Long Covid: A Parallel Pandemic (Evan H. Hirsch, MD Reacts 2 Years Later) - #145

Long Covid: A Parallel Pandemic (Evan H. Hirsch, MD Reacts 2 Years Later) - #145

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Hey there, welcome back to the EnergyMD Podcast where we help you resolve your chronic fatigue, whether it's from long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome so that you can get off the couch and get back to living your best life. So today I'm doing something a little bit different. I'm gonna do a reaction video to a video on YouTube that I saw called Long COVID, a Parallel Pandemic. So I'd like to jump in and what I'm gonna do is for those of you who are on, who are listening on a podcast, I'm gonna narrate.

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anything that's written or anything that I feel like needs narrating and I'll make comments as we go through. This was a very popular video on YouTube, so I thought it would be significant for people to hear and understand and this is generally also a very conventional video and so, you know, my perspective is going to be functional and environmental medicine and so it'll be interesting I think also for you to hear kind of the the different views.

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and what each has to offer. So let's go ahead and jump in. So the science of long COVID is far from settled. Scientists and physicians are still working to understand what it is, what causes it and how to treat it.

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At the same time, millions of people are reporting new health problems after recovery from a COVID infection. So this is two years ago. So this is done in 2022.

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here are some of their stories. So it kind of starts off with going through some people's stories.

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I'm not going to touch too much on these because I think we've all heard these stories and I don't want us to get stuck into that place of struggle. Yes, it is true that about 30 to 35 percent of people, depending on the, or 20 to 35 percent of people looking at the stats are now experiencing persistent symptoms of long COVID and those symptoms can be really disparate. So up to 250 different symptoms can be present.

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awful. So they're showing a couple of people here. This woman is a form of flight attendant and yoga instructor and she now needs a walker. She has tremors. Her situation is pretty dire and pretty awful. Get every system in my body. The internal tremors. And so I'm just kind of fast forwarding through here a little bit. And vibrate emails and messages from people who are. This is me now.

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I get email.

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So this is Akiko Iwasaki, who's a professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine. So it's interesting to hear her thoughts. ..messages from people who are suffering from long COVID every day. Some of these stories are very emotional and devastating. Feeling sick all the time, belly aches all the time, leg ache. This is an 11-year-old child. And then I get headaches, like pains in my eyes. I don't feel like myself anymore. I can't work.

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drive. When I do drive, I feel like I am driving drunk. Exhaustion to the point where you can't remember your kids names. I am formerly an ICU nurse and have not been able to do that in almost a year. I have horrible vertigo. The mental fog is like nothing I've ever experienced before. It's absolutely the worst health you could ever imagine. Their lives have been ruined by long

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were used to doing. These stories are accumulating within me and drive me really to do more research and to try to find something that we can do to help the suffering of these people.

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Yeah, there's no doubt that this has been an awful illness that has affected so many. So they're now showing that about her long COVID study started in 2021 that will examine vaccines effect on patient symptoms. A new study is currently enrolling people with long COVID who have not yet been vaccinated. The work could tell researchers what's driving the condition and offer clues to treatment. Unfortunately, we see a lot of people who got the vaccines and consequently ended up

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vaccinations. There is urgency to understand this disease because there are people suffering so much so that they are contemplating of taking their own lives to end the misery.

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If we can stop one more person from such active desperation, I think we would have done our job. You know, part of this is the awful symptoms that people are experiencing. You know, part of the reason why people are committing suicide is because of the awful symptoms that they're experiencing and also because of the mental health increase with long COVID. So there was one study of 265,000 people who had COVID and they were followed for six months,

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mental health diagnosis after six months. And so that's depression, anxiety, bipolar, even some schizophrenia. And so consequently, the question is, you know, is it the awful symptoms of long COVID like fatigue and brain fog that's, you know, making it that making that is causing people to feel so desperate and to have suicidal thoughts and actions? Or is it actually because

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changing the neurotransmitters, getting into the central nervous system and causing these mental health symptoms that are then leading to the suicidal thoughts and actions. You know, every day, every minute counts and I understand that and that's part of the reason I don't get much sleep.

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So now they're talking.

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Exploring how the world is navigating the past, its consequences, and the way forward.

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When COVID hit in early 2020, my lab was ready to tackle some of the key questions such as how does the immune system respond to the virus infection and what causes severe disease versus mild disease. But during the course of investigation, we've also been encountering a lot of people telling us about their lingering symptoms that last for a very extended time period, some of which are debilitating.

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fatigue, nausea, dizziness, headache, and some sort of pain.

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I have a lot of GI issues. I'm very nauseated most of the time. It's hard for me to eat a full meal without getting sick. I have joint pain, muscle pain, fatigue, tremors, brain fog, severe anxiety. I'm not even the same person I was before. That's completely ruined my life. It's completely changed my life. Through the conversation with the patients and the doctors who are treating these patients, we became quite aware of this phenomenon of long COVID. We didn't... So some... they're showing some...

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about more than one in five adults adult COVID survivors in the US may develop long COVID, a CDC study suggests. And this was in the New York Times. I don't see the date, but I think it's probably around 2022. And that is what the CDC says now at this point, a couple years after this, it's 20%. But there are other stats and other studies that are showing up at above 30 to 35%. So that's one in three people.

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so many people becoming ill with long-term consequences.

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They're showing an image here of approximately one in five adults ages 18 plus have a health condition that might be related to previous COVID-9 illness. They're showing a number of the different systems that are affected, which are basically all of them. You know, unfortunately, the COVID virus can get into any cell in the body and consequently it can cause symptoms there. And so that's why it can cause over 250 different symptoms. Patients who are discharged may have 50% of those having long-term symptoms, whereas

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may lead to much less prevalence, but still in the 10%, 20%, 30% range. So that's a lot of people.

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And now we're seeing that actually the more mild symptoms that you have outpatient, the more likely you are to get long COVID. So she's talking about early on in the pandemic, it was, you know, the symptoms that they were seeing that were persisting were mainly from people who were coming out of the hospital and those rates were very high. But now we're not seeing a lot of these people ending up in the ICU and going into the hospital. But instead we're seeing more mild cases. And so I think that kind of skews the data a little bit. But now we're seeing, you know, if you have five mild symptoms.

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you're more likely to get long COVID than somebody who has one major symptom when you're having acute COVID. You're more likely to get long COVID than if you have more major symptoms when you have an acute COVID infection like where it feels like the flu and yeah. Let's continue.

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vaccination and prior infection will likely reduce the chances of you getting severe COVID and even potentially long COVID. But it's not, it's not a guarantee. And that's one of the things that we're seeing is that there's actually studies to show that some people who got the vaccination had less chances of getting long COVID and other people who got the vaccination did not, or it increased the risk. And then also the stats around people who got the vaccination who ended up getting long COVID or spike protein illness after that is significant.

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And they're showing an article here from May 2022 that says long COVID risk falls only slightly after vaccination huge study shows. Some people get long COVID after being boosted and gotten a breakthrough infection.

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Even if the pandemic virus spread were to stop today, we still have tens of millions of people suffering from COVID. And that's a parallel pandemic that's happening, which is getting a lot less attention than the acute and severe COVID, even though the cost to lives and the quality of lives that these people have to live with are very limited.

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So the parallel pandemic they're talking about here is the difference between the acute and severe COVID that we were worried about initially and now this long COVID pandemic.

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What does long COVID do to the body?

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COVID exhausts the body and I think she's going to go into this. COVID can impact any part of the body. It's really not a respiratory only disease at all. And it basically involves every organ systems that one can imagine. Starting with the central nervous system, the peripheral nervous system, the GI tract, the respiratory cardiac, musculoskeletal system, just basically everything depending on the person. What's interesting about this is that

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the different variants of the COVID virus are now expressing themselves differently as they evolve over time. And so the latest variant, or at least in the end of 2024, seem to be largely gastrointestinal based. A lot of people having diarrhea and other gastrointestinal issues. So it's just another example of how the virus can get in any system in the body and consequently cause any symptom.

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It may be a set of organs that are involved or just one. There's a huge heterogeneity, but I don't think any organ is spared from the impact of long COVID.

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Yesterday was my 20 month anniversary of having a fever. So I've had a fever for 20 months and one day, doctors don't know why I have a fever I've been to the Mayo Clinic and their solution was to not think illness thoughts. So.

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When somebody has a fever, it's because the immune system is trying to fight something off. The immune system functions better at a higher temperature. And so consequently, the immune system knows that there's something in the body that's not supposed to be there, in this case, the COVID virus, spike protein. And so its reaction is going to be, you know, and that's really what symptoms are. Symptoms are the immune system trying to get rid of something

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And so consequently, that's why you might have diarrhea, or you're coughing, or runny nose, or a fever. Like all of these symptoms are the immune system trying to get rid of something out of the body. So that's how I would explain that to this individual. Mm-hmm.

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You may have heard that long COVID is a mental illness, I can guarantee you it is very physical as well. One of my symptoms is muscle spasms, where randomly some of my muscles will contract, leaving me in pain. Because of that, I'm trapped in this wheelchair, this bed and this room. Long COVID isn't just mental, it's physical as well, and I spend most of my time in total physical pain.

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We are that poor voice. It's a young boy who's in a wheelchair and he's talking about how, you know, long COVID is not just a mental disease. It's also a physical one. And so he talks about how bad his muscles are cramping and how much physical pain he's in. What's interesting and what I see in our long COVID program is that people who have those symptoms, sometimes it's directly from COVID and sometimes it's from COVID acting as a biofilm disruptor. So in general,

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the reason why people get COVID is because COVID is the straw that broke the camel's back, but they already have the toxic five that are present. And so this is what I call the toxic five. It's a combination of heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, and nervous system dysfunction that's already present in the body that has already caused immune system dysfunction and mitochondrial dysfunction, but you really didn't notice. And then all of a sudden, the

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comes into the body and it ends up being the straw that breaks the camel's back and causing all of the symptoms. So that's really the difference that we're seeing with people who have long COVID and people who don't is that there is the stage was already set. Now when I talk about, I'm going to go back a little bit. So in terms of, I mentioned that this this boy may have had other things as well. And so if you have other infections like Bartonella,

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also body pain, sometimes misdiagnosed as plantar fasciitis, so pain under the feet, and sometimes misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia, pain in the muscles. And so sometimes getting the COVID virus can trigger some of these infections coming out. Bartonella can also cause mental health issues. So this can be part of the reason why there's that big uptick in mental health. Is it directly due to the COVID or is it due to Bartonella or maybe

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the North American malaria that causes fevers and it causes sweating. You know, it could be causing that woman's temperature to be increased, you know, every single day for the last 20 months, as she said. Babesia also causes anxiety to the point of panic attacks, depression to the point of suicidal thoughts, and shortness of breath. So sometimes when people are having those symptoms, is it from COVID or is it from Babesia? Now, in our program, we address all of those to make sure there's no stone left unturned and make sure that we're addressing everything.

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But I think that's an interesting part of this to remember that even though it looks like long COVID, there's always other things that are at play. It's never just the COVID.

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We're seeing clear biological differences in the measurements that we're making in long COVID patients compared to people who had COVID who fully recovered from COVID. We need to kind of move beyond this notion of psychosomatic origin of disease and really look into the biological origin, biological reasons why these people are suffering. I can't, I couldn't agree more.

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I mean, the medical trauma that people are experiencing when they go to their practitioners and they say, I have these symptoms, and the practitioner says, we'll go do this, this, and this, or they go to a long COVID clinic.

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I mean, and by medical trauma, I mean the practitioners and providers and doctors who do not believe that long COVID is a disease. And part of it is because they don't have a medication that they can use to treat it. And so they kind of throw up their hands and they feel bad that they don't have something to treat and they kick people out of their offices. And that's incredibly traumatic to these people who are already suffering. So for any providers watching this, I just ask you to have a lot of empathy and do what

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If you don't have the knowledge on how to treat long COVID, then please get the knowledge. We do mentor practitioners if that's something that you're interested in, but at least refer them for support. Long COVID clinics potentially can help, though they're kind of missing the boat as well, and we can talk about that more in a minute. But I think that sending them for physical therapy, potentially looking at some alternative

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massage or some of these other things could be really supportive or referring them to a functional medicine practitioner, environmental medicine, but somebody who specializes in other options. You know, unfortunately not enough practitioners, I would say even 95% of all functional medicine and natural medicine practitioners are not trained in the toxic five. And so they're not going to have the knowledge around how do you treat a virus like this? How do you go after the heavy metals, the chemicals, the molds?

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the other infections, which can include Lyme type infections and co-infections, and how do you do nervous system retraining? So all of those are really important to address in order to get complete resolution. So we're going into long COVID symptoms. There are over 200 symptoms reported for long COVID. Some people have one or two of these while others have over a dozen symptoms ongoing at any given time.

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Not everyone has the same disease and I think that speaks to different endotypes of long COVID that people are suffering from. I think it has to do with the part of the body that is being affected by the COVID virus. What organ is the virus in? I would say I'm experiencing long COVID.

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This is Senator Tim Kaine. There are people who are really suffering. And I wouldn't call myself a sufferer. I have a bizarre nerve tingling sensation that feels like my skin is dipped in an alka-seltzer that's just going off 24-7. But the range is anywhere from people having some pain or shortness of breath and fatigue. The fatigue was really bad. And I would also get breathless doing very normal things, like walking up the stairs. It was really scary. All the way to people having internal tremors and vibration

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able to do anything else because their body is just moving in a way that they cannot control. They cannot sleep, they cannot eat, they cannot think, they cannot do anything. They're just under such a great physical and mental strain from such symptoms that these are the people unfortunately who have taken their own lives or who are contemplating ending their lives. And some of those really extreme symptoms are from the COVID virus getting into the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system.

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Those are extreme symptoms, but there is a huge range of symptoms. And ultimately, we need biomarkers to say, OK, you have this kind of covid or that kind of covid, and we're not there yet.

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Yeah, and I don't agree with that. I'm not sure what biomarkers are going to help us with. It's going to say, oh, yes, you have COVID. And what is that going to give people? Is it going to help them get on disability? But it's not a solution, right? And so I'm curious to see kind of the utilization of biomarkers moving forward, but right now it's being used more for diagnosis, which I know is the first step. But in general, when people, you know, all these people, they know that they have long COVID, right?

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virus and they ended up with persistent symptoms or they've got weird symptoms that started after 2020. So they know that they have long COVID. They don't need biomarkers to show them that. So I'm curious to see how things are going to move forward in the future with that. Long COVID and post-acute infection syndromes.

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I believe that the ME-CFS is probably the same disease that people with long COVID are suffering from, but were caused by other infections.

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I couldn't agree more. I think that that's great that she's understanding that and agreeing with that. So ME-CFS, myalgic encephalitis is what they call chronic fatigue syndrome in the United States, myalgic encephalitis outside of the United States and in Europe, oftentimes called ME-CFS or CFS-ME. And it's this conglomeration of symptoms. To have an official diagnosis of that, you have to be suffering for six months and have challenges with fatigue,

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gin, brain fog, body pain, sleep issues. And so, and so I agree, but I also think that it's not just another infection that people had, you know, before COVID there was Epstein-Barr and HHV6 and a bunch of other viruses that oftentimes triggered things, but it was always the, at least in my

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and molds and nervous system dysfunction in order to allow the infection to kind of take hold, to cause these issues, to cause the damage to the mitochondria, to decrease the energy that people are able to produce and increase the inflammation and the symptoms that they have.

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This next screen says link between long COVID and ME could transform the lives of sufferers. People with chronic fatigue syndrome have often complained they're not taken seriously, but that could change as research is done to similar effects from the coronavirus. I definitely agree with that and I hope that's going to be the case moving forward.

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Prior to long COVID, there have been a number of infections, many, many viruses, but sometimes bacterium and parasitic infection, that leads to long-term consequences. It's only with the sheer number of people with long COVID that really now is highlighting these other diseases, such as ME-CFS, that's being triggered by numerous other pathogens. I agree. Symptoms are very similar to long COVID, such as chronic fatigue, as well as

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some of these dysontonomia-like syndromes, you know, cardiac issues, GI issues, many you know, vasculature issues and just inability to control these heart rates or blood pressure or you know, things that are very similar to what we're seeing with Long COVID. It's a wake-up call really for the society to start looking into other post-acute infection syndromes. And because we are going to be dealing with this going forward.

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these long COVID patients might develop into ME-CFS if they cannot recover from the long COVID stage of the disease.

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And she's just saying that basically if this lasts longer than six months and they meet the criteria that they would essentially be diagnosed with ME-CFS. But I couldn't agree more with her in terms of the fact that there's multiple pathogens that are going to be contributing and that we need to do something about it. And hopefully the medical community is going to be looking at this and having more awareness, more empathy, and hopefully we'll get some better tools. Right now we're having great success.

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herbs, vitamins, minerals, etc. nutraceuticals and nervous system retraining in order to help people and hopefully the medical community will follow suit.

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What causes long COVID? Long COVID disease pathogenesis can be considered as having four separate causes, but these are not mutually exclusive. People can have a combination of these things too. So the first hypothesis is that there are maybe persistent virus hiding somewhere in the tissue, which you cannot measure with a nasopharyngeal swabs or saliva because these people are PC or negative. But imagine having that in your gut or some other organ and that type of persistent virus

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or it could be just the remnant of the virus, such as the protein or the RNA or combination thereof. That could be triggering the chronic inflammation.

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And that actually has borne fruit. There was some research that came out at the end of 2024 that indicated that parts of the virus and parts of the spike protein can actually replicate on its own and cause inflammation and symptoms in the body. Second hypothesis is autoimmunity. Autoimmunity can be triggered as a result of an acute infection. And once these autoimmune cells, which are T cells and B cells that are reactive against our own body, own host of proteins or molecules,

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very difficult to shut them down once they are triggered because the stimulus that are triggering them is everywhere. Essentially it's your own cells. The third possibility... Yeah, I definitely agree. And autoimmunity is the immune system's reaction to something. So essentially the spike protein is in the body and the immune system is trying to get rid of it. The immune system's whole job is to get rid of things out of the body that aren't supposed to be there. And so it's reacting to the spike protein and if the spike protein

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the immune system is going to be attacking the thyroid trying to get at the spike protein. That's one way that autoimmunity is created. Another way is that it's reacting to spike protein in a certain part of the body, let's say in the gut, and it sees certain proteins that look like another part of the body. So let's say that there's a protein that looks like the thyroid, it'll then start attacking the thyroid because of those proteins that are being presented on

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mimicry where it's basically mimicking it's attacking over here and it's seeing something over in this part of the body but then it's it's it's then seeing something similar in another part of the body and it's attacking that so it's attacking both of those

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is dysbiosis. So third possibility is dysbiosis of microbiome. Of microbiome. So we have trillions of bacteria in the gut and they really contribute to our health, but potentially disease, if they're disturbed in their compositions or their metabolic functions. So and it's also possible that there are latent viruses that are reactivated to cause some of these symptoms such as the Epstein-Barr virus. So that's the third hypothesis. It's really about like whatever that's in our body that's that's sort of

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either a microbe or a virus. The fourth possibility is tissue. I do agree with that, you know, I mean, I think that dysbiosis is basically just a term that indicates that there's an imbalance of certain bugs, certain infections in the body that ends up causing immune system dysfunction and inflammation and consequently symptoms. The fourth possibility is tissue damage.

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damage that's incurred by the initial infection that cannot be repaired. And this is likely happening in the hospitalized patients who were intubated or had you know some some extreme measures of medical interventions.

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If you have severe... Well, we're seeing now that people who've had COVID, even acute COVID, you don't have to have long COVID, you can still have damage to a number of organs. And so you don't have to have had hospitalization or severe COVID virus. Your respiratory infection with SARS-CoV-2, you obviously have damage in the lung. You know, if you've had pneumonia, there's scarring and potentially fibrosis. Those types of tissue damage is very difficult to repair.

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If you look at the UK Biobank study, there is a significant reduction in brain mass of people even with milder COVID. So that's a direct damage to the brain after even a milder infection. And there may be other damages that we don't know about, you know, vascular damage. There may be a lot of clotting issues or issues related to the endothelial cells that may have incurred some damage. And of course, endothelial cells are very important for the...

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the function of the blood vessels as well as oxygen exchange and so on. So I think there may be many damages at the microscopic level like the vasculature or more the macroscopic level like the brain itself or the lungs and there may be damages in the liver or intestine or other tissues that we don't currently appreciate with respect to what's happening. So these are roughly the four major hypotheses but there may be more.

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hovers most of it. I mean, I...

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except for the other toxic five, which not enough people are talking about. So it's not just about the spike protein. It's also about the heavy metals, the chemicals, the molds, other infections that are present. You know, there's stats to show that Epstein-Barr virus was, you know, increased by 73% when somebody had COVID. And the question is, well, was the Epstein-Barr virus actually there before that? And that ended up predisposing somebody to long COVID. So I think that there are

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but you know, having, you know, we're just seeing a lot more success when we're addressing all of the toxic five and so consequently I have to believe that those are present and that's actually that's what we're seeing also throughout the process. So this next part is long COVID treatments.

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With respect to treatment, if the first hypothesis of persistent virus is leading to long COVID is true, then we need to go after the virus as treatment. One thing we can do is to use antivirals like Paxilvid or Molnipiravir that targets the virus itself and we can maybe eliminate the source of the problem that way. It's also possible that some people feel much

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virus reservoir that was cleared by vaccine induced immunity. The therapy for that group of long COVID patients would be antiviral measures. If long. So these antivirals are.

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highly imperfect and they definitely have side effects. And oftentimes they may be inhibiting the replication of the virus, but they're not getting deep and getting at really the root of the virus. And then they're also not just seeing the other toxic five. So this is why sometimes people only have marginal success with some of these antivirals. On COVID is causing autoimmune disease. First of all, the target of autoimmune disease needs to be identified. What are the TMB cells attacking in such cases?

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because that will inform us how the host immune response is harming the host. If we know that these patients are suffering from some sort of autoimmune disease, there are interventions that are already existing in the autoimmune disease treatment, such as immunosuppressives or even biologics to eliminate B cells that are the source of autoantibodies. And there are newly developing biological drugs that can be applied to long COVID. If COVID is somehow inducing dysbiosis.

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So, you know, in conventional medicine, they're...

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they're using the scientific method and looking at one variable at a time, which is great and admirable. But the challenge is that when you have an issue that has multiple causes, we have to think in a different way. So we can't just think about this one cause of the, either it's the virus or it's the autoimmunity and we're going to change the immune system in some way, suppress the immune system. Let's actually get rid of, let's look at the underlying root causes.

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So what's triggering the immune system to react in an autoimmune way and let's remove those causes that are present and use a really broad differential. Yes, we understand that COVID is the trigger, but what are the other causes that are present that kind of set the stage? What are the toxic five and how do we remove them? So that's what I'm finding to be helpful for people in our community, but I really hope that the conventional community can kind of change the way.

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that they're looking at some of this research to take a look at multiple causes instead of just one cause. Next is she's talking about if it's inducing dysbiosis. Which means that some harmful bacteria may be expanding in lieu of the better sort of more commensal bacteria in their gut. We may be able to go after either the metabolites that the bacteria is producing that's harming the

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trying to change the composition of the microbiome through diet or probiotics or some other mechanisms.

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Next they're talking about prevention. Someone who's newly infected, I would definitely recommend to get the PaxLovid right away because the earlier the treatment, the more likelihood of you being able to eliminate the source of viral reservoir. And actually...

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Treating early with Paxlovid or monoclonal antibodies is just, in general, great to avoid any of these four hypotheses of diseases from occurring because the longer you allow the virus to replicate and cause damage, the more likelihood of you triggering these four types of disease outcomes. And there is even a study that suggests that getting vaccination within the first 12 weeks of infection reduces risk for developing long COVID.

35:17

They're showing a study that was done in May 2022. So, Paxlovid has been shown to be helpful for people who are having acute COVID, who are more likely to go into the hospital. So, people who have heart attacks, heart disease, stroke risk, and are over the age of 50, and have other risks as well. So, you know, just...

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Let me give you the whole list. So heart disease, diabetes, lung disease, cancer, blood disorders, immune disorders, mental health conditions, disabilities, other conditions, overweight, obese, being 50 years or over, and lifestyle factors such as smoking. So it's appropriate for those people to prevent them from getting hospitalized or dying from it. So that's where it's helpful. It has not been shown to be helpful for people with long COVID.

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This next quote is from, or this part is from, Alyssa Milano.

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After my second vaccine, my long haul symptoms started to ease up, which I guess happens to like 40% of long haul patients. But I still have shortness of breath sometimes and heart palpitations and tingling in my hands. And it'll come out of nowhere, you know, and it's, it's scary when it happens. So even vaccination may may be helpful during the early phase of infection. But if you wait too long, these things aren't going to be effective.

36:50

interesting that she says that. I mean, I think that that's a little bit of a scare tactic. So, you know.

36:57

I do think that we have to have caution with the vaccinations just because they have not been as thoroughly tested as we would like. They were done under emergency status and there were lots of side effects that I see in my practice every day. So I think we do have to be cautious about recommending those. And I would like to see more data and more studies with the vaccinations. I'm fine with vaccines that have been studied and have been shown to be helpful.

37:27

part is about mitigation measures. I'm personally surprised that long COVID isn't at the center of discussion in public. Knowing how devastating this disease is, I am very hesitant myself to go out there and get exposed to any kind of COVID.

37:46

I just think it's really gambling with your health and it's not safe. I personally think that removing the cautionary measures to prevent transmission is a very bad idea. I do absolutely ensure that my children are fully vaccinated, boosted if they're eligible, and are wearing masks inside while they're going to school or elsewhere. We need to layer protective measures, one on top of the other, in order to reduce the risk of getting COVID so that we don't get long COVID either.

38:18

I haven't seen any recent research on booster recommendations. I have seen CDC recommendations that boosters are still recommended, but I haven't seen any updated research that indicates that it's a good idea to do so.

38:38

I feel sorry for you all the time. No. I want doctors and researchers to help find a cure for it, but I don't know if they can. I think they can.

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Dr. Hopin, so it was a good video. I definitely appreciate Dr. Iwasaki, I believe her name was, and the information that she provided. I think that there are things missing from diagnosis, the reliance on the biomarkers that they're trying to do. There's still a lack of acceptance in the general medical community. And so there's medical trauma that's happening to individuals who try to go get help.

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The challenges with the long COVID clinics is that they're really symptom based. So if somebody has shortness of breath, they go to see the lung doctor. If they have challenges with their gastrointestinal tract, they go to see the GI doctor. If they've got heart palpitations, they go to see the heart doctor. And conventional medicine can help with some of those acute symptoms. But in terms of getting at the underlying root causes, you're not going to be able to get there just by utilizing medications in the conventional system in order to change your symptoms.

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you have to look at that root cause and be like, okay, so the spike protein is causing these things, how do we get rid of the spike protein? And it really comes back to addressing the toxic five. So I hope this was helpful for you. If you are interested in seeing how we approach things, you can click on the link below, check out our latest masterclass or latest video where I kind of go into depth on our four step process that we've used to help hundreds of people at this point

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COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome. So thanks so much for being here, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.