Effective Treatment Of Long COVID, Fibromyalgia, And Fatigue

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Welcome back to the conversation. Today, I’m speaking with Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum. Hello. Welcome.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

La la la la la. Welcome to everybody from the big island of Hawaii. For those of you of fatigue, whether you have long covered CFS, fibromyalgia or just the fatigue, we are going to teach you how to optimize your energy and get your life back today. So kelpies, paper and a pen. So, anyway, Laura. Pleasure to be with you today.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, my pleasure as well. So let me introduce you to our audience. You are one of the most frequently quoted integrative pain and fibromyalgia medical authorities in the world. You’ve authored several bestselling books, plus you’ve authored eight studies on effective treatment of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue fatigue syndrome. You appear often as a guest on the news and talk shows. Good Morning America. Dr. Oz. Oprah, CNN. You are the authority in this space. So, like you said, we’re going to jump right in. Talk about fatigue, fibromyalgia and long COVID. So can you start off with telling us, you know what? What is it? What is CFS or fibromyalgia or long? What are the symptoms of this?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Basically, these represent an energy crisis where the energy drops so low that you trip a circuit breaker called the hypothalamus almond sized area of the brain. Right about back, you had that area, that area controlled sleep hormone. It’s an autonomic function that the last ones that stand up are big back water, gravity control, third leg. They need some of that blood back up to your brain and the rest that’s got an oblique function. So you’ll see this wide mix of symptoms. But the way to tell if you have CFS, fibromyalgia or long-covid, which is simply post-viral, is one more form of post infectious CFS and fibromyalgia is you have the paradox of exhausted and can’t sleep normally are exhausted sleep all day, all night. But first off, they can’t sleep. You have brain fog. And then if you also have widespread pain, you have fibromyalgia without it. That’s just conflicting syndrome. But you get widespread pain. Fibromyalgia, you’ve got it. Even if you have autoimmune conditions or other problems or infections and things like all the rest that may have triggered the circuit breaker going exhausted and can’t sleep. That’s the sign that the sleep center circuit breaker is tripped and you have these conditions.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And can you talk a little bit more about where that pain would be in the body? Is it in joints? Is it not in joints where people expecting to feel this pain?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

So here’s the thing that we think that low energy would make your muscles go all sleep. But after a heavy workout, you don’t come home and say, honey, my muscles are always lumpy. Stay there. They’re all tight. Give me a shoulder rub. You’ll work out the muscles. Muscles are like a spring. It takes more energy for them to relax and to contract. So you don’t have energy. The muscles get locked in a short position and after a couple of hours or years, they hurt. You’re going to see the pain in the shoulder, begin to see the headache. You’re going to see a problem, head back and maybe even around the joints and spots like that. But you’re not going to have red swollen inflammation. You’re just going to have pain. And that’s the muscle pain in fibromyalgia, anyhow, we have chronic pain. The signal to the brain of chronic pain will trigger what’s called great pain or microglial activation, and then that will trigger what’s called small fiber neuropathy. So get 43% of people have the numbness and tingling in their fingers and paresthesia. They’re benign in this condition. So you’ll see it’ll trigger each of the seven major kinds of pain. But it starts with the muscle pain most off the shoulders. A long, long muscles.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Got it. Got it. Now, I remember in my years working in Western medicine, you know, I can think back to the early 2000. So we’re going 20 years ago. And I can remember people coming into my office telling me that they had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and wanting support for this. And I really didn’t have tools. I didn’t I didn’t have anything to help them with. And I remember, you know, I was pretty much instructed by my chief of staff, give him a referral to psychiatry, maybe some SSRI will help them, but we really can’t offer them anything, you know, from our family practice or in it or internal medicine perspective. So can you speak on that a little bit? Because I think there’s, you know, the stigma that it’s untreatable, the stigma that it’s in their head, the stigma that there’s nothing we can do for you.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Laura Put simply, doctors are clueless about the syllabus of what you’ll find if you this illness because it affects the immune system like most immune conditions like oral we’ll be talking of course lupus about affects probably will be three quarters female because a woman has two X chromosomes and that’s where the immune system lies. And you’ll see immune system diseases, 75%. Woman If you look at the Latin medical word for hysteria, it comes from the word history or uterus. So even though half of physicians are women, the institution itself still has a strong bias that as a doctor, if I don’t know what’s wrong with a woman and she has something complex, then she is crazy and that is abusive. It’s simply not acceptable. So 85% of people have not been given a correct diagnosis yet. Both doctors don’t want to take the time to learn about it. Now, financially, there’s no incentive. You know, you become an expert and suddenly you’re going to be flooded with people with CFS and the insurance company won’t pay you and you’ll go bankrupt. So that’s the payoff for taking the time to learn. 

So if the doctors says, I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, let’s find somebody who does. That’s okay. If you can’t pay with a book from bypass to fantastic of a scalpel and you know, I don’t know how to do a heart bypass. It doesn’t make me about doctor. But if the doctor implies to you and your family that I don’t know what’s wrong with you, so you’re crazy. That’s why I recommend you get up, walk over to them, give them a kiss on the top of the head, look them in the eye and say thank you for letting me know right up front what a complete and utter asshole you are. If I had all my time with you, turn out, walk out the door, take your family member with you, slab up and say, I have. Nobody should ever see that abusive bastard again at Walk Out the door. Well, seriously, it’s just not acceptable anymore for doctors to do that and go find somebody who does. Holistic doctors often can go to IFR and still functional medicine. They have a very big list of holistic doctors. You go to naturopathic.org, you’re going to have a whole big list of naturopathic doctors. You know, go to somebody who knows.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Absolutely. Okay. So thank you for letting us know that it is completely not okay if you hear what is going on? You know, we’re talking CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia or LONG-COVID. We’ll unpack all of this. So real quick before we get into the solutions, can you just tell us what’s causing the mitochondrial dysfunction and this fatigue and pain?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

It’s a widespread thing. You know, what do you have as a human allergy crisis? Actually, perfect storm for you about energy crisis this day these days. So half the vitamins and minerals are lost in food processing. All the calories, they’re lost the first time in human history where people are obese and malnourished. At the same time, we’ve lost a third of our sleep. We’ve got an average 9 hours a night to six and three quarters since light bulbs were developed, the speed of life was increasing. The stress of life. The news media. When I was your age, the media mantra, if you want to sell something will suck. Sell you put a good guy or beautiful woman next to the cars, the beer or whatever it is that’s sold. Not now. The media mantra is fear. A device of assault. They want to scare you to death, to make you hate each other. And I thought there’s a wonderful, wonderful actually move for that, where if you’re watching the news, which, you know, we look at and say, well, why? Why Russians don’t know that, you know, they’re invading another country and murdering them. I know they hope their propaganda makes them think this is a war of protection for the fatherland. And I will tell you a secret. Our propaganda in the United States and Western world is equally B.S. 

So as we look in God, they don’t know how hard we’re watching this crap on the news. That’s a fiction. So if you’re watching stuff and it makes you feel bad, do the simple move your hands together. Take a big breath, breathe out, reach your hands to the side. Grab them out and take off. Okay, you all your energy will feel so much better. Meanwhile, so you have all these different things. Plus, in response to many infections, many infections grow by hijacking our mitochondrial energy machinery to take energy and make viruses. And but there’s a number of mechanisms that our body uses brothers for your methylation there, whether it’s getting the RNA going crazy, there’s all kinds of things where we basically shut down energy production to starve the infection, and that works in the short term. But sometimes if there’s little pieces of the virus left or whatever, the body doesn’t get the message that the infection is not gone. It gets stuck in the low energy position and you have to try not to suck it back up. So there are a lot of things that will drive out. It’s like saying, how can you do a circuit breaker on your home? Thousands of ways. Same in your body.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. And so for those of you wondering, Dr. Teitelbaum is talking about the cell danger response. We definitely have people coming on here and doing full, you know, half hour, 40 minute talks on that. So look for that. Those talks on cell danger, any other causes of mitochondrial dysfunction. So you covered infections, you covered stress. What about toxins?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Well, let’s go to the lab because our approach would be shine very strong energy production, which we sleep, hormones, infections, immunity, hypertension as part of its nutritional support, little bit of exercise to prevent deconditioning. And then we could make beds for the mycotoxins and other toxins that are going out as well. So what we’ll talk about in the book is all of these we’ll talk about out here, the box of teeth. Fantastic. The blue guy over my shoulder is well organized. All of this for you. So we didn’t talk about the hormones because, again, it’s a circle. The hypothalamic circuit breaker controls hormones. So your thyroid, adrenal, reproductive and numerous other hormones are going to be low. Not enough to be for the test to be abnormal for that, you have to have failure. 

After we had lost 2% of the population, an income of 80 $100, the shoe size of six is normal because it’s not the lowest 2% of the population, you know, so I have a size 12, but the doctor say five six is normal. Jacob Yeah. So the but also low hormones can the trip the circuit breaker goes both directions so thyroid again the blood test will miss the vast majority. How do you tell if you need thyroid hormone? Thyroid IQ weight gain, cold intolerant. You have two of those symptoms and you have fatigue. I’m going to give you a trial of thyroid hormone by prescription, preferably the desiccated thyroid. But there’s we can spend hours talk about different approaches to thyroid adrenal. And the adrenal test will only pick up not a few of the last 2%, but the last 100,000. It’ll be normal and tell us so low that it can kill you, which is absurd. There is no such thing. Established medicine is as an in-between between life threatening Addison’s disease and totally normal medicine. Does not recognize it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Does not it? Doesn’t recognize anything in the middle.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Yeah. Yeah. You have to have organ failure rates where the normal range comes from. This is funny. I’ll lecture to four or 500 doctors at a time. I love asking this question. Where does the normal range for lab test come from? Because a lot of doctors would be happy if you stay home. I just said the test after tests are there. All right, I know that’s fine, because they think a big panel of wise, elder or big silver bear or long gray hair sitting around and all the collective wisdom of thousands of years, we start to get together all of the questions that this grant this high no problem and wonder does after about five years but it’s nice so where the hell are these were coming from? So I looked it up and they come from the national bureau of Lab Standards. I looked at up and said, You take 100 people, you do the test and you apply two standard deviations, which means the lowest two and a half and the highest what happens to abnormal the 95 and below normal. So as I mentioned, a shoe size of 5 to 13 is normal, doesn’t get the size five fits everybody. So I give the thyroid hormone adjusted to type and form and dosing the feels the best keeping the feet for safety adrenal if you have I’ll tell you the best test do you get irritable want hungry? If you’re not sure ask the people around you if you’re at marriage counseling or at a divorce lawyer do probably have adrenal fatigue. One of the biggest drivers of relationship tanking is the moodiness for blood sugar drops so that the people in their family know if I get irritable, just feed me, don’t hug me, because not call your eyes out, just feed me. Then you can hug me and console me.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It’s being hangry. So your heart.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Attack like I forgot how hangry. The worst thing you can do is eat a candy bar. You’ll feel better and then be an emotional rollercoaster the next couple of hours. Yeah, I’m on the reproductive hormones. They’ll they will not go abnormal until you’ve had low estrogen up just go for 5 to 12 years so you kept your lab FSA HLA a standard testing doctors do how do you tell well if you’re problem out and the PMS irritability but the headache poor sleep brain fog trouble sleeping low energy are all worth around your menses. When estrogen and progesterone dropping that means that low estrogen or eldar progesterone are contributing to and I will address fatigue and I will go with the bioidentical hormones, not the poison standard ones. The only reason they made those me is because they are patentable. It’s a toxic. There’s a periodic ls. So that’s how you tell the hormones. So these are you know, we could go out for the next 2 hours about how you can blow a Fuze, you know, having a toxic relationship, having PTSD, having, you know, that different toxins in the environment, that 85,000 chemicals don’t help the autoimmune diseases triggered by these chemicals and the, you know, fear mongering which drives autoimmune disease to another topic. But it’s so there’s many ways to blow. Fuze It’s not critical necessarily to see what it was a trip to a circuit breaker, whether you had a viral infection, Epstein-Barr mono, whether you had Lyme disease, any of thousands of ways to trip to Fuze exhausted and can’t sleep. You’ve tripped a circuit breaker. Turn it back on with the sound protocol.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You know what I’m really appreciated about you, Dr. Teitelbaum, is, you know, it’s not lost on me that the art of medicine and of really paying attention to people’s symptoms and what their bodies are telling us is gone by the wayside. I mean, today’s Western medicine physicians are really relying on laboratory evaluation and not on what the patient is telling you is happening. And then, I mean, this has been a steady decline for the 20, 25 years that I’ve been working in the Western medicine space. And what I’m really appreciating is how you’re teaching our audience right now that the way you feel tells me what’s going on with your thyroid, what’s going on with your adrenals, what’s going on with your sex hormones, what’s going on with your blood sugar? So this is such valuable information. If your doctor is not listening to how you feel, it’s time to find a new doctor.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Yes. And somebody listen, because I find that people will tell me in the first five, 10 minutes of my just listening what’s going on with them? And that in the next five, 10 minutes, they’ll tell me how to get a better.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, yeah, listen, listen carefully. They will tell us. Okay. So I want to make sure we save and carb some time here to go into Long-Covid because such an interesting thing. We were discussing this before we hit the record button. You were telling me that, you know, we just gained however many million cases of fibromyalgia due to.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

17, 17 billion.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. Okay. So unpack that for us. So what do you mean? The Long-Covid and fibromyalgia are linked here.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Basically numerous infections. We’ve seen a few routes. You know, they should be six or seven have COVID. We’ve seen it with Lyme. We’ve seen literally dozens of infections. I stars have been shown to trigger to trip that circuit breaker. And what we’re seeing is that 10% of people with COVID, mild or severe, are having persistent symptoms that don’t go away. Even a year later, they still have it. So with 170 million people have acquired COVID in the United States, that’s 17 million. That’s probably a little bit higher than that. Have persistent symptoms now for those of you who have fatigue and the insomnia sometimes takes a year or two to kick in. So if you have fatigue, if you have shortness of breath, when you email me again, if you’re a practitioner, you can email me. Just note that I’m a practitioner. I’ll send you questionnaires and treatment checklists and the summary of what’s going on. If you have the illness, just stop. You know that you have CFS, fibro or long-covid or fatigue. Again, I will send you a 4000 word summary of here are the different things causing it here. The most common things that can help, although there’s hundreds of books will go and detail. But the article will give you a really good idea. There be home testing for the hypertension, the low blood pressure, the automatic dysfunction where you stand up and you feel a little light. How many up brain fog after a while. So the COVID, like dozens of other infections, can trip circuit breaker where the cells stop making energy and the hypothalamus malfunctions. Nothing except a circuit breaker. And turning it back on. It’s pretty much the same. Sleep hormones, infection, nutrition, exercising and working to address blood pressure. Low blood pressure issues. 

Toxicity is less of an issue for the Long-Covid, but for COVID it’s important. Also, I will give a special form of curcumin called cure about and I’ll give something called clinical glue to file to turn off the inflammation of free, radical, outgoing entry from the COVID. So COVID is unique because I’m going to go more for those kind of things. For standard CFS and fibromyalgia, there’s dozens of things to help sleep. I use April 2010. Well, got melatonin. Very good again. I will give the thyroid if the symptoms are there, I’ll give adrenal plaques. We just did a study of something called drill ginseng. It’s one thing I keep on my desk for myself that before the talk today, I took half a pill. It’s 880 ginseng chewable tablets and he goes and I study of people post-viral CFS and fibro 188 people who have at least a 50% drop function at increased energy at 60% an average increased energy and stamina of about 70% incredible ability. It was quite amazing. So there’s a lot of different things.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And you talk a little bit, I know there’s some people watching who feel like they’ve got long-covid symptoms, but they might not have the fatigue or the sleep issues, but they still might not be able to smell or taste after a year. They might feel like, gosh, they’re just getting sick more often. Like their immune system just isn’t as great as it used to be. Can you speaking of that group who might not be severe?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Yes. And that’s why what we talk about in the article, it’ll go through. If you have shortness of breath, shortness of breath, ask for the shortness of breath article. That’s a whole other thing. But the shortness of breath is very, very common. Use a finger click pulse oximeter. You can get a lot of Amazon. It’s like 25 bucks out if your oxygen saturation is over 96%, really short of breath. It’s not a heart and lung problem. And we’ll talk about in the article how to get rid of the shortness of breath. If you do have a the brain fog, low dose naltrexone again this is all out of the care about adding the clinical to the file for three months will turn off the add on to say brain inflammation, but the likely little activation that goes on so these these are things you’ll need a holistic doctor for the low dose naltrexone are prescribing naturopath the if you have a cardiomyopathy there’s a phone app we did called cures A to Z. So you are capital ADHD. It’s a free app to bulk upgrade if you want, but it’ll look up heart disease, not some free app, all of it. It’ll talk about ribose as the L-Carnitine Coenzyme Q10 Hawthorn. It will give you a recipe, even a failed myocarditis, heart injury or heart attack from it that will dramatically increase cardiac function after six weeks, even if you’re bedbound. But these are all cheap, so the doctors will not hear about it. That’s a shame.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

So it’s. I don’t grappling quickly here, but because we only have a few minutes left. But if you take each of the different types. So the key thing for the other symptoms is turn off the inflammation and I’ll do that. If there’s pain, I will use cure a man, which is a curcumin, possibly a combination that shuts off both key arms of inflammation, of balances, of down. And I’ll use a clinical glutathione file and that helps a lot of those post-COVID other symptoms.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Have you been successful getting people’s sense of taste and smell back?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

That’s something that we don’t have a lot for what needs to be done for that, as either time they do have these training kits where they start to have more potent smells through retrain and that can taste. If you look up online for that, you can find those kind of kits for retraining that. But that’s a little harder once we don’t have as much for that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And can you explain to our audience why? Why does this long COVID happen, any of these symptoms from the not being able to taste and smell to the shortness of breath, to the fatigue? What is this virus do in our body that is creating this?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

It’s creating a massive cascade of radical injury and inflammation. That’s why the two things that I talk about are the anti-inflammatories, which is the curcumin, possibly a combination which turns off the cyclooxygenase and lipo, and they both balances those two down. So the cure I man is the way that I’ll do that. And the glucosinolates I’ll use a clinical do to fail because that shuts down the free radical injury. And usually after about three months, it’s like a fire. You put it out at times to stay out. So these things are like a three month protocol.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay, excellent. So in the last moments that we have here before we hit record, we were talking about how, you know, the universe has an interesting sense of humor and you said, hey, if we have time, let’s talk about what’s going on here. So tell us more about this disease that you may have or this condition you may have. And what are we what are you meant to learn from this?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Yeah, people ask. Well, it’s a nice doctor. Like you don’t going to feel like CFS for fibromyalgia, holistic medicine, I said. But the old fashioned way I got it. I was in med school. My dad happened a while. I was paying my own way through college dress. I was working up during about school and you know, and those are the easiest things for my life and my family meltdown. Or I made the mistake of allowing them to be as a peacemaker, which was stupid. And that kind of set me up for an energy crisis. I got what I call the drop dead flu, nasty viral infection and knocked out of medical school. I could no longer function. What about? I couldn’t work. I couldn’t go to school. I couldn’t go buy scholarship loans. I was homeless, sleeping in parks.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It’s unbelievable.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Out in Tulsa, my life was over my whole life, a jerk being a healer. But it’s not as if George could be a doctor and you know, and it’s like the universe put a holistic homeless medical school. Sara My park bench and a herbalist camp. I learned chakra healing naturopaths came by. All these people taught me bits and pieces of what I needed to learn. And sometimes they had pizza with which I might even eat and I was able to learn how to get myself well. Go back to med school. I spent the last 45 years with this. But here’s the thing. It turned out to be a real gift. And because you will find that, it’s kind of like, don’t you wish? You know, Spider-Man got bit by Spider and he had a superpower. And don’t you wish you got a superpower going through this illness while you can get your life back, you can get healthy and the superpower you get will be learning to set boundaries, which boils down to saying no to things that feel about say yes to things to feel good, to say no to things. I feel bad because right now, people with this disease that they attract what I call energy vampires, it’s like you put on the emotional toxic waste dump, open sign over your head and this and that. 

I hate that people you’re saying, hey, come suck me dry they and they’ll have you can tell the coming in so put all the hooks in you like oh I’m so glad to have that for you. I don’t know how I survive. HOOK You know, just nobody else is there for me. HOOK You’ll see these different things. And then after they sucked you dry, they will throw up all the emotional, toxic waste on you. Then they’ll say, I feel so much better. You’ll feel like you just got hit by an energy vampire. So if they if you feel worse after talking to people, not just like if you will know, because you will feel when they’re walking down the street, everybody’s running and hiding and crossing the street and they they home and right on time. You know, your gut is going run, run. But you’re like a deer in the headlights to move as soon as things start feeling bad to you, your personal responsibility is to say, no, I just walk away and then they’ll do the thing. But I don’t know how I can do it. My doctor I’m a doctor with make believe. The doctor said I need to say no to here. I can’t do that. And then if they keep doing it, well, we have a social thing about both. The doctor said no. Then are you trying to kill me? My doctor certainly, you know. And then they’ll walk away because they’re not an easy mark anymore. If it feels bad, your psyche is saying say no.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

They know. Well, that is a great place to end this line. Thank you for coming and dropping all this wisdom on us. Can you tell us what is your website and what? Where can the name of your book behind you? Can you repeat that again?

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

The book on Amazon Blue Color from Fatigued to fantastic bestselling book of all time. First Edition was 1995. I’ll CFS and talk about you are for information go to vitality 101. com for supplements. The main ones I would start with are a homepage of endfatigue.com and the work for SI.com and again for information sheets, just let me know if you have the disease or practitioner email me out of fatigue at the ozone fatigue doc at gmail.com. That’s after the free CFS, the fibro or long COVID information sheets. I’ll send that over to you if you want copies or for recent studies you can ask the those as well. If you’re outside of the United States, you’re lucky that you get something called recovery factors at recovery factors that are not available to us out but everywhere else. So blah, blah, blah. Now you see, I got my college nickname of Grappling Chuck.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you. Dr. Teitelbaum is absolutely a pleasure. You take good care.

Jacob Teitelbaum, MD

Know it to be while everybody.