hospital. But our goal is to keep them out and to keep them from getting all of the post-COVID junk that goes on, which so far is working out pretty well. But what's also working out is our time. Uh, our time is now over pretty much for this program. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson with Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson, and we also are going to put this over on YouTube. And so all these links I've been telling you about will be down below in the description box. Please follow Contact Talk Radio. That's who you're watching right now. Follow us on Facebook and on the website. Uh, on YouTube, please like, share, subscribe, make comments. All of that really helps the the platform out. All right, well, I'm out of time. It's Dr. Paul. I hope this has been helpful, and I will see you all on YouTube or the radio or somewhere next week. Thank you.
