I wanted have a conversation with clear and safe guidelines on ways to support your IMMUNE system during the COVID-19 pandemic. system from a Holistic or Naturopathic approach. The show had a window to sit with Dr. Paul Anderson, a Naturopathic physician out of Seattle, Washington.
Listen to the episode here:
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Key Topics:
- Traditional Medical Therapies [00:13:44]
- Psychological to Physical [00:22:22]
- Weather Factor [00:25:29]
- Heat Therapy [00:27:16]
- On Vitamin C [00:34:03]
- On Glutathione and Amino Acids [00:39:15]
- Vitamin A, D, and Zinc [00:45:29]
- Breathing Techniques [00:54:41]
- On Oil Extracts as Respiratory Medicine [00:56:54]
- Staying Hydrated [00:57:47]
- On Exosomes and Immunomodulators [00:59:22]
- A Doctor’s Reminders [01:06:30]
Dr. Paul Anderson – How to Proactively Protect Yourself from Covid 19
My name is Elijah Allan Blitz. I am not Gabby Reece. Laird and I guest-hosted the podcast with Dr. Paul Anderson. We had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Anderson and took it. This information is valuable. I hope that you guys get something out of this. Dr. Anderson is the Medical Director of Advanced Medical Therapies in Seattle, Washington. He’s at the heart of this.
I learned a lot from him even stuff as simple as getting selenium like eating Brazil nuts. If you check out Gabby’s Instagram, she posted a video of the condensed things that Dr. Anderson is doing for his family. He’s not recommending this to anybody because everyone is different. It’s ideas and there are dosages in there. Also, we talk a lot of other things. He goes into exosomes and his thoughts about Turkey Tail. There are a lot of things that he goes into. He also sent links to everything that he refers to. Sending everybody so much love. It’s crazy times right now. Stay safe.
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Maybe you’d like to start and give your punch list of what you see given what you know. Where you are, and what you know, it’d be interesting to hear your perspective.
Being in Seattle and watching things unfold here, and I’m sure other states will catch up and pass us, we’ve had more confirmed cases in more fatalities probably than most other places. One of the problems that people need to be aware of with reading the news, hearing the news, or whatever is the statistics are only as good as the numbers are based on. If you look at Chinese statistics, they’re not based on real numbers. It’s not like you’re taking a percentage of we tested everybody, let alone we had a good test to do it with. You have to be a little careful.
The problem is, of course, people feel better, “It’s a low death rate or a low penetrance rate.” The problem is that we only tested the sickest people so they’re going to be skewed up or we had a test that was only 50% accurate so they’re skewed the other way. People need to take the statistic for what they are and not discount them. Not get too afraid of them because fear doesn’t help your immune system. They’re as good as the numbers that we have.
Here in the US, living with it here as a doctor in Seattle, people who’ve been exposed in our clinic tested is hard because we don’t have the test kits we need. The University of Washington went around the CDC and made their own so that helped us a bit but we’re not there. With stats, getting tested, and everything, that’s going to take time to play out. You can’t be banking on either getting tested or whatever or the stats to make you feel better.
What I can tell you from being in a city where we had the hospital a mile and a half away from me here was where the first patient that we knew of in the US was. There’s some debate that maybe there were other patients before him but the first one that we diagnosed. It went on from there. What we’ve seen is pretty much what everyone has said. If you have a lot of risk factors, if you are elderly, etc., that’s not good.
Our worst case scenario that we’ve seen play out live and I’ve been consulting with a family at this place is a care center where everybody has all the risk factors, the elderly, they’re sick with other things, and they all live in one big building. Those have outbreaks of all kinds of stuff. They had an outbreak of COVID it hit them very hard. They’ve been on the news, I’m sure people know about that. They’ve had 30 or close to 30 die. That’s pretty heavy-duty.
What I can say is that people who have been exposed there who don’t live in that center such as healthcare workers, etc., don’t have that high level of fatality. How you’re doing underneath makes a huge difference. How you’re taking care of yourself, how you are or aren’t eating, and all that stuff does fit in. That’s another message. No one wants to wake up and have a pandemic or a bad virus so you’re not thinking of these things. The base of how you take care of yourself matters more now than ever, it always mattered. It matters if you’ve got some bad floating around.
The other thing we don’t know, we make surmises about it, is asymptomatic people who test positive. Like most viruses, they’re the most transmissible. The problem is you can’t tell because they have no symptoms. They’re breeding the virus. It’s in their respiratory secretions so it’s going around. What we don’t know is there are a lot of them that probably will only experience a mild set of the illness and then get better and maybe never even be tested.
The problem is if they’re in contact with people either who don’t have a great immune system, there are a lot of modern drugs people are on for auto-immunity and some bad diseases that lower your immunity. They look healthy but their immune system is lower than the average person. This whole thing with social distancing, flattening the curve, and all that it, what that’s about is protecting the people that we don’t know we might be exposing who might look fine. I call them the silent at risk and there are a lot of those folks out there either because of medications they’re on or they don’t have the zippiest immune system or they look healthy but they’re not underneath.
As a preamble, you need to take care of yourself regardless. I’ve had people say, “If I start eating clean, moving my body, hydrating, sleeping, and all that, will it protect me from the virus?” You don’t know that. Would you rather go into a viral illness doing that stuff or would you rather be not doing that and get sick? The bedrock things are important and they’re easy to forget. This is a two-edged sword. There are a lot of nutritional things that people are going to add to what they’re doing. The way I’m going to talk about it is not to give advice to anybody.
I’m not giving you medical advice. I’m telling you what we do for our family. If you want to do that thing, you should talk to someone who’s qualified there. I don’t mean this personally against primary care doctors because I used to be one but your primary care doctor may not be an expert in nutritional augments to your immune system, Chinese medicine, or whatever. Find someone who is, that’s all I’m saying, and ask them about what I’m talking about. At some point, we’ll go through that stuff. I can send links to things that might be helpful as well. That’s where I wanted to start out.
[bctt tweet=”Do what you can with your own body. It’s amazing what you can do.”]
The other thing for the background is there are a couple of things in the news and then there’s big American news backlash. One of them is a lot of the Chinese studies that are going on with using vitamin C either orally or intravenously to help people who are sick or get over or recover. Those studies are actively going on. I’ve had an internet connection with the people doing the study so I have updated information. We’re going to do a live webinar to update everyone about that research. I can send the link to that because it’ll be recorded. I’m sure it’s free. It’s an international thing.
What dosage of vitamin C?
Let me get to that in a second because there are a couple of different ways that they’re doing it and there’s an Americanized version of it that we have done. When we get into what to take or what to do or whatever, I’ll outline that. I’ll try to make it as simple as possible. The way it’s portrayed in the media is not exactly the way it’s being done. There’s nothing wrong with that. We want to be clear with what they’re doing in the hospitals. I will definitely get to that. This is important for empowering people, a lot of North Americans, this podcast, my podcast goes all over, around the world, there are a lot of traditional medical therapies that grew with the culture.
In China, for example, I’ve been getting their data translated so I can read it because I don’t read Mandarin. One of the big things they’re doing is using what they call traditional Chinese medicine for people on the front end to keep them from needing the hospital and for people on the recovery end. When I read what they’re doing, it’s a traditional Chinese approach and there are a lot of practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine all over the world.
You can say the same thing. I have some friends from India and neighboring countries. Ayurvedic medicine is their traditional thing and they’re doing it. What’s interesting but not surprising to me is the traditional approach, if done by a physician or practitioner of that who knows what they’re doing, is extremely effective probably at keeping you out of the hospital or recovering even if you do go in there. It’s about the approach, it’s not about whether you can only do Chinese or you can only do Ayurvedic or whatever. Almost anything works if it’s done by somebody who knows what they’re doing.
There’s a case even, it’s one person but the numbers are powerful. It’s meaningful. The care facility that’s near us, they’ve got 60-plus positive or roughly 30 have passed. There’s one person who’s as sick, probably sicker than some of the other ones, who’s tested positive and he has no symptoms. They’re there all quarantined who haven’t had to go to the hospital or quarantine.
The only difference with him is he had some traditional Western herbal medicine that, prior to being on lockdown, was prescribed for him to help his immune system because it was cold and flu season. He’s been able to stay on that. He’s one of the few people who’s tested positive but showing no signs of progressing and he’s got the problem. We’re hoping that we can keep that going to him etc. in isolation so he can stay there.
Stuff like that is happening. The reason I want to bring that up first is there was a big wave where all of the health experts on CNN and all the big news outlets came out and said, “There’s nothing to vitamin C. There are no herbs that can help you. There’s no nutrition that can help you.” I didn’t listen to all of what they said but I know what they wanted people to do. Essentially, there was this giant backlash against, “There’s nothing you can do for yourself other than stay away from people and wash your hands.” I’m here to tell you that that’s inaccurate.
There’s this game you can play with statistics. Because we don’t have long-term Coronavirus studies or COVID-19 studies using anything, you can say, “There’s no science for it.” Of course, there’s no science for it. We don’t have that. We do have science for some other nasty things that have happened like H5N1 and H1N1, which are different viruses but act the same and kill the same. this backlash in the American media, I’m not sure what’s driving it and I don’t care but it’s something that needs to be called out for what it is. It’s BS.
There’s a lot of stuff you can do. Because you never know where someone is and where they’re listening, if you avail yourself of whatever your traditional medicine is in your country or your area, this is a great time to see a good practitioner of that. In Korea, for example, I go there and speak and I have connections there. At this end of the world, especially infectious diseases, they have traditional Korean medicine, which is similar to traditional Chinese medicine.
A friend of mine who is in the middle of all this going on in Korea where they’re not having big death rates, I said, “What are you doing?” He says, “We are doing some IV vitamin C and stuff.” He says most people are staying home. In Korea, the testing capacity test is 10,000 to 20,000 people a day. He says, “We’re testing everybody.” If you’re positive, you self-isolate. He says that, on their own, people are availing themselves of either traditional Korean medicine or nutrient therapies to help, etc. He says it’s not organized, people are just doing it. Their test rates are penetrant and their death rates are good if you can say that.
I wanted to frame what you’re hearing in the news, some of it is great like the idea of flattening the curve and staying away from people. If you’re an unknown positive, you don’t want to be spreading that around, especially to elderly folks or people on drugs that are busting their immune system down. There’s a lot of stuff you can take and do. The other side of it is not going to hurt you. What they’re floating around in the US in the hospital communities, which is not a bad idea, is there are some old-time drugs. This has made it out to the news thing.
I’m not telling secrets or anything but there are old-time drugs that were used for malaria and stuff like that. They upregulate part of the antiviral system your body naturally uses. What their thought is, “This is a drug. It’s easy to get. It’s old. Maybe we should start giving this to everybody.” They’re doing it in Australia already, in China, and stuff. That’s their attack and that would be great if they did it. The only trouble is that these drug combinations, you have to manage carefully for cardiac reasons and other stuff.
When I get to tell you what I do with my family and then you check it out with your practitioners, with few exceptions, there’s no downside to any of it. It’s likely based on older research with other viruses to be helpful for you. That’s my preamble. It’s a lot of jabber about stats and what’s going on but people get this twisted version of what’s going on in the world from the news, Facebook posts, or wherever.
Everything you’ve described speaks to the psychology that’s going on. If you’re freaking out, all of your psyches is going to play a big factor in your immunities. We know that. Believing that you’re going to be okay and it’s going to be okay and all of those things are going to have a huge factor. We don’t even have measurements for that stuff, I would imagine.
A couple of questions, one that comes right to my mind is it seems like, at this particular time, there are other things going on as well. I knew a couple of people that were sick and they went and got tested and they weren’t tested. They had some other stuff going on. Is it the psychology of vulnerability? Are things piggybacking on this virus? It seems that, at this particular moment, there’s more than this one thing going on. People are sick and then people are like, “We got that virus.” When they got tested, they didn’t have that virus.
That’s a huge thing, too. We call it comorbidity. There is still influenza B and A running around. If you have that and then you get exposed, it ups your chances of more trouble. There are all kinds of other things that people don’t even realize go around in the winter because most people don’t get sick from them. They’re transmitted the same way. There are certain little tiny bacteria and there are some other things that do this.
Dr. Paul Anderson – The way you breathe, how hydrated you are, and the stuff you are breathing in is important.
What we see in our clinic is mostly cancer and chronically ill folks. They’re the sicker end of the spectrum. When we test them for these things, they receive them from airborne things and they have them in a slow burn in the background. If you get that person and they get it, it’s like, “I’m already on fire here so to speak. I might not feel it because my immune system doesn’t care about those bugs. Those bugs plus the other ones are huge.”
For this presentation, I’ve been getting things translated from China from the hospitals. One of the things that they did was they statistically looked at these bugs and said, “Did the bad cases have other stuff growing?” We haven’t gotten there in the US yet but it makes complete sense. The short answer is, yes. They have chronic fungal things, some parasites, a lot of bacteria, and stuff that they opened the door for it.
The other thing that you brought up can be measured. It’s tough to measure but it makes logical sense. If you think about it, yes, this is a time of year. I have allergies and soft coughs sometimes. You look around and go, “Do they think I have the COVID?” It’s not. I have allergies and that’s why I’m coughing. If you’re afraid and then you start to get symptoms from 1 of the other 100 things that can give you cough, a fever, or whatever, you can talk yourself into being sick. Psychologically and physiologically, you’re a great target.
What they’re saying is there are so many asymptomatic people that probably have it brewing and they cough on ten people. A certain number of them, their immune system is not going to let it get too far. If you have anything going on to knock your immune system out and even psychological or these other bugs that are going around, you’re a great host. That’s a huge thing.
You up a point when you talk about this. This has been one of the coldest winters. I was in Alaska. I can tell you in Hawaii and California. We’re on a northern hemisphere high-level outreach cold. From what I’m hearing, it could be one of the culprits in this whole pandemic.
That’s true. There’s nowhere you can go where the weather is not completely at that end of the spectrum. If you consider that these other bugs we talked about that can set you up to be worse off, most of them do well during the colder times of the year. It makes complete sense. They’re starting to see some stats. Those are statistics we’ll see years from now when we look backward. That makes complete sense. It’s the same here in the Northwest and the same almost everywhere.
That brings up the question because we’ve been hearing a few different reports in regard to heat and that heat is something that can be helpful. We know that it does well in the cold so heat would have some benefits. Personally, we do an excessive amount of sauna because it’s part of our regimen that we use for our health and wellness. We’re mad sauna people. I’m curious about it. When the body is threatened and you have a fever, that’s another version of heating up.
What are those symptoms? What is the stage of symptoms that you’ve seen now that you’ve watched it run this course, especially in these hospitals where you’ve gotten people vulnerable? The stage is like, “What is the course?” Is there any rhyme or reason for it? Is it bouncing around? Is it a headache? Is it coughing? Is it fever?
These are largely based on this massive data from the Chinese where they have a big group and stratified. We’re seeing the same things. I want to get back to heat because heat, sauna, and hyperthermia are important things you can do for yourself. It has similar symptoms to a bunch of stuff, especially influenza A. The dividing line still seems to be holding out. The problem is these things mutate and then they act differently as they go along.
The dividing line is you start like you would with influenza A with a pretty big fever and dry cough. In influenza A, you get the fever and it hits you like a truck and you get respiratory symptoms but then you immediately pretty much start to hurt everywhere. You get joints that don’t want to move and stuff like that and a bunch of other symptoms.
This one, because it’s receptors that it goes in through our respiratory and they trigger this chemical cascade of your body saying, “We don’t like this. We’re going to put the immune system to work.” The fever goes up immediately and then you start a dry cough. Dry coughs are fine because you’re not swimming in your own secretions. The problem is that dry cough is a harbinger of what’s going on, which is all of the alveoli are getting wetter and wetter. That’s what kills people, the inability to move air.
Your immune system reacting quickly, which it does to influenza and these mutated COVID and stuff like that, is what makes you have a fever. Fever is supposed to try and burn the bug out for lack of a better term. Its symptoms are unique. When we’re screening people and they call, “Should I come in? Should I go get tested?” It’s like, “What are your symptoms?” If there’s cough and fever because of a lack of test kits, we test people for other common reasons for cough and fever like the flu, pneumonia, and stuff like that.
If they’re negative for those, we send them to the hospital. Usually, they’ll get tested by default. The fever response is a good response. Social media is good and bad but this has been a good thing. There have been a lot of people posting these studies where they said, “You probably shouldn’t take ibuprofen or anything like drugs to lower your fever. That’s probably not a good move.” I’m saying this for a long time.
In this one, because it moves fast and you want your immune system not to overreact but to hit it hard if you take something like a nonsteroidal, it drops your fever too quickly. The other chemistry that your immune system is supposed to use to react is hamstrung. It can take some of the immediate responder types of cells and take them out of the game for a while. By the way, while we’re talking about heating and stuff like that, sugar does that too, which nobody likes to hear. When you’re protecting yourself against viruses, sugar is not the thing that you want to comfort eat.
Blocking the fever. A doctor sent me a message. I haven’t had time to track it down but I trust them and they’re scientific. They were talking about the external temperature that can be achieved in a sauna, hyperthermia device, and stuff like that can at least slow down the growth rate. Potentially, if you hit it hard on the front end, maybe even help slow the growth rate of the virus and kick up your immune system.
External fever, when they use it as hyperthermia medically, does both of those things. One is it slows the bugs down but the other is it tells the immune system, “Something is going on. We need to find who’s here and kill them.” There are levels that are achievable by saunas and by home devices. We’ve got our sauna set up and are using it. If you look at the Nordic cultures where the sauna is a part of what they do, in some outbreaks, that seems to slow the progression of what’s going on.
That’s another thing that’s very North America. Canadians are doing a bit better than us Americans on this. Hyperthermia, as a medical treatment, there are devices that heat you up a lot, heat certain organs, or whatever. In the rest of the world, it’s accepted. There are a lot of decent to good science on it for a lot of things, especially infections, cancer, and stuff like that.
[bctt tweet=”Sleep well and take care of yourself. Remember that all the basics are important. Don’t blow them off as people do.”]
The US has been slow to take them on and now they’re doing trials. We’re 40 years behind most other countries. To get to the levels where they’ve killed some real nasty viruses such as they’ve done in Europe, you have to be sedated to be in an environment that hot. There are four levels of heat you can get your body to. Most heavier sauna equipment can get you into the 2nd, the beginning, or the 3rd level, which is medically useful.
If people have access to anything to heat them up. People say, “I don’t. I can’t get a sauna. I’m out.” What I have them do is put an extra layer of workout gear on and whatever their workout du jour is, get hotter than you normally would. That will trigger some of the same cytokines. Heat therapy is useful. People who shouldn’t be in heat, they already know that. don’t start if you shouldn’t. it is a part of your routine or it’s something you were going to start doing, that’s something I would do.
There are a few things that we’ve been hearing pretty consistently. I want to ask you your thoughts. I understand you’re not recommending this. Everyone’s case can be different. Something that we’ve been hearing over and over, there are about four things that I would love to get your thoughts on, and that would be glutathione, vitamin C, exosomes, and Turkey Tail mushroom. Can you add your thoughts on any four of those?
This would be a great time. I’ll go through the list of what I’m giving my family and myself and that crosses over with a lot of that. If I miss any of what you mentioned, you call it out. It’s interesting. One night was all health care providers and it was a webinar where I was presenting the latest in what you can do with your patient and all this stuff. Most of the questions had to do with stuff around that. There’s a little bit of misinformation about certain vitamins and other stuff. I’ll do a mini version of that.
Vitamin C is cheap and it’s easy to get. Most people tolerate it well. There’s a scientific basis behind this that most doctors never were taught because they’re hard sciences that we’re learning now. We’ll give the doctors a pass for that. When you get sick, you require a different amount of vitamin C than when you were healthy. When you are getting sick or sick, your gut receptors that pass the vitamin C in your blood go crazy. They turn on and they’re like an open gate. When you’re not sick, the gate is regulated so you get what you need every day.
If you’re getting sick, you’re exposed, even if you don’t feel much, what you’ll see is you’ll start to tolerate more and more vitamin C. The way that you do it is a low-tech thing called bowel tolerance. We’ve all maybe taken too much vitamin C and you get diarrhea or whatever. There are two things about that. The receptors can only absorb so much at a time. For memory’s sake, what we do is we have ascorbic acid powder, we put it on our water, and we take it 3 or 4 times a day with dinner and at bedtime. You meter out the dose. That lowers your bowels getting upset.
If you’re sick around sick people, what you’ll find is you might only tolerate a gram or two grams a day before your bowels get loose. I’ve had sick people tolerate 20 or 30 grams, no problem at all, and they’re sucking it up. They’re taking it. That’s a pretty big range. Start with 500 to 1,000 with each meal and at bedtime. If you get no diarrhea or loose stools, double it the next day. As soon as you hit that point where your bowels are telling you too much, it’s not hurting you at all to do that. It’s like, “That’s too much. Go back to the other dose.”
Vitamin C is used in many different areas of your body and your immune system. It’s water-soluble. We don’t make it ourselves. Biologically, we have to get it from the outside. When we are fighting something, our regulation of it goes up to absorb but also your white blood cells suck it up. Some of them use it to kill things, which is good. There are a number of other things though that vitamin C does. Your cells, when they run low on it, they become easier targets for viruses to enter. The worst thing is, in certain tissues, they become easier targets to have what you call the bad reactions to being septic, inflamed, or whatever.
Some of the research in China where they’re giving it intravenously is people who they’re trying to keep from dying on ventilators from septic shock or an inflammatory reaction in the lung and it’s working. If you can do that at home by increasing the amount that goes into your body so your levels are high enough. In your body, on the other hand, when you’re not sick anymore, you start to back off again. It’s simple.
The cool thing is that the doses now that I’m getting the Chinese stuff translated, the doses that they’re using with people on ventilators or who are dying and IV when you’re sick, you can get to by oral dosing. Yes, if you’re in a hospital and get an IV, that’s even better. If you’re looking at prevention at home, vitamin C is great.
There are two comments I’ll make. Some people will say, “It burns when I take vitamin C,” or they get stomach upset. What we’ve always done with those folks, you can either get a buffered form of vitamin C, which has certain minerals with it, which is great. Esterified C, which has been around forever, is Estra-C. Those two, even with people with bad stomachs and stuff, seem to tolerate that fine. There are ways to do it. I use ascorbic acid because I tolerate it. My family seems to do fine. It’s cheap. You get it in bulk.
Vitamin C is important. I’ll circle around the IV stuff. It’s foundational because we can’t make it. There are a lot of stuff we make ourselves. When you get sick, if you have the building blocks, you’ll make certain peptides or you do other stuff because your body can do that. Vitamin C, you got to get it from somewhere outside of you.
Citrus is probably a good place.
As far as when you’re eating, all the stuff that most people’s grandmothers told them about what to eat turns out to be true. Nothing in packages. Look for color in the fruit and vegetable kingdom. It not only has natural sources of vitamin C but also the bio-flavonoids that go with it that keep your immune system calm and then a whole bunch of other polyphenolic compounds and stuff. I’ll tell people to look for things that have the most color, it probably is going to have good stuff and that turns out to be true. It’s different where you go around the world but it’s the same. That’s one foundational thing.
Another thing that’s less talked about and you’ve seen a little bit more but because this comes in through the respiratory system, there’s an amino acid called cysteine. This gets to your glutathione question. N-Acetyl Cysteine is also fairly cheap. Here at the house, we take it with each meal in 502,000 milligrams. It does a bunch of stuff but it does two major things and one of them is it keeps the secretions in your respiratory tract thinner.
What happens is when your immune system starts to beat up a respiratory invader, it puts out immune proteins and those immune proteins become sticky. That’s why you get a bad cough and then you’re hacking up stuff and it’s gooey. That’s what’s going on. That’s also what kills you. N-Acetyl Cysteine on its own is called mucolytic and it helps to keep them thin. It doesn’t stop the immune part but it helps you keep the stuff moving out. It goes well with vitamin C.
The other thing it does though it and vitamin C are supportive of your natural glutathione production. N-Acetyl Cysteine does it directly because it’s glutathione 3, amino acids, and N-Acetyl Cysteine is right in the middle. N-Acetyl Cysteine is the easiest to absorb orally. N-Acetyl Cysteine helps the lungs but it also helps your natural glutathione function. Vitamin C and some of the other minerals that we’ll talk about help your body recycle them. glutathione has to be recycled. That’s super important.
Dr. Paul Anderson – Dry cough is a harbinger of what’s going on. The alveoli are getting wetter and wetter. Air doesn’t go through fluid and that’s actually what kills people, the inability to move the air.
People who are higher risk, people who maybe haven’t had the best lifestyle, and all that stuff, or if you have the resources to do it anyway, we’re doing it but it’s not part of the core. The core is like if you have to spend X dollars, spend it on this stuff. Liposomal glutathione or acetyl glutathione, which is another oral kind that absorbs, those are extremely important. Glutathione is something that you burn through quickly as well when you’re sick.
If you think about it, if your vitamin C is being used elsewhere and it’s what helps recycle it, that’s another good reason to keep your vitamin C up. If your glutathione all burns out, your immune function starts to lower so your lungs get more sensitive, your brain, and all the other places they’re worried about this stuff going. N-Acetyl Cysteine is a cheap way to raise your natural glutathione levels but it’s also lung protective.
If you’re doing lipo glutathione or acetyl glutathione, the oral forms, none of them are terribly cheap but 1 to 200 milligrams is quite decent if you’re taking it with this other stuff. You could do that twice or three times a day. Especially if you have a history of other lung problems or used to be a smoker or you’ve worked in a toxic environment or maybe you’re already carrying around some of these other lung bugs, it’s good. In our facility and some hospitals, they will nebulize it like you would with an asthma patient where they nebulized drugs into them. They nebulized that N-Acetyl Cysteine forever but you can do glutathione that way too. We’re trying to get this in with that facility where all the people are sick.
Can you get water-soluble NAC to put in nebulizers?
Any compounding pharmacy that does nebulizer solutions can get glutathione or NAC as a powder-based and sterilize it. They’ll make it a nebulizer solution. In past outbreaks of things with elderly folks where lungs are fragile, we’ve seen where that’s kept them from good getting worse, especially a high-risk cases. The other thing that you have to be cautious about is there are a lot of younger folks who are healthy but have asthma. If you’re an asthmatic and then you get hit with this, you can be as healthy as anything but your lungs will escalate faster. Depending on what drugs you’re on for your asthma, that may cause a thing. For glutathione, either orally. Nebulizing can be helpful there.
We do it intravenously too, that does for the organs, etc. The lungs are the big targets. The nice thing with NAC is you can get enough NAC to protect your lungs and up your natural glutathione for probably 20% of the cost of doing it all through glutathione. A lot of people are replacing certain parts of their food budget to get certain supplements for the next few months. I’m trying to keep it there. If you have access to glutathione, especially if you have access to a doctor who can prescribe a nebulizer solution of either N-Acetyl Cysteine or glutathione and you’ve got any lung issues at all, it’s amazing what it does. That’s one.
There’s some theoretical controversy that’s not controversy. I’m going to address it. This is for adults. I don’t know if you heard the screaming of my grandchildren but they’re on baby doses of that outside here. Vitamin A and D are super important for all immunity, especially vitamin A in your lungs. It makes some sense on paper about A and D. A and D might change the ACE receptors in the lungs and maybe you shouldn’t take it because it might let the virus in faster.
On paper that looks curious but none of the respiratory failure type viruses. We’ve had this a lot with H1N1 and a bit with H5N1 where we had a lot of people to look at. None of those or any other respiratory problems have A and D ever caused an exacerbation of the disease. They’re critical to the rest of your immunity and your lung immunity.
There are a lot of doctors on this call. Everyone’s afraid of vitamin A. I’m talking about 1 to 4 months during this critical time. Talk about taking these levels forever, I do anyway. You do what you do and talk to your health care provider. All of the families who are adults get 25,000 IUs of fat-soluble vitamin A. Carotenoids like beta-carotene and other carotenes are great and you get them in food. They don’t do this well.
As a therapeutic, this is a pharmacologic use of vitamin A. Vitamin A like retinyl palmitate or any other retina, if it starts retina, that’s the one. 25,000 IUs is super safe unless you’re in liver failure or something like that. Many people take more than that. The adults are doing it every day. It’s fat-soluble and you take it once a day. A lot of people take vitamin D, some 5,000 to 20,000 a day. If you’re not taking vitamin D, you should be on like 10,000 to 15,000 at least. For this short period of time, it’s not going to hurt anything.
A and D, they’re fat-soluble. If you took them forever at super high doses, they would build up but we’re talking about prevention. In a 1 to 4-month period, you need them. Minerals are important for a ton of stuff. The one you hear most about, which is legit is zinc. It’s like vitamin C, it’s used in many places. Zinc is directly used by some of the fighting white blood cells like vitamin C to create chemistry that kills stuff. Zinc also is the thing that if it can get inside yourself will block viral replication.
Getting into the cell is a trick. Most people are fairly low in zinc in their bodies when we test them. If you don’t have enough zinc, you can’t get it anyway. You’ve taken a good multi or a pack, it’s got a bunch of stuff. You might find that you’re taking a lot of stuff already. If you’re not used to taking these things, my family and some of our patients are doing 50 to 75 milligrams a day.
If you’re active, you might burn through that. For the average American, that’s higher than their long-term use. The reason for that though is to get zinc levels up. People say, “Zinc depletes copper so you have to be careful.” It’s not for 1 to 3 months. That’s not going to be an issue. Yes, long term. The one caveat with zinc is some people throw up when they take zinc. If you’ve ever had that happen, you’ll never take zinc again.
I’m sensitive to it this way. Here’s what I do, I set my stuff down in the zinc. I eat half of my food. I take the zinc with some water and I eat the other half of my food. It digests with your food. It doesn’t stick to your stomach lining and makes you vomit. Be careful with that if you’re going to take zinc. Most forms of zinc absorb well. A real common one you see is zinc glycinate or zinc bisglycinate. The glycine residue helps it absorb faster too.
We take black ant powder. It has a little bit of zinc in it.
Someone sent me a picture of that.
It’s heavy.
Zinc also helps with glutathione functions. Many minerals get involved there but zinc is huge. The other one that’s huge with glutathione that helps the rest of your immune system is selenium. What I recommend to people though because now you’re getting to a pretty big pill count is if you’re on either a multi or whatever, look at trace minerals in it.
If you don’t see anything like zinc, selenium, or a little bit of maybe copper or maybe not, or chromium and stuff like that, you don’t have minerals in there. They might put calcium and magnesium. If you don’t see trace minerals, that’s not good. You can get trace minerals as a mix and they work better together. I recommend if you got selenium in your multi, great. You want 100 to 300 micrograms. That’s in good multis. Makes sure you’re getting it somewhere.
[bctt tweet=”If you’re on multivitamins, look at your trace minerals. If you don’t see trace minerals, that’s not good.”]
Brazil nuts have about 100 to 300 in 1 or 2 Brazil nuts. If you’d like those, that’s the easy way to get selenium. Nuts and seeds, because they’re made to regenerate and also be stable when they fall on the ground and stuff, have a lot of mineral content. Nuts and seeds, you got to eat. They’re a great place to get a lot of these minerals too. Those are the core things.
You mentioned glutathione, we did talk about that. If you have access and/or you’re already taking it, don’t stop is what I would tell people. A lot of people already have nebulizers if they have respiratory problems anyway. You can usually get N-Acetyl Cysteine has been more standard in hospitals because it’s been around longer than glutathione. There’s a drug used when you’re having a lot of respiratory problems made from N-Acetyl Cysteine. It’s pretty easy to get.
Glutathione, you just need a pharmacy. If you get IV glutathione from the pharmacy, it’s a little different preparation but they can make nebulizer glutathione. If you’re asthmatic and you have to go buy stuff from a pharmacy that makes your neb solutions, they can make glutathione for you. You just need your doctor to order it. What we generally do is about 200 milligrams plus or minus per nebulization, even with older fragile folks.
There have been other influences on elderly people with respiratory and they could get it. It turned some people around because it helps keep you from plugging up. That’s what takes you out. I was on a call with an expert panel and all this stuff and most of them were on the East Coast. We’re going through what had been our experience and what’s going on and when do you send someone to the hospital and stuff.
Because of everything that will take you out from this particular virus, the consensus was you can stay home and take care of yourself through the early to middle stages. The further you go in, the crappier you feel because you’ve got a fever. You can have a fever at home if you can hydrate. If you’re elderly, you take care of yourself and get help. What they said was when you get breathing problems, that is when you need to go to a hospital.
We don’t overburden the hospital people with fevers. If you’re having trouble breathing, you got asthma already, you got one of these million bugs already, or you progressed fast and now you got wet lungs. Wet lungs are what will take you out. Even on a ventilator, the problem they have is you can push air in and out. When you get to the microscopic alveoli, if they’re full of fluid, the air doesn’t go through the fluid and then that’s what will take you out.
What about nose breathing? That’s probably pretty important. You produce gas in your sinuses that helps you absorb oxygen. If it gets down to that, it seems like nose breathing will probably be a pretty important thing in this process.
There’s been one published paper but there’s been a couple of nicely written articles about breathing techniques and the improvement of the way you breathe and the breathing technique for the lower respiratory, which is where the trouble starts. 99.9% of people don’t even know that exists or care about it. That’s a huge thing, looking into nose breathing.
Do you have links to that article or that paper that you’re talking about?
Yeah. I’ll put it on my list of stuff.
If this thing is progressing and becoming a breathing issue, the more we can see the breathing and using our entire lungs and breathing through our nose. We humidify the air because we live in a dry area. We’re cold mist and humidifying in our rooms because that’s another lung health. That leads to lung health. If we’re in a sauna, we use eucalyptus. There are things that we got to factor.
That’s important. The more of those things you do, if you call them hygienic, basic, or whatever, the more you do basic nutrients, the less likely you are to have this go to the place where you need help. If you need to go to a hospital, you need to go. The last thing you want to do is have to go to a hospital with this. Not only are you around other sick folks but the technology that we have to help is great but this bug is a tough nut on there, especially in the way we do it here.
You mentioned eucalyptus, citrus oils, and stuff like that, especially in saunas or heated areas. We do a lot of that too. There’s German research on different oil extracts and using them as respiratory medicine. They looked at how many of these different types of bugs does this thing kills versus this. If you go to Europe, they steam it and then you inhale it. It does kill many things. Eucalyptus is also pretty tolerable. There are some on the list that they have that you wouldn’t want to be inhaling. Eucalyptus is good across the board.
Looking at stuff that you can do and changing the way that you breathe makes a huge difference. If you’re in a dry area, make sure that you’re humidifying. It’s almost like the simpler the idea, the more they blow it off. They figure, “I breathe.” Staying hydrated, why is that important? Your respiratory system dehydrate so fast and if you’re doing it, it dehydrates faster. Most humans are dehydrated anyway. Your mucous membranes, the more dehydrated they are, the easier stuff goes in.
You have mucous membrane antibodies that sit there that are like flypaper and they can be specific or non. A reason we’re not sick all the time is that mucous membranes can transmit stuff easily. This flypaper-like sticky stuff is there to hold it. When you get dehydrated, it starts to spread out and the bugs land and get into your cells.
If it’s a virus, it starts to replicate. The way you breathe, how hydrated you are, and the stuff you’re breathing is super important. People with airborne toxic professions, people that work in car shops, welders, or whatever, people who’ve been around secondhand smoke, your lungs go quicker into the bad zone. I’ll put that on there. I’ll look up the nose breathing stuff. I know it’s in there somewhere. It’s been a little sporting week here.
Dr. Paul Anderson – All the stuff most people’s grandmothers tell them what to eat turns out to be true. I tell people to look for things that have the most color, it’s probably going to have good stuff.
Thank you for your time. Any thoughts about Turkey Tail mushroom?
Interestingly, one of the questions, one of the doctors posted was, what about nebulizing or inhaling exosomes? Exosomes, for people reading and wondering what that might be, if you’ve heard of stem cells, stem cells are our direct programmers at the cell level and they turn into other stuff. Exosomes are looking down at the landscape and they have the potential to go and either redirect things or fix things. They can fall into the cracks, level things out, make them feel better, or whatever.
The way I answered the doctor was it makes complete sense to me to do that. I don’t see any reason why, given the way exosomes work, they make something worse. We haven’t had access to good exosomes. I can say with a lot of confidence with A and D and respiratory influenza, I’ve seen it a lot. Exosomes, there’s no logical reason in a respiratory problem or an infectious problem that they would not be beneficial.
I’ve talked to some of the exosome scientists because it’s a big emerging area. It’s a little early still but what they’re saying is in the infectious inflammatory world because exosomes aren’t down doing job X, they’re up here trying to figure out which jobs need to be stimulated or slowed down. They should be helpful along the way. It’s like nebulizing. If you’re already doing exosome therapy, talk to who does it with you. It makes a lot of sense.
Turkey Tail and other mushrooms. Turkey Tail, interestingly, we use that in part of our cancer research that we were doing. It surprised everybody how well it worked, especially certain cancers that weren’t treated well with anything else. Turkey Tail has particular complex molecules in there. Mushrooms, generally speaking, are immunomodulatory. It’s similar but different mechanisms from what I said about exosomes. An immunomodulator goes in and if this is too high and this is too low, it tries to bring everyone back in balance so you don’t do too much inflammation or too little. They try and right the ship.
Turkey Tail got famous because it’s one mushroom. A lot of times, in mushroom therapy, you’d mix them and do other stuff. It isn’t an immunomodulator. Stuff like Turkey Tail and there are some Western herbs like black elderberry, which has gotten bad press for dumb reasons, and some of the other stuff. They’re immunomodulators. I have no problem using most mushrooms, especially Turkey Tail, or some of the modern mixes we have in folks, especially on the prevention end.
The way that mushrooms and some of the other herbal things work is they’re trying to keep your immune system that’s working hard doing it on the level. It’s going to do it at a higher level but you don’t want half of it way too high and half way too low. A lot of folks don’t have either the nutritional or the metabolic juice or their immune system has been off for a while. It’ll over and under react at the same time. That’s what gives you the wrong symptoms. Mushrooms generally help with that.
There’s some thought that maybe if you’re bad, hospitalized, you’re not going to be getting mushrooms anyway. You do them on the front end in the prevention or early disease and then on the recovery end, they’d be good. Thankfully, there are smart people who can take over doing stuff. One person on this call is an immunologist and does a lot of research. They were reading all of these posts about, “You shouldn’t use black elderberry. You shouldn’t use all these other herbs because they’re going to cause a cytokine storm and you’ll die.”
She wrote an elegant thing that I was going to write less eloquently with a bunch of resources. it basically went through and said, “Here’s the thing, if you look at the research on these herbs and stuff, the way that they work is they’re mostly modulating. Yes, they kick up your immune system a little bit.” If you go back and you look at the one research on. We’ll pick one thing, aisle six, it’s what everyone focuses on but there’s a bunch of them.
Aisle six is, “How much does black elder kick it up versus influenza A, which we have a lot of data on?” Influenza A, it’s orders of magnitude of what the flu virus can do, which we believe is similar to COVID. It’s like, “I’m going to go out to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and I’m going to throw somewhere between a cup and a small bucket of water into it.” The Olympic-sized swimming pool is what the virus can do.
The little bucket that does a little bit to help the immune system, that’s not going to create a cytokine storm and kill you. She goes through all the science and all this stuff. I helped her help that go viral. These are useful things. They’re easy to get. Here’s the other thing I was joking about my grandkids. Children don’t like to take a lot of stuff in. Black elder or sambucus, I’ve not met a kid who doesn’t like it. It’s one of the few things that taste good. If the kid likes it, it probably tastes pretty good.
Ice cream cake.
It’s good for you and it tastes something fun to them. With kids, whatever you can get into them is what you get in. That’s why I like powdered vitamin C because we can put it in their water and it tastes like lemonade or whatever.
I like to spice it.
With kids, the younger they are. We got one grandkid that takes anything I give her but she’s an oddball.
I have one. There’s never a carbohydrate she didn’t like.
Did I miss any of the things you brought up earlier?
Everything I asked about. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you, guys.
We appreciate it. There are 1,000 more questions and there’ll be 1,000 more before the end. Is there anything on the closing that you like to say?
Sleep well and take care of yourself. Remember that all the basics are important. Don’t blow them off as people do. What I’m telling people is don’t stress-eat sugar. You might as well tell your immune system to take a hike if you do that. If you get in there, heat. If you breathe differently, all that stuff is super important. Do what you can with your own body and it’s amazing what you can do and then this other stuff will help.
I’ll send over some of the links to stuff. I’ve got a couple of podcasts that are aimed at a non-freakout level of what you do on the ground for you and your family. I’ll send you links to that. I will send a link if people are interested. The webinar we’re doing around the world talking about the research around IV vitamin C and keeping people alive during this prevention, I’ll send a link to that because it is free. It’s made to dispel a lot of myths and get beyond a lot of the crap that you see on the internet, sadly, I’ll send you a link to all of that stuff.
Thank you, Dr. Anderson.
Thanks, guys.
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About Dr. Paul Anderson
Dr. Anderson is a recognized educator and clinician in integrative and naturopathic medicine with a focus on complex infectious, chronic, and oncologic illness. In addition to three decades clinical experience, he also was head of the interventional arm of a US-NIH funded human research trial using IV and integrative therapies in cancer patients. He founded Advanced Medical Therapies in Seattle, Washington, a clinic focusing on cancer and chronic diseases and now focuses his time in collaboration with clinics and hospitals in the US and other countries. Former positions include multiple medical school posts, Professor of Pharmacology and Clinical Medicine at Bastyr University and Chief of IV Services for Bastyr Oncology Research Center. He is co-author of the Hay House book “Outside the Box Cancer Therapies” with Dr. Mark Stengler as well as a co-author with Jack Canfield in the anthology “Success Breakthroughs” and the Lioncrest Publishing book “Cancer… The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment.”. He is a frequent CME speaker and writer and has extended his educational outreach creating an online CE website “ConsultDrA.com” and Advanced Applications in Medical Practice (AAMP) conferences. AAMP is dedicated to bringing next level learning to healthcare professionals to enhance their knowledge and clinical skills in a CME approved format.