Autoimmunity And Long COV!D

Eric Gordon, MD

Well, thank you. Thank you, Keesha. Thank you very much. And I always like to specify and be clear that, we contributed some of the questions of the paper and the patients: Dr. Naviaux contributed the brains. I mean, it’s his work. I wish I could say it was mine. You know, we continue to collaborate, and discuss, and learn, but he really is an incredible visionary ’cause he’s one of the few clinicians, or he’s no longer a clinician, but he’s one of the few doctors who actually spent a long time treating patients, but also has an encyclopedic knowledge of biochemistry and evolutionary biology, and as well as virology, actually his PhD was in virology. And so it’s just the ability-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

It’s very timely; virology right now. And so I’d love to bring us because part of, you know, like the, the title of your talk is “Autoimmune and Long COVID” and there’s a relationship between long COVID, or long-haul COVID, and this becoming an autoimmune issue, much like Lyme disease can become an autoimmune issue when it becomes chronic. And I would like to dive into that and talk a little bit about that.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well, you know, in my mind, most, as I say, I preface this with, everything we say about biology and the human condition, always has exceptions. Okay. But with that said, in my mind, most autoimmune disease has at its heart or its trigger, is usually some chronic inflammatory state, often low level. I’m sure your talks you’ve often gone over how you have celiac disease, and gut inflammation, and all these low-level we call, I consider them low-level infections, or chronic inflammation. But sometimes they’re triggered by infection. And what we call long COVID is no different. I think what’s different about long COVID is that we’re seeing the same family of responses that we see in ME/CFS and in what people call Chronic Lyme because many, some Chronic Lyme patients have persistent infection and do respond to antibiotics or other antimicrobial therapies. And sometimes the bug is gone, but the body is still reacting, as though it’s there, and that’s the autoimmune component because-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And the brain can be reacting in Chronic Lyme.

Eric Gordon, MD

Oh, well that is-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

The same with long COVID, right? We can have this neurological brain response. Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well, to me, the brain is what controls the body. I mean the nervous system, but it obviously it’s a feedback loop. We all know that the vagus nerve gets most of its information from your gut and the periphery, but it’s when the brain is, has enough energy, you can relax, and you can tell your immune system to relax. I always remind people that relaxation is what takes energy. When you contract muscles, that’s kind of falling off the cliff. Okay? The relaxation of the muscle is what takes your body to make ATP and to actually use energy, and to create energy. So it is, and when the brain doesn’t have enough energy, it gets irritable. And the, and with irritability comes all the emotional responses that people have. And so if you’re someone who tends to anxiety, if you’re someone who tends to a little obsessive thinking, these are just, these are self-protective mechanisms that usually we keep under control, but the more inflamed the brain gets, the more in inflammation that’s in the body, the more of these cytokines or chemicals that your cells make to communicate and to tell the body that there’s inflammation there, when they get into the brain, they create the inflammatory situation that will then lead to anxiety, or OCD, or depression. It just depends on how you’re wired.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

But also with outside of the mood part of it, and I think this is even just as scary, if not scarier, the microglia start to carve away your connections. And so you start winding up with areas that aren’t connected and you have this brain fog.

Eric Gordon, MD

Oh, absolutely. Or just as some of us, as we get older, we find the same thing is that yeah, our, we do lose connections in our brain. And we actually chew them up, absolutely. When the glial cells are activated, you can actually begin to chew up brain tissue. Luckily, we can also, that can be helped ’cause we can actually see that on, we do the MRIs that are, with some mathematical permutations, called NeuroQuant. I mean, that’s just one, the name of one company, but there’s several out there and we can see in things like, mold, mycotoxin illness, and in Chronic Lyme disease and in probably any of the chronic inflammatory disease, you can see parts of the brain that expand, ’cause they’re inflamed, and other parts that shrink because as the inflammation went on, they’ve atrophied a bit. But what’s really exciting is when you deal with the underlying inflammation and you supply the right nutrients, these things can come back. I mean, that’s, what I, for too long medicine has had this idea that if there’s something happens to your brain, you’re cooked, you’re finished. And it’s amazing the plasticity and the ability for things to heal, you know, so-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Well the higher, your level of adverse childhood experiences in your, in your past, that also triggers this microglia carving, and we know that once you downregulate the hypervigilance of that limbic system, and start to come into that self-soothing and self-regulation, that that stops and then the neuroplasticity starts taking over and you can build new bridges. And so, absolutely, you can go from high volume, right side of your amygdala, and shrinkage of the prefrontal cortex into the very opposite. And that’s beautiful.

Eric Gordon, MD

And that is what gives us hope. And it, one thing I’d like to emphasize to people, ’cause it, what confuses folks is how some people have x event and they really have persistent problems and other people seem to sail through. And this is where one of Dr. Naviaux’s papers that have never really gotten the press that it should have. He did a study for the Department of Defense, oh about, I think it was 10 years ago now, of looking at people who were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and basically 10% of the people had 90% of the post-traumatic stress. Okay. And he could see that based on their metabolomics. So how your body actually self-soothes biochemically helps determine your risk of these adverse events through, especially in, but especially in childhood because that’s when the brain is most plastic, that’s when we’re developing. So you can really unfortunately develop patterns that are hard to change. And I just remind people of that because self-judgment, I can imagine that’s a big part of what you try to teach people is how to temper that, is really is really easy to do, especially when your spouse seems to like sail through and you seem to fall apart easily and you get that idea that somehow you’re morally less when, no, this is just how we’re built. And understanding, you know, like, and have compassion, that-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Well, we’re energy patterns. You know, we have one of the five about how we respond and one of them is rigid, and another is fluid like water, and another one’s more air where we just leave our body and disassociate, another is fire where we get aggressive. Another one is earth, where we just hunker in and hold on and get stuck. And we have, you know, each of us has a different way that we developed in childhood and probably have some perhaps karmic and genetic predisposition to, and here we are. And it armors our body in a very specific way. And you’re not going to be like your spouse. There’s a very small percentage of a chance that you will be like your spouse, so you’re not broken, you’re just different.

Eric Gordon, MD

Right. And that’s so important is just being gentle. Because what I find is that in my patient population, that almost all of them were what I call, if I asked them, they were the sensitive one in the family.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

They were the ones who felt what was happening without a lot of words. And that’s a gift, because they often have very fine sense of taste and hearing and…

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Intuition, empathy. Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

And it’s, so it’s a wondrous gift but it unfortunately comes with a price in our modern world because of the level of just toxicity, and lack of ease of physical activity, and nurturing from the earth. I mean, all the things that we know make a healthy body and the, and give the signal. I mean, that’s something we’ll talk about a little later on is how you need the signals for healing. And they’re not one, that’s, in medicine, we’ve always think of things. I mean, well, not all medicine, but yeah, unfortunately, modern medicine, we tend to think in what I call a trauma-based model where, you know, there was an accident, a bullet wound, which we’re great at dealing with because that’s a-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

What’s the active ingredient? Let’s distill it down in a reductionist way and we’re not reducible that way, neither are our experiences.

Eric Gordon, MD

No, biology does not work the way machines work. Like I always tell people, we make machines. That’s why we can be, we can build bridges really well, but we don’t understand biology at that level. And because you can’t, because nothing does one thing in the body. It’s all multiplicative. And so, when we try to, and we can, a big event is a big event, but how our body deals with it goes back to that beauty of the multiplicity of possibility that’s makes us individuals.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Let’s talk about cell danger response and how it’s related to autoimmunity.

Eric Gordon, MD

Yeah. Well, I think the first thing I always like to remind people, it, first of all, it’s hardly anybody’s heard of the cell danger response, but people are beginning to talk about it. And I think I’d like people to understand that it’s a concept; it’s not a thing. Okay. It’s an overarching concept for how your body maintains itself. You know, cause really it’s, Dr. Naviaux calls the one aspect, the healing cycle and the healing cycle is what we do every day. You know, we eat, we build, we eat, then at night we sleep and it’s at nighttime we often break down injured tissue, or we try to take care of old cells and we build up some new ones and that’s.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Detox our liver, move our limbs, yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

Absolutely. Like the whole thing at night, you know, you get the lymph and the,

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

It’s a lot of work happening at night for those that think that your body’s resting.

Eric Gordon, MD

It’s working, it’s working hard. But that’s the healing cycle. That’s what happens every day. And that’s why when you’re healthy, you know, you injure yourself or you overdo, and in fact, that’s how we grow, is by pushing our bodies and exercise to the point where you actually injure tissue a bit. And then usually, you know, during the day, but mostly at night you heal it. Okay. So that’s great. That’s when everything is working well. Now, if you have a bigger injury, you then go into a where more than a few cells are injured, you go into what, what Dr. Naviaux calls the cell danger response. And he’s broken that down into three pieces. Basically the first one is the inflammatory piece, the and re, and so a lot of inflammation and removal of dead tissue, ’cause you know, that’s what you gotta do, you gotta clean it up. The second part, this CDR that we call CDR-2, is when you’re rebuilding that. And that’s a growth phase. And interestingly enough, that’s the phase that gets disordered in often in autoimmune diseases.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Mm

Eric Gordon, MD

Okay. It’s this because you know, like I said, if this is an overarching concept, so it’s not just about rebuilding tissue, it’s also about how your immune cells monitor and regulate themselves ’cause you know, I’m sure in some of your other summits, when you’ve got more into the nitty-gritty of the physiology, unless you know, it’s the T cells and the B cells, but they’re always self-regulation is what’s gone awry in autoimmune disease. And so that’s has a lot to do with how the lymphocytes self-regulate in this so-called CDR-2 phase when they’re, they’re turning themselves on and they’re making more of themselves. Okay? And so that’s often happening in an imbalanced way in autoimmune disease. And the CDR-3 is at the point where the tissue has repaired and grown back ’cause the CDR-2 is when you are repopulating cells like stem cells come in and they, and the other cells nearby start to grow. But in CDR-3, these cells are maturing and they’re now beginning to talk to their neighbors again, because the whole thing about a healthy body is good communication. Just like a healthy family or society is when we-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

A healthy sex life. Everything is about good communication. Right?

Eric Gordon, MD

And that’s what, and that’s what, so when the CDR, when the system is working well, you go through these phases, CDR-1, CDR- 2, CDR-3, and then you’re back to the normal health cycle of just small repairs and fixing things that need to be fixed that aren’t too big. I call like the health cycle is more like, you’re fixing, you’re just cleaning up stuff around the house. The CDR is when you have to call the contractors back. So, and the thing that’s really interesting about this is Dr. Naviaux has positioned the mitochondria as the regulator of this system. And most of us think of the mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell, what makes ATP, and what, keeps our energy thing going, our energy system going. But he’s a mitochondrial specialist, actually. He was the first president of the American Mitochondrial Association. This is one of his big things and mitochondria have different forms. Okay. They have these long, they, they actually form long, normally when they’re doing our background, let’s keep ourselves healthy, they’re mostly in this long filamentous forms that are communicating, they’re actually touched, attached to each other and communicating, okay? But when we go into the CDR-1, they break apart and he calls it the spaghetti and meatballs model. ‘Cause you have these long filamentous forms, which are, you know, the ones we consider normal. 

And then the meatball ones are when they’ve broken apart and they’re kind of not communicating with each other, once again, ’cause they’re hunkering down for survival. Okay. So the mitochondria in the CDR-1 sense danger. Now the most, probably the most primeval danger sense is to bad chemicals and viruses, ’cause in, this cycle happens in single cell organisms. It’s not about people. This is how life works at every level. And so during that hunkering down, it’s, I always say, it’s a little bit like in the feudal ages when you know, like the invaders would come, people would burn the fields and retreat to the castle. Well that’s what happens in the CDR-1, okay? You lower your ATP production. Okay. You stop making these big molecules that can be hijacked by the virus. Okay. And you start putting some of that ATP that you’re still making a little bit of, on the cell surface and it acts as a communication molecule that tells the other cells that there’s danger here. And that produces sickness behavior by the way. If you inject people with ATP, they actually will feel sick. You know like flu-ish, achy all over, tired, not hungry, wanna go and hang out in the corner and hide because-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Which is interesting everybody because in cellular biology, we tend to think of ATP as the little units of energy that every cell needs to function, and as good, right? So it’s really interesting.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well it is good because-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Exactly. But to think of it like causing sickness behavior, if you inject it, is fascinating.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well it’s ’cause it’s a communication molecule and like everything in your body, the volume affects the message. Just like when you say please, or if you scream please, you get a very different message across?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Which is why homeopathy works too. Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

So it’s the tone, and ATP is a sig, so you have like, at least I think in humans we have like at least 17 known receptors for various purine, they call it the pure energy, ATP is made up of purines. It’s just part of the makeup of your DNA and RNA. And so you have receptors for these molecules for ATP and UDP and a whole bunch of others. But these are crucial because without a little bit of ATP leaking outta the cell, you don’t learn. The way that dopamine tells your brain to learn something, to pay attention, is because a little ATP came out. So it’s a molecule of attention, and attention goes to memory ’cause you gotta remember the stuff that’s dangerous. And it also tells you when you put a lot out, it lets you know, you’re really in trouble. You gotta like hunker down and protect yourself. So that’s kind of, I, the CDR-1, and the CDR-2, and the mitochondria are sort of coming back online a little bit, but not completely. And during the CDR-1 and -2, you’re getting most of your energy from burning glucose, from burning sugar. And that’s why people who are chronically ill, often, it’s not just a sweet tooth. It’s the only thing that makes them feel better, it gives them a little energy, is because their mitochondria aren’t doing the normal job of making all those 34-36 ATP. You’re only, you have to burn glucose and you gotta burn a lot of it to get energy.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Oh, red jello in the hospital wasn’t such bad idea apparently.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well, yeah. You know, there is some.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

My whole entire medical career, I have poo-pooed red jello in the hospital.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well look, you’re getting a little protein and a little sugar, could be worse. No, that’s that’s I never thought of that that’s-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

that’s with the red food coloring, but okay.

Eric Gordon, MD

Yeah, yeah. Maybe, but that could be something. But so, it’s just trying to get the complexity that the mitochondria, when they’re going through these things are not broken. And that’s one of the reasons why when people are really in the throes of being really sick, a lot of the supplements that we feed people don’t work so well, is because a lot of them are there to quench oxidative stress or to help the mitochondria work more efficiently. But the mitochondria, when they’re in that meatball form, they’re not gonna be using a lot of CoQ10, and a lot of these other nutrients that we normally think of from the mitochondria, so that’s why it doesn’t work. But as you’re healing, when you start entering that CDR-3, when you’re beginning, the cell is now maturing and going back to functioning and talking to its neighbors, then the CoQ10 really works. And so I just like to, ’cause I know for years people would come in with shopping bags full of supplements. You know, and just to go back for a step, the reason I fell in love with Dr Naviaux’s ideas is because it helped explain why I was treating people, when I was treating kind of healthy people in the 90s, these supplements worked great. You know, the people who were just tired and wired, you know, working too hard and pushing themselves, not sleeping enough, not eating well, but they’re still okay; they’re just fatigued because they’re kind of pushing, the supplements often helped.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

But, but sicker people, it changes. Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

It changes. And so your mitochondria have changed, but, and, well, I don’t wanna go too much deeper but one of the things I just wanna emphasize here is that going from stage to stage, CDR-1, to -2, to -3, unfortunately we don’t know the magic trigger to get them to go. And that’s why it is so important to do things that are just generally, that give signals to the body, that the war is over, such as, maybe being outside, being in the sun, movement a little bit. If you’ve got with that post-exertional malaise, if you’re somebody who exercises and feels terrible for two, three days afterwards, well, don’t push. But if you can walk around your house, walk around your house. If you can walk a half a block, walk a half a block. That little bit of motion.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And journey, we wanna get more of that structured water in place in your cell. Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. It’s just so important to do the, not so glamorous, but probably really basic important things. And again, people get frustrated ’cause when you’re really sick, that doesn’t get you well. But it keeps giving your body, the signals that when you or the person you’re working with to help your health return to health, you finally hit on the thing that your body needs, you’ll be in a much better shape and ready to move on if you actually are spending some time in nature, even if it’s just a few minutes, just sitting outside. So I just, one of my big things, don’t wait for the miracle.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Right. No, that’s so true. Okay. So how is this similar to, let’s talk about long COVID and persistent vaccine injury.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well, okay. You know, is exactly what causes long COVID, there are different ideas and I think they’re all in play. And again, in some people, one is more important than the other. The two main what I call, I like to call things stories, because to me, medicine is story. People like to think that there’s like rock solid facts, but you know, again, when you’re near death, we have rock solid stuff. You’re in the ICU, we really know a lot of good things to do, but when you don’t feel well, we have ideas. We’re not so sure. But anyway-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

We call it the art of medicine.

Eric Gordon, MD

Right. Which is very frustrating when you’re the patient and you would like answers. And especially in this modern world where people, we all see the wonders of technology. It’s really frustrating to realize that, again, they work better when we build it. When, when God, or whatever your way of looking at the organizing forces of the universe created it, we don’t know so much. But anyway, the, I’ve lost my train of thought there. That was very interesting. That’s what happens when you get really old, you see, you lose things. The, so I lost where I was going. So-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

We were talking about long.

Eric Gordon, MD

Oh yes. How long COVID, yes. So there’s a fellow, Dr. Bruce Patterson, who, really early on, he had always been interested in persistent viral infections. He worked at Stanford for up to about 2010, and then he went off on his own because he was working on things like dengue and cytomegalovirus. These are things that are persistent in the body sometimes, especially dengue. And most people it’s an acute infection, but sometimes it can be chronic. And he started to see that if he could find persistent pieces of the virus, not necessarily a whole replicating virus, but a piece, that was stimulating the immune system, living in a monocyte. Now a monocyte is one of your white blood cells. It’s what we call macrophages in, when they’re floating around the bloodstream. If you, again, don’t wanna overwhelm people, but it’s part of what we call your innate immune system. And so he found, and so when, when COVID came, he and people right away were, were having persistent infection early on. It was clear that we couldn’t find any virus, but people were feeling terrible and fatigued for months. He started looking for them and he did find in these, what we call atypical, one subset of the monocyte, that often tends to patrol the blood vessels, he found pieces of the spike protein, the S1 piece, just a small piece of it, but this should have been metabolized by the monocyte. You know, it should have been that-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

We know it can last 15 to 18 months post-infection.

Eric Gordon, MD

Right, it hangs out sometimes in these monocytes. And when these monocytes then latch on to a blood vessel in a particular area, it signals inflammation, and it calls more inflammatory cells there. And so if it’s in your liver, it’s gonna make the liver a little unhappy. If it’s in your heart, it’s gonna make the heart a little unhappy. And so he came up with some ways to A, dislodge these monocytes and get rid of them and help interfere with how they were talking to the immune system. So he has a whole program for that, that, it helps a bunch of people. And then there was a researcher, Dr. Pretorius in South Africa, who noticed that lots of people with COVID had very high, abnormal thrombosis. You know, we did see that all right in the beginning, that’s one of the dangers is blood clots in, and also we see that’s one of the dangers from the vaccines though that we, this blood clotting, that’s what happened with the J and J, that big thing right away, of the clots in the brain. But those are-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Sound like very, very-

Eric Gordon, MD

those are very unusual. Let me put it, I don’t want, to be very clear. Those were very unusual, but they proved the point that this can happen. Very, very rare.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

My dad died after the vaccine of that.

Eric Gordon, MD

Oh my God. Yeah. Well, because the vaccine, it’s a double-edged sword.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Right.

Eric Gordon, MD

I mean, like, I have to believe, that from the change in the mortality figures, when we started using the vaccine, especially in older people, people over 60, over 70, especially over 80, you know, it was, it made a huge difference. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a lot more cardiovascular deaths because the vaccine does create a prothrombotic, just, it makes the blood clot easier. And we have seen that, we’ve followed some people after vaccine and you can measure that this marker called D-dimer, which happens when you’re breaking down clot, goes up. Now but anyway, so Dr. Pretorius started looking at the blood and what she was finding not just that it was forming more clotting, but these were abnormal clots. ‘Cause normally our body is pretty good at breaking them down. That’s why we see these high D-dimers, because your body’s working hard. Well, in some people with long COVID, the D-dimers aren’t even elevated. Is because the, when you have a lot of inflammation, which the spike protein creates, the blood clot itself forms differently instead of being the fibrinogen instead of being in these, like these three, nice three dimensional shapes becomes pleated and more linear. 

And the enzymes that normally break down blood clots that normally break down fibrin, don’t work. And so you have these microscopic areas of fibrin deposition. And often whether it’s hiding virus or hiding other toxins, that’s a question I don’t have the answer to, but you’re definitely having a lot of inflammation. And when you start forming these, you deprive areas of blood flow. And so you get lots of the brain fog or just all, basically every symptom that patients get relates to decreased energy production in an organ, for a time. And that’s what confuses doctors is because these don’t often leave traces in the normal blood testing. And that’s why chronically ill people have such a hard time because until we find the test that shows them, ’cause I’m old enough, back in the 70s, MS was still, they were just beginning to get that it was real. I mean they, in the 60s and 50s MS was considered a psychological, it was mostly women, hysterical, you know?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Exactly.

Eric Gordon, MD

What are we gonna do?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Although from Victorian times, we are a histrionic on a group, yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

We, yeah. I, that, what can I say? But that’s the history of medicine. When we don’t understand it and it happens more in women, it must be psychological.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Hormonal, hormonal women. Pat ’em on the head, send them on their way. Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

I apologize, but that’s been the story. And so until we can measure things, that’s what happens. And unfortunately these chronic diseases, even, quote unquote, “Long COVID” and especially the vaccine reactions, the typical blood tests are normal. You know, your blood count and your liver and kidney functions tend to be normal. So they’re not looking; we have to look a little deeper. And unfortunately the blood tests that Dr. Pretorius uses are ones that are really simple, but they’re really at this point only done in hospital labs. They’re not, you can’t get them commercially yet. So we’re kind of stuck there. But, what’s interesting, and I’m, I don’t go too far on this, but since we’re talking about these blood clotting things is that there was some doctors and I’m sorry, I’m blocking on her name, I apologize for that. But, in Germany, who started using a type of an apheresis and apheresis is like cleaning the blood, it kind of like, it takes your blood out and it goes through either a centrifuge or a filter. And she was using a device in Germany that uses a filter. That was, I believe she was using the one that was originally developed for people with super high cholesterol. It’s not popularly, it’s not used much in America. 

There’s only probably a handful of places that use it, but it’s used for people with super high cholesterol and a few other things and it does filter these out and she was using them on people with post-COVID, long, quote unquote, “long-haul” COVID and getting some good results. And she and Dr. Pretorius are now working together and publishing some papers. So it’s really very exciting and they’re getting some good results. I personally think that a combination of using that with the regular type of apheresis, which just kind of filters the blood through a centrifuge and removes the immunoglobulin, ’cause one of the things that drives lots of chronic autoimmune diseases, and this is where I think the connection is with long COVID and autoimmunity, is there are antibodies. There are, the spike protein leaves behind lots of antibodies. And also even after the vaccine, we can see lots of antibodies to the spike protein, and then your body makes antibodies to those to clean them up, which is kind of interesting how like I said, this is not an easy, simple system. And some people, again, most of the time the body works really well. 

We make all this stuff and we clean it up. We get rid of it. But sometimes, if the cells that are doing it are in this CDR-2 and are too enthusiastic, they keep going, they don’t get the signals to stand down. And then you wind up with too many antibodies and you start making autoantibodies to them. And that’s where the regular apheresis I think can help. But if the blood clotting is there, you probably need the HELP. It’s just called HELP, which stands for heparin. Anyways, it has to do with the, it’s an acronym. And like most acronyms it has to do with heparin and LDL cholesterol and fibrinogen, but they didn’t wanna use fibrinogen so then they put the P in for plasmapheresis, but anyway, but these are two different systems to clean the blood. That’s the bottom line. And I think going forward, and unfortunately, when I say going forward, it’s gonna be a slow going forward because in America, I bet you we don’t do this in establishment places for another two to three years ’cause that’s how slow, I mean, it might even be five. I mean it, it breaks your heart, which is-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

We’re often 10 to 15 years behind the research in clinical-

Eric Gordon, MD

Oh, oh yeah. No, totally. I was being optimistic because this seems like so important. And so many people are being, the thing about Chronic Lyme disease and the ME/CFS is that it hurts lots of people, but it’s like a batch here and a batch there. COVID has hit so many people at one time that the medical establishment can’t do what it normally does, which goes, “Oh, well you’re not dying.”

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Needs more research, need more research. Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

Needs more, and the problem with the research is that they spend so much time on trying to understand the pathophysiology, that they don’t spend enough time on, “How do we fix this?” Now at this time, the pathophysiology is giving us some direct hints. If it really is the blood clotting, but it’s still this looking into the blood clotting is still not happening at the mainstream level. They’re still spending a lot of time at these centers of excellence, for long COVID, which basically consists of, pulmonologists and cardiologists and rheumatologists, and neurologists, seeing people, the neurologist tells you, “Well, your headaches and brain fog are mm-hun.” You know, the pulmonologist tells you, “Well, your lung function is fine.” The cardiologist, I-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Do you know what I have found has worked in my practice?

Eric Gordon, MD

Yes.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Is standard processes protomorphogens.

Eric Gordon, MD

Huh?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

We’ve added those in, so the protomorphogens are giving your body the cells of the like organ.

Eric Gordon, MD

Yes.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And that’s the whole basis of it, kind of like homeopathy. And so if somebody has gone into long-haul COVID and is having cardiac issues, we give the Cardiotrophin PMG. It works like, my patients, none of them have long-haul effects. If they have neurological issues, we use the Neurotrophin PMG. When, if they have lung scarring, we use the Pneumotrophin PMG, and I keep them on it for three months. And it’s been remarkable in how well it works.

Eric Gordon, MD

That is very exciting. And I really like, I said I use the standard process. I, especially for people who have, I used to use a lot of the ones for the hypothalamus and the pituitary, because you have these things where it’s obvious there’s been some immune attack, if you will, on these organs and that is, they seem to work.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Well, I sat and thought about it and thought, “You know what? No one’s offering anything, so let me just try this.” And I have been astonished at how well it has worked. So-

Eric Gordon, MD

That is exciting. I’ll have to add that to because unfortunately when you treat, like doc, the Dr. Patterson’s protocol it’s, they’re basically all drugs and they work, there’s, I mean like a lot of people can’t tolerate them and some of them are very, very expensive. It’s actually the one of the, I think the safer one, even though it’s got a black box warning from another, from a long time ago, it’s ridiculously expensive. So it’s nice to have things that-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

This is inexpensive, accessible, people get it, and I’ve not had anyone have a bad side effect to them, and we put that in combination with the FLCCC.net protocol

Eric Gordon, MD

Right. Yeah. Well the FLCCC, I said, I like that. Again, I haven’t seen, again, I always start people sort of on that, and, again, by the time I see people, most of them have done that.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah.

Eric Gordon, MD

And failed

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yeah. So this is our addition to it.

Eric Gordon, MD

Yeah. And I think that that would be a good one because, again, the FLCCC one is a nice, it’s immune modulating, and that’s what we’re trying to do. But sometimes people have gotten to the point where that’s not gonna cut it anymore.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Exactly.

Eric Gordon, MD

And then you have to keep going further. I mean, that’s always been, our process is, it’s just the nature of my clinic is that I don’t tend to see people till they have failed the naturopathic and the-

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

We’re in the same boat.

Eric Gordon, MD

medicine. It’s like the, yeah. And it it’s.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Last stop on the train.

Eric Gordon, MD

Yeah, that’s right. And then you just have to find, you do it’s, it’s really just about listening because many times there is a therapy out there it’s just that the individual needs a different note. You know, we all respond differently to the interventions. But so these are the, to me the main rationales behind long COVID are the clotting and the persistence of spike protein, and then it’s the person’s immune system and what their, how they, how they dance. And it’s like all autoimmune disease, you start with calming as much things as you can making life as safe as possible. And then you see what’s going, unfortunately, the conventional world looks at it with, they have two hammers, you know, either the, either the, the prednisone steroid thing, which is just put out, shut the system down and pray that it reboots itself. I mean, cause really that’s, you know.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

And often it doesn’t, with the.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well that’s.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

You go off the prednisone and there it is again and it’s just like, okay, no, you can’t destroy your gut microbiome and your adrenals to do it that way, so.

Eric Gordon, MD

Oh no, it’s a it’s diminishing returns because again, if the trigger is truly gone, the body is amazing enough that sometimes really, that does work. But generally there’s something persistent in the system, a habit pattern maybe. I mean, and that’s the beauty of working with the brain again, ’cause I, my, I always tell people, your immune system is just like the rest of you. It’s neurotic.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Yes. I always say that too. It’s just like your mind.

Eric Gordon, MD

Once it learns a pathway, it will go back there again, easier. And so we have to often, help retrain it and you know, that’s why there are so many, so many, so many different ways of dancing with this. But anyway, so those, that.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Doctor Gordon, we’re actually out of time.

Eric Gordon, MD

Oh. Well, it’s been fun.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

I really appreciate you spending this time sharing even just a fraction of your knowledge and wisdom about this. It’s been fascinating and thank you so much.

Eric Gordon, MD

Well, thank you. And I do, and I also just love every time, every time I talk to anybody, I always love what I learn. And you know, the standard process had been on the back of the shelf for a while. I’ll bring him to the front. So thank you. It’s been my pleasure.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

Thank you again. And everyone, until next time be well.