Understanding the Dilemma of Long COVID: Symptoms, Impacts, & Treatment Options
Are you ready to protect yourself from Long COVID? Schedule your free 20-minute discovery call with our New Patient Coordinator to see how you can become a patient at MaxWell Clinic and start your healing journey today.
As we all know, the world has been through a tough battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the war has calmed, the aftermath remains, and one of the persistent challenges we face is the issue of Long COVID. It’s our mission to bring hope and support to those who have been affected, which is why we’re inviting you to watch our webinar: “The war has calmed, but the fallout remains: The Dilemma of Long COVID.”
Long COVID, also known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), is a condition characterized by ongoing symptoms that persist for several weeks or months after the initial COVID-19 infection. Despite its prevalence and impact on individuals’ lives, Long COVID remains poorly defined and often misunderstood by healthcare practitioners. In this article, we will delve into the pathophysiology of Long COVID, explore the diverse range of symptoms, and discuss potential treatment options.
Watch the video with MaxWell Clinic clinicians, Mark Lickey, MD, and Mary Scalf, PA-C as they share their knowledge and insights on Long COVID
The Problem:
Long COVID has turned out to be more common than we initially thought, adversely affecting many people in various ways. There is a misconception that it only affects those who were severely ill from COVID-19, but the reality is that it can be much more subtle and widespread.
The Solution:
The good news is that there is hope, and you don’t have to live with Long COVID forever. By watching our webinar, you’ll learn about the steps you can take to relieve your own suffering or help those you love. Knowledge is power, and we’re here to empower you on your journey to recovery.
The Complexity of Long COVID:
Understanding Long COVID is challenging due to its multifaceted nature and the wide array of symptoms it presents. Symptoms can vary from respiratory issues and fatigue to neurological problems and autoimmune reactions. The World Health Organization has identified over 200 reported symptoms associated with Long COVID, making it difficult to categorize and define the condition accurately.
Impacts on Physical and Mental Health:
Long COVID significantly affects individuals’ lives, leading to various physical, emotional, and cognitive challenges. Symptoms like chronic fatigue, brain fog, and dysautonomias can severely impact daily functioning, making it difficult for individuals to perform routine activities or engage fully in life. Additionally, Long COVID can contribute to the development or worsening of autoimmune conditions, cardiovascular issues, and mental health disorders, further complicating the overall health picture.
The Importance of Comprehensive Care:
Treating Long COVID requires a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary approach. However, obtaining appropriate care can be challenging due to fragmented healthcare systems. Collaboration among healthcare professionals, including primary care physicians, specialists, and integrative medicine practitioners, is crucial to address the diverse range of symptoms and provide personalized treatment plans.
Treatment Options for Long COVID:
While there is no one-size-fits-all treatment for Long COVID, several approaches have shown promise in managing its symptoms. Some potential strategies include:
- Gut Microbiome Optimization: Supporting a healthy gut microbiome through personalized dietary changes, targeted probiotic supplementation, and addressing gut dysbiosis may alleviate symptoms and improve overall well-being.
- Neurofeedback: This brain retraining technique can help individuals with Long COVID improve brain function, reduce brain fog, and restore cognitive abilities.
- Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT): HBOT involves exposing individuals to high levels of oxygen in a pressurized chamber, promoting oxygen delivery to damaged tissues, reducing inflammation, and supporting healing processes.
- Antiviral and Anti-inflammatory Approaches: Specific antiviral medications and anti-inflammatory agents may be considered, depending on the individual’s symptoms and medical history.
- Addressing Nutritional Deficiencies: Correcting nutrient imbalances, such as magnesium deficiency, can support overall health and alleviate symptoms associated with Long COVID.
Conclusion:
Long COVID is a complex condition that affects a significant number of individuals worldwide. Its wide range of symptoms and impacts on physical and mental health necessitate a comprehensive and personalized approach to treatment. Collaborative care, addressing various factors such as gut health, neurocognitive function, and viral reactivation, offers the best chance for improving symptoms and enhancing overall well-being. As more research emerges, it is crucial to remain vigilant in understanding and addressing the challenges faced by those with Long COVID.
Are you ready to take charge of your health? Schedule your free 20-minute discovery call with our New Patient Coordinator to see how you can become a patient at MaxWell Clinic and start your healing journey today.
all right hello everybody and good morning if you are seeing us live and uh
we’re happy to have you here I’m Dr Mark lickey uh here at Maxwell clinic and
next to me is Mary scalf physician’s assistant and uh also what I call my
little sister yeah Natasha is like he’s not another big brother here so thanks for having me on
with you for this topic it’s nice to just have this more as a conversation rather than just a a session to throw a
bunch of uh facts down your gullet but we will be giving you some facts today yeah
um are the goals of our conversation today about long coping well we really want to talk about it’s like why is why
is this important um and what is long covered I mean that’s a big question I think it’s so
confusing and I believe even among Healthcare practitioners that is
probably not well defined yeah and well picked up on and and in a way it is a
little bit difficult to Define and we’ll talk about that in a little bit uh we want to talk a little bit about pathophysiology otherwise what what goes
wrong in in Long covered why is it affecting our bodies and what’s driving the dysfunction yeah and uh and then we
want to end with some some tips on like what is it that we can do to to help
those who are suffering with this because it is something that is significant for a lot of people
um so I feel like it’s a super important uh And Timely topic that I I really
couldn’t ignore it because I’ve Got Friends who’ve got long covet issues I’ve had more and more patients showing
up here at Maxwell Clinic who have long covet and I was like we have to talk about this yeah and what’s really
heartbreaking though is because there’s all these other parts to covid that became so political that I fear that these patients are being ignored or
they’re not being listened to or they just don’t feel hurt at the very least yeah I I think that you know we we’re
three years into this um you know things have calmed down obviously with people getting covered
and and you know the the the the covet that we’re dealing with now is not the same cover that we were dealing with
before because of all the mutations that have happened and fortunately it’s it’s less serious but the the Fallout of all
this with with a significant number of people is is really uh affecting a lot
of lives and and that’s that’s what we kind of want to start about talking to you a little bit is you know first of
all we haven’t forgotten about you no um because everybody’s kind of wanting to
let’s stop talking about covid it’s like okay but there are a lot of people that
are still affected by this and are you seeing this in your patient population and people that you know oh yeah even my
own husband it still hasn’t regained his smell and we’re trying all different sorts of different things try to regain
that and some of these things they seem like like oh no big deal but do you like even the sense of smell
it influences our sense of taste and our experience in the world and just to wish
that you could smell dog poop even and remember what it sounds like well
you got a few guys with your three dogs um but yeah I mean you have everything
from you know less severe uh symptoms that people are having like that which I
would still consider a long coveted to to people who have lost a lot I mean
I’ve got two good friends who have had they have very high level jobs and had
to quit because they weren’t able to continue to work because of how much
it’s affected their lives and some of these symptoms like just seem like people just can’t truly appreciate them
right like how just they exhausted and can set in and due to some of those the the drivers will talk about even
decreasing oxygen delivery uh vascular system issues and it just is becomes one
of those groups of like invisible illnesses you look fine on the outside so surely you’re fine on the inside and
that’s just not how it is people are suffering silently from this there’s a lot there’s a lot and and
we’ll get into numbers in a second as far as numbers of people that are affected I want to talk just about the
cost of this so people who are affected by long covid their spending and this is
like after insurance kicks in and all that kind of stuff on average about nine thousand dollars a year in medical costs
that’s not insignificant and as far as you know all the other kind of down down
kind of the the extra things that are happening as a result which can’t really
be monetized in money you know it’s like those are huge you know it’s affecting
people’s ability to to parent and people’s ability you know just for engaging in life you can’t put a dollar
amount on that no it can’t you can’t showing up in life the way you want to it’s there is no like price you can put
on that yeah so um they’ve actually done an estimate on how much this is costing the US economy
3.7 trillion dollars that’s a lot of money
um but yeah so it’s this is why we’re talking about it people are profoundly affected in a lot of different ways and
uh you know we want to we want to delve into it a little bit um so one of the things that uh we want
to talk about is like how common is it uh and this is this is a hard question
and there’s all sorts of numbers out there probably on the low side is probably about 1 in 13 adults I mean
that’s significant right there that’s 7.5 percent of the population who’s had covet which is almost everybody I’ve run
into a few people who haven’t had it oh yeah those are unicorns yes total unicorns
um but it’s like okay well well how do we Define it it’s like it’s it’s one in
one in 13 patients or people who are having symptoms at least three months
later okay and that’s significant and that’s like
65 million people worldwide that’s a lot of people but there was a study in the Lancet
which is a British medical journal that actually showed that 45 of patients had
at least one symptom three months out from having coven oh yeah that’s a lot
that’s almost half of people um 10 to 30 percent of non-hospitalized
patients at least um and 50 50 to 70 percent of hospitalized patients so if you were
hospitalized from covet much higher likelihood of having long coveted and the range of these percentages uh
they’re they’re kind of hard to pinpoint an exact it is it is and there’s there’s a lot of different a lot of different
studies out there trying to you know pinpoint like what what’s the what are the actual numbers it’s hard it’s hard
to say particularly in the non-hospitalized because you have the availability of at-home testing and
maybe people didn’t seek medical care um right and they didn’t need to be in the hospital and that there were no
options to really help why would you go to a doctor you know how did it you just
needed to treat symptomatically in quarantine yeah um interestingly the the population that
is the the highest incidence of developing walls shocking to me well it
was actually 36 to 50 which is interesting like you would think it might be the really old or really young
yeah yeah um and so actually the the older population they found that the elderly
so 80 plus are three times less likely to develop long covered than people who
are in their 50s which is odd we I don’t think any of us would have predicted that no there’s so
much our bodies aren’t made to last forever right and you would think that some of that machinery
has uh equipped to handle this infection well and as far as the the other issues
that it causes long-term not sure exactly how to explain that but those are the statistics interestingly as far
as where it has hit in the U.S the most in the South actually Kentucky Alabama
and Tennessee are all three of the highest incidents of of long covet and
then oddly South Dakota yeah um not in the South but uh anyway and then as far
as ethnicity Hispanics more than Caucasians more than blacks more than Asians
so you know how to explain that not sure um but women are definitely affected
more than men women you know at a rate of probably about 40 percent higher than
men um it’s almost not surprising since women have a higher incidence of autoimmunity than smells do so yes and
autoimmunity we’ll get into that in a little bit but autoimmunity definitely plays into how this all comes about
um you know as far as defining it it’s it’s a little bit difficult but I mean
basically it’s ongoing symptoms that are that happen as a result of covid that
just don’t resolve and usually that it’s being said that it’s greater than three months
um so you think like does this symptom start with your acute covet infection or
can it occur within the four weeks of the onset or even later um so what they found is that like the
neurocognitive issues neurological and kind of brain function issues can actually start
a month to even like three months after you’ve had covered so it doesn’t always happen like directly afterwards you know
symptoms like respiratory symptoms like people who get shortness of breath and cough a lot of times that will start
with the infection and then it just doesn’t go away um but you know some people get symptoms
related to their prolonged hospitalization and so they’ve got those symptoms that just keep going for months
afterwards um and and the thing is as far as what symptoms are we talking about the the
World Health Organization has actually found that they’re like over 200 200
from different reported symptoms that can happen as a result so many and that’s why this is such a hard like
condition to like put in a box you can’t put this one in a box and that’s what I
think it’s so hard for people to get the care they need because your symptom what
do we find with a lot of these non-specific symptoms or these Myriad assist symptoms as sometimes you might
feel like you’re written off especially if it’s more like you’re dealing with uh fatigue
um or even after they roll out maybe some other issues causing your shortness of breath you’re just kind of you’re just you’re just out of shape yeah and
that’s probably not the case right um all right let’s let’s talk a little bit
about who who are the the people who are more likely to develop long coven
um so unfortunately we already talked about one of those being a female is just a risk factor for this having type
2 diabetes connective tissue diseases which Mary has had a lot of experience with
um work in Rheumatology in the past um oddly ADHD but you know that’s a it’s
a brain kind of issue and and there’s a lot of brain things that can happen as a result of code along covid
um people who tend to have allergies and uh you know which is not always an
autoimmune issue but it’s an immune activation kind of issue but then about
a third of patients had no pre-existing conditions that they knew of
um I don’t know is is this something that you’ve seen Mary because I I’ve definitely seen this is that it covid
seems to hit people where they’re already a little bit weak oh yeah oh for sure I saw patients that whose mental
health got worse if they already were dealing with a history of depression and it’s not that they just became more
depressed or they had this SSRI deficiency in their body and but their
symptoms got worse and it just wasn’t because of the state of the world either and if they dealt with chronic fatigue
already or just like this some level of decreased energy that got a lot worse following it yeah I was concerned
because I read reports of of angioedema being caused by covid-19 and one of my
patients who had an unexplained angioedema that because of those patterns I was seeing covet get you
where you were already susceptible making it worse that potentially if she had gotten it she would have a very
severe reaction with that and could require hospitalization and intubation so yeah
one particular person that I know their their autoimmune stuff just went crazy
you know already had some issues but it wasn’t really affecting them that much and and having coveted twice actually
just really activated the whole autoimmune disease issue oh yeah so
hopefully I read my Twitter arthritis a solid flare Hashimoto’s sometimes and
antibodies it’s like oh for sure um so you know I how how does this
affect the body and there’s no easy answer to that because it affects the
body in a lot of different ways I mean what what are what’s kind of
ideas about how this is adversely affecting the body so you know once one
is kind of obvious it’s like you’ve got a virus that’s causing damage and that you’ve got the virus or viral remnants
like RNA or proteins that are triggering symptoms triggering chronic inflammation
and that’s probably a lot of what we see but not all of what we see I don’t know that many people are aware though that
those those viral particles can hang out in your tissues and just kind of be waiting yeah and and doing damage as
they wait exactly um autoimmunity which we’ve talked about a little bit you want to tell them about
what molecular mimicry is yeah so one of the kind
of is that the the pathogen or this viral particle from covid is going to
um affect the host tissues so it’s going to be using its own cells to cause some
issues with the acquired immunity immune function with BNT cells to start
wreaking havoc and causing Auto antibodies to form against normal
enzymes normal processes in the body usually think about autoimmunity as
uh attacking you know your own body you don’t want you you don’t want your immune system attacking yourself that’s
not a good thing no so it’s like covid is harnessing um some of his powers like it’s kind of I
don’t know almost intelligent in some ways like that’s what bioparticles do they hijack the bodies yeah to replicate
so they are pretty smart um another thing that it can do is
affect your microbiome some of you are very familiar with that word others are
not uh so the microbiome is basically the bacteria in our gut how does that
affect our bodies yeah the bacteria in our guts we can have good versus bad the
balance of certain bacteria actually have a wonderful benefits to our health 70 about 70 of our immune function is
comprised within our gut and our gut microbiome we have more we have what
trillions I think so yeah existing in our gut microbiome so it just affects a
lot of different things and and one of the things that you know has come to light in the past few years is that our
gut microbiome actually affects our brains you’d never think about but it actually does and so that could be
affecting you know people talk about having brain fog I mean that’s a pretty common one that people get with with uh
long covet you know could that be partially the microbiome oh for sure I know and we have to think about two
though that like when you think about the gut microbiome I don’t want you to just think about gastrointestinal symptoms when you think about that
dysregulation of the gut microbiome so um like you said it is connected to fatigue it can be connected to
autoimmunity um it can be connected to mental health issues as well as the worsening of ADHD
yeah definitely um other things that can happen reactivation of other viruses things
like Epstein-Barr virus which is the the virus that causes mono but it can cause
other problems when it’s reactivated like chronic fatigue and stuff humans herpes virus six
um FC bar is in the family of herpes viruses so and it’s just it’s just interesting though it’s like what were
you told when you got mono when you were a teenager uh that this will go away biracial have antibodies you’ll be fine
you won’t really get it again and we’re finding that’s just not truly the case and that covid can actually reactivate
some of these viruses that we thought were dormant yeah
um you know things having to do with the blood vessels so um clotting which you know that was
talked about a bit you know we found out that that uh covid was causing clotting
problems but sometimes those those problems can continue in Long covet and
that can cause all sorts of problems um capillary functions so capillaries are the smallest blood vessels in our
body and they supply all of our organs with nutrients and oxygen and all that kind of stuff and if your capillaries
ain’t happy nobody’s happy you have organs are gonna be starving for some nutrients
um and then endothelial dysfunction so that’s the lining of your blood vessels so you know you the lining your blood
vessels is super important and if if that part isn’t working well that puts you at risk for things like
cardiovascular disease you know so otherwise heart attacks Strokes hypertension all that kind of stuff and
then signaling issues in the brain stem and the vagus there or what’s the vagus nerve do for us oh it helps to regulate
what’s what’s the autonomic nervous system so it’s our it’s our flight or fight response that’s the sympathetic
versus our parasympathetic which is the rest of Digest
um so I can mess with that and I found a lot of people have had issues with
anxiety as a result of long covet oh for sure and it’s common so people develop
other types of like dysautonomias and pots sometimes starts after a covet
infection um so you know I mean as we we’ve talked about a lot of these things but you know
cardiovascular disease clotting issues cerebrovascular disease type it
increased your risk Long Cove it increased your risk for type 2 diabetes if you didn’t have it already you may
get it and I’m not saying these things to make you know make people scared but these are these are the ramifications
that we’re dealing with chronic fatigue which we mentioned um so it’s it’s a bit of a mess and
there’s there’s so many things that can happen um so you know we’re dealing with something that that has
um a kind of ramifications that we really haven’t seen that much at least
on on this wide of a scale with a virus before Oh yeah like you don’t get uh you
don’t get this for Sleep viruses usually we haven’t seen it today I mean every once in a while you’ll see some of this
stuff but as far as how how common it is and how widespread it is as a result of
this particular virus it’s it’s significant so I don’t mean to oversimplify this but going when I was
in PA school though what what three viruses cause the common cold that you were taught right uh rhinovirus
adenovirus and Coronavirus if you told me that a coronavirus would
have ramifications yeah but it did then I I would have been really shocked and
like really like it comes with a common cold yeah um but this is by no means the
coming home no this is not this is a different animal
um but you know as far as you know as we said symptoms can be so many different
things and I think that’s what I found with with my patients as they come in
and you start delving into you know okay when did your symptoms start with this
particular issue and it’s like how does it did it relate to you having coveted
you know as far as the timeline and and I’m just finding that more and more people it’s like there is some lingering
symptom that they’re dealing with yeah the question that we most often ask when we start to evaluate a patient is when
were you last well and if you can pinpoint that then like what was going on at that time was there an infection
so this in this case it might be covid uh there could be other stressful situations in life hospitalizations that
can be connected to that as well but that’s what’s so important to think about if you’re struggling with some of these symptoms that you’re not getting
answers for start to think about well when did this all start and when were you last well
when did you feel best and then what was the what was the timeline of what happened after that yeah so yeah I can’t
ignore that um so treatment
um this is what what can we do about this oh it’s it’s a bit messy because
it’s affecting different parts of people’s health and their bodies in
different ways it’s like some people it’s like it’s going to be primarily an autoimmune issue and some people it’s
going to be more of a neurocognitive issue and some people it’s going to be more like the chronic fatigue issue
cardiovascular yeah I mean so so that that’s why I mean even though even the
World Health Organization which I found this amazing said that a multi-disciplinary approach is the way
to go about treating this but it’s like what I found is that people
who have been trying to get help it’s it’s hard well it’s hard to get
doctors and clinicians to talk to each other it really is um and so you know maybe they have got
their primary care physician who’s kind of like the quarterback but then they get referred to you know pulmonologists
or they get referred to a Cardiologist or they get referred to you know a physical therapist or a psychiatrist or
a counselor and it’s like everybody’s kind of floating on their own Island and
that doesn’t always work real well no yeah I’ve seen people really suffering
because I feel like I’m seeing all these different Specialists and yet I’m not getting better because everybody’s kind
of just doing their one thing and their one specialty and it’s not working that
great sometimes I don’t know if this is your experience and this is not necessarily every specialty but it seems
that Specialists and there’s decking off their boxes and saying well it’s not this and not that and then there’s a
referral to somewhere else yeah yeah I’ve seen that a lot actually Specialists referring people to other
Specialists um but yeah it gets it gets really messy
um and you know there’s there’s hasn’t been any like specific validated treatments I mean they’ve looked at a
few different things but nothing’s really like floated to the surface I think it’s because there’s so many
different things that are contributing to the unhealth so many organ systems
are affected and there’s not going to be just one overarching treatment for this
because of that so I find this that’s going to have to set the expectation for
this you know unfortunately if you’re looking for that one thing to give you all the hope to get better we don’t have
that yet we don’t we don’t I don’t think we’re ever going to because of just the path of physiology how this is affect
affecting people’s bodies you know it has to be an individualized plan of care
um you know it it has to be you have to have somebody who’s digging deep with you if you’ve got this particular issue
and kind of knows the right way to look at it and is looking at all the
different things yeah and we have the availability here to look at so much we do within Maxwell care you know we
talked about just the dysregulation of the got microbiome I don’t believe you’re gonna have another doctor that’s
going to be able to do this unless they’re a functional medicine or an integrative clinician it’s actually assess your gut microbiome one of the
things that we have here that is very unusual we have something called a glyco check which actually looks at your
capillary function because your capillary function can be really compromised by covet we see that over
and over again and there’s something we can do about that oh yeah the capillary function can be tied to this without
fatigue as well um uh we’re willing to look into clotting factors in the blood and we’ve
been doing this kind of even before covid looking out for brinogen or D-dimer to kind of give us an idea of
that looking for any source of inflammation to bring it down I think it’s been amazing when I was having some
post-coded issues I used IBO Zone
an Ivo zone is going to take blood out from your veins I think about 15
milliliters of ironic correctly it’s going to put it in a super oxygenated environment and then ran through UV light and then
back into your body and it’s so beautiful to see that bright red blood after that deoxygenated dark blood
um you know laser body that comes back in bright red but it’s creating this kind of super oxygenated environment and
the blood goes back in it continues to circulate and it gives us this antiviral antibacterial anti-inflammatory
properties and with my own fatigue and mental health I noticed combining this with
exercise that I saw improvements in my energy and my cardiovascular activity
and then I just would have with exercise alone and I was really Blown Away by it
so yeah uh you know we have a hyperbaric oxygen here
um you know there’s there’s we have a lot here at Maxwell and this isn’t just an advertisement for Maxwell but you
know I think when people are looking for some place to get help with this it’s like you you really need to find some
place where they are looking and delving deep into what’s going on and then have
the ability to actually go after those things that are found to be abnormal right and it’s like I don’t think it’s a
failure of of any like Primary Care clinicians or whatever everybody is doing the best yes and what they’ve been
trained with and what I so enjoyed coming from a Rheumatology space to hear is I felt
kind of almost stuck in some ways in my ability to help people when I knew there had to be more and then so coming to the
Maxwell clinic and knowing functional medicine allowed me to have that more of which to offer and to help people so
yeah I I feel the same way I spent 20 years in primary care and I felt especially as I moved on in my career
and and learned more about functional medicine and this way of doing things my hands were tied it’s like I couldn’t
really practice functional medicine within the traditional model and it’s been great to be able to feel like I
have more to offer patients and and I guess I would say something like long covid is almost like the perfect
type of of disease process if you will that really needs this type of care yeah
because otherwise it’s care is fragmented or else it’s just not delving
into the right areas to be able to truly help people yeah that’s that’s the way I
feel I and I agree I’m with I’m with you on that um so anyway that’s that’s pretty much
what we had anything else you wanted
um that’s kind of what we wanted to cover um so let me see if we can get to
I don’t know if there’s any questions I don’t think there’s any questions at this point but yeah if anyone has any
questions uh with the time we have remaining please um feel free if there was something that
you know if you wanted to to hear that maybe we didn’t touch on yeah because this is a big topic
um and if you end up having uh questions afterwards you know maybe you know this is recorded so you’re going to watch
this some other time uh is that you know we can we can answer questions you know
uh that you have by submitting on Maxwell Clinic um but we’d love to see you here you
know if you’ve got long covid and you’ve been frustrated with you know other care
that you’ve gotten we’d be happy to delve deep into this with you um so actually we do have a couple
questions let’s see here um you wanna you wanna hit that one
yeah so this is actually coming from my patient um what I think about using
Alex naltrexo Naltrexone in higher doses is used for opioid and alcohol abuse disorders in lower doses we have seen
effects to support the immune function and help with autoimmune disease
so I have not been able to use it
specifically with somebody with low on covid to see kind of that outcome because when we treat patients you have
to think of it as an N of one or a study of one so I do think it has its potential benefits I would need to
search the literature to see if it has been looked at specifically to benefit covid but just because we know that it
will affect immune function in a positive manner and if the mode of action that’s causing the symptoms could
be immune connected then I do think it is plausible to be a benefit
um yeah it’s I I did run across a little bit on low-dose Naltrexone and and it
seems to be helping people I think especially with the people who have more of the autoimmune issues that show up as
a result of of long covet I see it benefited a lot of autoimmune conditions
so let’s see here what else we’ve got
um treatments that work for brain fog that’s that’s a good question um you know one of the things that we
have here at Maxwell Clinic is called neurofeedback and neurofeedback is
basically a brain retraining kind of program and so we kind of do we do a an
electrical brain map of of your brain and then we can train your brain to work
more efficiently and more effectively and I think that’s something that I’ve seen really help patients with a lot of
these types of issues so yeah and brain fog can is multi-layered it’s a complex
symptom as well so about like neurofeedback can be beneficial but also how are you sleeping
and are you getting restorative sleep is there some level of even sleep apnea at
night is there something in your diet that’s also worsening this brain fog
I’ve seen sugar and gluten worse than mine and I do better without it so yeah
and you know as we said earlier about the gut microbiome you know that’s if that’s messed up that can affect the way
your brain’s working I found yeast overgrowth and I treated that and people’s brain fog got better um and inadequate on nutrient levels
like magnesium so there are we’ve seen a lot of different things work for this to
answer your question um I’m gonna take let’s see here
should we go after this one chronic reactivated Epstein-Barr which
we mentioned a little bit I mean that’s it that can be tough to treat but it it
definitely can be treated I mean there’s you know as you said the uh ozone
therapy um can be helpful in that you have to think about the reactivated EBV like
herpes viruses that clasp we’re just we’re gonna we’re always gonna live with them and there’s not going to be a
complete uh getting rid of them right and so what I like to say is that these
types of viruses like to take an opportunity when we are our body is suffering from something else and it’s
like hi I’m here still oh did you want energy did you want to think clearly
but uh you know there’s a natural antivirals I have used as well to help with people you can find the then what’s
confusing is that the internet of course has all these different protocols to help and there’s there’s potentially
some guess where people do yeah and then it’s kind of controvers first seal because
anti-verbals medications are said not to be helpful for mono
but I have found them to be so in some patients
um uh let’s see here um
seeing more flare-ups or consistent symptoms in a long coveted made me think
that was something I read though that having really high antibodies to covid
the infection doesn’t mean you’ll have better protection from it right you have
even a higher likelihood to have some kind of reinfection so that’s kind of what that question
makes me see but um all right well I think we’re going to
wrap up for now um but we appreciate you joining us and uh engaging in this discussion about
long covid uh it’s it’s out there it’s a lot more common I think than any of us wanted to admit
um but it’s it’s it’s significant and it’s affecting a lot of people and uh you know go and get some help because
it’s uh it can be extremely debilitating yeah and if it’s something if you’re
already a patient here and you want to ask that specifically to your clinician let’s start to look into it if you
haven’t already so all right thanks Mary yeah thanks Dr Lithia I enjoy doing this with you all right everyone have a great
day yeah thanks for attending bye
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