Nicotine for Long Covid with Evan H. Hirsch, MD - #139

Nicotine for Long Covid with Evan H. Hirsch, MD - #139

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Hey there, Evan Hirsch here. Welcome back to the EnergyMD podcast where we help you resolve your chronic fatigue, whether it is from long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome, so that you can get back to living your best life. So today I'd like to talk to you about nicotine and nicotine patches. So if you have been paying attention in the long COVID world,

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you may have seen some people trying to use nicotine patches and wondering whether it's for you. So I'm gonna provide some education for you today to see whether or not it might be potentially a good treatment for you. So why would nicotine potentially be supportive? So there are some preliminary studies indicating significant improvements in some individuals, particularly areas such as cognitive function.

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fatigue reduction and inflammation management. There's actually lots of research on nicotine going back many years, up to 50 years, indicating and showing neuroprotective and cognitive benefits. So improving the way that you think, decreasing what's called brain fog. Nicotine also has anti-inflammatory action. So this can be especially helpful whenever you have pain or symptoms, those are all due to inflammation.

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And so nicotine may be supportive there. It also is a vagus nerve stimulator. So the vagus nerve is cranial nerve number 10, and it runs from the back of the tongue down through most of the organs in the body. And so it, it does really help with parasympathetic nervous system, uh, retraining, which is kind of getting your body out of the fight or flight response and in some more of a healing rest and digest. And this can be incredibly helpful for people.

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who have been affected by not just mental or emotional trauma, but also by physical traumas or physical stressors, which are the infections like COVID or a combination of what I call the toxic five, heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, actually, and nervous system dysfunction. That's the full toxic five, but the toxic four are physical toxins that can negatively affect the nervous system and cause that nervous system dysfunction.

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Nicotine has also been shown to increase energy and mitochondrial function by improving neurotransmitter function, neurotransmitter function, and reducing neural inflammation. Now nicotine kind of gets a bad name because it's associated with tobacco, right? Tobacco is actually a very sacred plant to native communities, but the use of it in cigarettes over time and all of the toxins, TARS, et cetera, that have been put in cigarettes,

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has definitely made this association between nicotine and cigarette use. And that doesn't have to be the case. Nicotine and tobacco can actually be safely used in the right context. And like I said, are a part of a lot of native communities and traditions and spiritual practices. So let's talk a little bit about the research studies that are available. So this kind of was brought to my attention because

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I heard somebody lecture at a conference talking about some of the research. So we have found that, or researchers have found that in the cholinergic system, which is basically that parasympathetic nervous system that rest and digest, which really allows you to heal, there are particular pro-inflammatory cytokines that can get reduced like TNF-alpha and also protecting against organ damage.

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through the use of nicotine. Nicotine also binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors with a much higher affinity up to 30 fold more than acetylcholine, which may help to displace harmful interactions such as those seen with the COVID spike protein. So this is really interesting because typically when you're talking about neurotransmitters and their effect on different receptors, generally something like acetylcholine

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which is the neurotransmitter, would have the highest affinity, which means it would bind preferentially to the acetylcholine receptor. But it's really interesting that nicotine is actually 30 times more, has more potent of a binding than acetylcholine does, indicating that it is even more potent or even more helpful at stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, putting the body more into rest and digest.

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What's interesting also is that nicotine has been shown to depose the spike protein off the ACE2 receptor. So this basically means if spike protein is sitting on the ACE2 receptor, which is how it gets into the cells in your body, um, the nicotine can kick it off. Okay. And this is sometimes what I'm seeing. And all this that I'm saying today is about education. It's not recommending that you do nicotine patches because you do need to have guidance because I have seen a number of people get worse.

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in this process and you do need to have somebody who can guide you through the process. Okay. So this is just for educational purposes. It's not for diagnosis or treatment at all. Okay. So what we've seen is that when, when somebody takes nicotine, oftentimes it can increase the amount of spike protein that's floating around because it's a deposing it, it's kicking it off of the receptor sites. Okay. So if you have more spike protein floating around, you can potentially feel worse. Okay.

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So sometimes ramping up on your dose might be a good idea. So the smallest dose, smallest patch is seven milligrams. Sometimes you may need to cut the patches into smaller amounts and ramp up every few days in order to decrease the amount of reaction that you're having. You're also, you know, our approach is that we, we compliment it with some other things. Like we're addressing the spike protein at the same time.

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And then we're also removing things that are inhibiting the immune system's ability to remove the spike protein. So that's the heavy metals, the chemicals and the molds. And so that's part of this whole energy MD method that I created this four step process about identifying the causes that you have, especially the toxic five, and then replacing the deficiencies, opening up the detox pathways, and then removing the toxic five or removing the toxins.

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And it really is that focus on removing the toxic five, the heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, and nervous system dysfunction that I find to be most successful. And it does require addressing all of those and essentially at the same time. You know, we kind of, the process is additive. So we address one of those at the same time, working up to a particular dose, then we add in the next product to go after the next cause so that we can end up addressing all of them.

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because they're really all interconnected into what I call a toxic matrix, where when you start to remove heavy metals or chemicals or molds, it ends up releasing all the other parts of the toxic five because they are interlaced, interwoven, interconnected, feeding off of each other, however you want to describe it. So you have to have something that's on board. You wanna make sure if you're gonna be releasing mycotoxins,

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you've got a binder on board, you've got a way to get these toxins out of the body. Okay. So nicotine is just a tool that complements this. And so let's kind of get back into the research here for why it seems to be supportive. So there was a study that was done in 2023 by Litsik, Litsikay, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Lits, Litske, that's what it is. It's probably

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only had a handful of people in the study, but they did report substantial improvements in six days of using the seven milligram nicotine patches. Symptoms like fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, anosmia, which is, and a gooseia, which is a loss of smell and taste improved significantly. One of the positive things about the research studies,

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is that there hasn't been any evidence of nicotine dependency that was found following when people stopped it, even in prolonged use studies. So people who were taking it for about a month, they stopped. They also, they did not have any sort of dependency. Now, does that mean that if you have any sort of, I have coached people on if they have any sort of predisposition to addiction?

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whether it's sugar, whether it's alcohol, whether it's drugs, whether it's nicotine, whatever, or if you have a history of nicotine, I would not necessarily recommend that you proceed with utilizing nicotine. But I do think it is potentially an interesting treatment. There was another study that kind of talked about, it was a cholinergic deficiency hypothesis.

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where this hypothesis originated from observations of people who had delirium and cognitive decline due to drugs or toxins where they took nicotine and that was supportive for them. It's also been shown in research studies to help people with viral myocarditis, which is basically an infection in the heart muscle, ulcerative colitis and obesity by inhibiting pro-inflammatory cytokines and improving metabolic and cognitive outcomes.

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Okay. So there are about, you know, 20 to 30 different studies that I believe are significant in people with long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome, though it's mainly in chronic fatigue syndrome and related symptoms. So you have to remember that when research is being done, they're focused on one particular outcome. And so it could be, you know, mild cognitive impairment or major cognitive impairment, like with Alzheimer's.

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There was one study in 2012 by Newhouse that showed that nicotine treatment for mild cognitive impairment showed promising results in improving cognitive function over six months. Newhouse also, oh no, that's the same study. In terms of ulcerative colitis, that research was done by Pullen and Sanborn in 1994 and 1997 respectively.

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where transdermal nicotine for ulcerative colitis improved disease outcomes in double-blind placebo placebo-controlled trials. Ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune inflammatory disease. Okay, and that was in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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It was also a study on high dose nicotine in Parkinson's disease patients. So I'm showing beneficial effects in an open trial in 2007 by Villafane. So there are a number of research studies showing some significant anti-inflammatory effects for folks. So I think it's an interesting treatment. I'm not recommending that you go run out and do it, but I do, if you are working with somebody, you might wanna bring it up to them.

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and see what they have to say about it. And we're just starting to work with people in our community as well in doing this. So I don't have a lot of data or information yet. And what we're seeing right now is that it is mixed. So there are some people who are noticing a little bit improvement over here, but then there also, there might be other symptoms that are getting worse. And that has to do with the situation with kicking, I believe, kicking the spike protein off of the acetylcholine or the ACE2 receptors rather.

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So that's my take on utilizing nicotine and long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome. So hope you're doing well. If you, I just released the latest masterclass. So if you do wanna check that out, click on the link below where you can learn all about our approach to resolving long COVID and chronic fatigue naturally, so you can get back to living your best life. All right, have an amazing day and I'll see you next time.