What to Do When Nicotine Therapy Fails in Long Covid and CFS with Evan H. Hirsch, MD
What to Do When Nicotine Therapy Fails in Long Covid and CFS with Evan H. Hirsch, MD
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Hey there, Evan Hirsch here. Welcome back to the EnergyMD Podcast where we help you resolve your chronic fatigue and related symptoms from long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome so that you can get back to living your best life. So I'm Evan Hirsch and I'm excited today to talk to you about what to do when nicotine therapy fails. So if you've watched some of my other videos, you've seen me discuss uh nicotine therapy and some of the research preliminary.
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and anecdotes that people are experiencing right now. And hopefully you've read some of the comments below the videos and episodes about how some people are having success and some people are not. And so I wanted to talk about what to do if you're not having success from utilizing nicotine therapy. So real quick background, nicotine therapy is being talked about for about the last year or so.
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in use for long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome, especially, um, as an opportunity to get rid of symptoms very quickly. And what we're seeing is about 50 % of people that we work with. And also that's what we're seeing also in some of the research have success. So that means 50 % of people are not. And of those people who are having success, sometimes they get complete resolution of their long COVID symptoms, and sometimes they're just getting improvement.
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Maybe they get rid of their loss of smell and taste, but they don't get rid of their body pain or their sleep issues or their fatigue, et cetera. And so why is this happening? Well, first off, we have to remember the mechanism of long COVID. So the COVID virus, the spike protein, the SHOT come into the body and end up being injected into the cells and consequently taking over the machinery of the mitochondria.
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and getting and causing inflammation in the body. Now, the more dysfunctional the immune system is, the deeper the spike protein is going to go into the body. So if the immune system is functioning correctly, you should have a strong response. I was just speaking about this with a client yesterday when they were asking me about, you know, is it normal that my family gets sick with a cold and I don't? And the reality is, that it's
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generally not. Sometimes it means you've got a great immune system and you're able to get rid of all the infections that you get presented with. But most of the time, at least the people that I work with who have long COVID and chronic fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome, it's because their immune system is distracted by toxins and infections that are in the body. And consequently, when you get presented with a new virus, it slips by the immune system, goes into the body and starts causing problems. But ideally,
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When you get presented with an acute virus, your body is going to try to get rid of it as strongly as possible. You're going to mount a fever. Your nose is going to run. You're going to cough. Maybe you're going to get chills, but you're going to do, your body's going to do everything that it possibly can in order to get rid of this virus out of the body. And that's really how it expels it, right? Sometimes it's a diarrhea, whatever it is, it's trying to get rid of it. If you don't experience anything,
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it's because the immune system is not reacting appropriately. And this is where we're talking about where the spike protein gets behind the immune system, goes ahead and takes up residence in different cells in different parts of the body. And the symptoms that you get, there's over 250 symptoms that you can get among COVID. And the symptoms that you get are related to where in the body the spike protein has gone. So if it goes into the muscles, you get muscle pain or muscle inflammation.
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If it goes into the central nervous system, you can have a hard time sleeping or you can get neuropathies, numbness and pain, maybe electrical shooting. Maybe you get, um, atrial fibrillation like I've seen with people. So you have to understand that when the spike protein can go into every part of the body, you can get over 250 different symptoms, which may be caused by the spike protein.
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So what's happening with the nicotine, whether it's a patch or a lozenge or a gum, is that it's binding preferentially to acetylcholine receptors. Now acetylcholine is the main neurotransmitter for parasympathetic nervous system component, which is the main healing, rest and digest. And oftentimes when we are all the time, when we have complex chronic disease, we're in a sympathetic dominant nervous system state.
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where basically we are in the fight, flight or freeze where the body is kind of on high alert. It's trying to get rid of the problem that's in the body and it can't rest. Sometimes this comes from these acetylcholine receptors that become dysfunctional. And so by taking the nicotine, it pretty much binds to these acetylcholine receptors actually preferential to the acetylcholine. So they're even better than just acetylcholine, which is really amazing. Stimulating it.
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activating the parasympathetic nervous system and shifting you from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system. It also has some additional benefits in terms of increasing blood supply to the brain, decreasing cognitive dysfunction and brain fog, increasing energy by stimulating the mitochondria. So there's lots of potential ways that the nicotine can potentially help, but let's get to the crux of the matter and the title of this talk. Come on, Evan, get to the, get to the title of the talk.
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So the reason why it only works in about half of the people is it really depends on what your total body load is of the spike protein. And then also of what I call the toxic five, the heavy metals, the chemicals, the molds, the infections, and the nervous system dysfunction that have built up in your body over time that has predisposed you to getting long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome. So in my experience, you and
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Yeah, you cannot get long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome if you don't have the toxic five. And the reason why I know this is because when I treat people for the toxic five and we remove all these causes, they get better. So it's not just about the spike protein. It's about the reason why your immune system is not able to get rid of the spike protein because the immune system is distracted often left field by the toxic five.
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by the heavy metals, by the chemicals, by the molds, by the infections and by the nervous system dysfunction. So it's really important to remember that the nicotine patch or lozenge or gum is going to bind to those acetylcholine receptors. And sometimes that's all you need because you don't have a significant burden of the toxic five. You just have potentially the spike protein. Oh, that's the other thing is that the nicotine
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is going to kick the spike protein off of its receptor sites off the ACE2 receptors. And consequently that can decrease the activity of the spike protein in the body. But if it's not just about the spike protein, if you had this total body burden of the toxic five, the nicotine is not necessarily going to help. Now there's reasons to, to try nicotine at different points in the process.
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you know, after you potentially taking some fiber analytic enzymes like not to kinase because they can help digest the spike protein that's being kicked off of the receptor sites or further down the line. Once you've started to remove the toxic five. And so that's where we have it in our program, where we go through a four step process of first making sure that we're going to address all of the potential causes that you have and all of the causes that you have as an individual. That's how the first way that we personalize things.
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And then we replace the deficiencies that you have deficiencies in hormones and vitamins and minerals to make you more resilient and robust and optimizing your lifestyle habits. Then we open up the exit pathways so that you're prepared for removing the toxic five, including the spike protein in step four. Okay. So that's the four step process that we take people through. And when you start to remove the heavy metals, the chemicals, the molds, the infections, and retrain the nervous system,
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you are going to be a lot more successful at being able to get rid of the spike protein. So if you're not having success right now and you haven't addressed the toxic five, that would be the next thing to do. So, sorry, if you are not, if you've tried the nicotine patch and you are not having success, the next thing to do is to get rid of the toxic five and then you can potentially try the nicotine patch in the future. So a couple of other thoughts on this, you know,
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Sometimes if people are taking the nicotine patch and they're not noticing a difference, you may want to try a higher dose. So generally what I recommend to my clients is trying seven milligram patches, doing it every day for two weeks and seeing what sort of results you have. If you don't have any results at all, you're not noticing anything, you may want to go up to the 14 milligrams and do that for 14 days.
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I wouldn't go beyond that because of the addiction potential. If you are noticing that you're having side effects, feeling worse when you're taking the nicotine patch, you're going to want to take a lower dose. You're going to want to take a half dose or a quarter dose, and you may need to transition to a lozenge or a gum in order to be able to do that. And then you also, if you're finding that taking it every day is problematic or you have side effects,
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you want to, you want to find your Goldilocks dose. So you want to find the dose, which is the number of milligrams and the frequency. So, um, that's going to serve you so that you don't feel worse. And so this can be potentially taking it every other day, every third day, or even once a week. So you may need a half a dose, 3.5 milligrams once a week in order to not feel worse while you're taking it. Cause you're still potentially getting some of the benefits.
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It's important to note also that nicotine is not a cure-all for all of your bad lifestyle habits. So if you're not getting enough sleep, if you're not drinking enough water, if you're not getting enough movement or your ideal dose of movement, and if you're not eating the right foods or avoiding gluten, dairy, sugars, and processed foods, that can be another reason why you're potentially not having benefits from taking nicotine. Okay. Um,
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So if you are interested in seeing if we're a good fit to work together, we're interested in learning about more of my philosophy about treating the toxic five, my four step process and why I don't recommend labs when people come into my program, which people are like, that's heresy. Go ahead and click the link below and check out my latest masterclass where I go into detail on these subjects. You can watch it at two times speed and it'll only take 20 minutes.
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And then if you want to see if we're a good fit to work together and have me do an assessment on your case and see if we can help you, you can go ahead and click the link below and get on a, or click the link below the masterclass video. You can get on a free call with me 45 to 60 minutes where I'll do an assessment to determine whether or not it can help you. And about 30 % of the time, I tell people that I don't think that we're a good fit to get to work together. If I do believe we're a good fit and you want to hear more about what we offer,
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I'll go into how our program is structured, everything that's included, the investment, et cetera. So I hope this was helpful for you. Please, if you learned something new, please give it a thumbs up, like and subscribe, share it with somebody that you care about who's struggling with long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome. And I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks so much for watching.
