Full Transcript Herbal Safety and Clinical Experience 0:00 The Cleveland Clinic had a herbal clinic. 0:04 We use the same brand of herbs that they have used. 0:07 They went through almost 500,000 cases, half a million. 0:13 And they found three times they had some, what they considered a negative effect. 0:19 One headache, one case of itching and one of diarrhea. 0:22 That's in half-a-million. 0:24 Now you give half million people aspirin and you're going to get deaths. 0:28 right? 0:28 Depending on the dosage, you could get a lot of deaths. 0:31 And so the herbs are much safer than taking an aspirin if they're given to you by a competent herbalist. 0:38 You do not want to go online and pick out an herbal formula because you don't know how it's going to act in your body. 0:45 It could actually do the opposite of what you want because they are very powerful. 0:49 Hi and welcome to The Balancing Point. 0:52 I'm Dr. 0:53 John Needers and I am here to make traditional Chinese medicine functional medicine and integrative health simple, practical and fun so you can restore balance, 1:05 boost vitality and enjoy a healthier life every single day. 1:11 Hi, this is Dr. 1:12 John Needers, your host at The Balancing Point. 1:16 We're here with some more information. 1:19 And today I'm going to talk about long COVID, so-called long-COVID, and understanding diagnostics and the treatment options. 1:27 So I am going look at this the way I look through many things. 1:31 many different lenses, many windows, if you will. 1:34 I want to talk a little bit about conventional medicine, a bit of functional medicine and a traditional Chinese medicine.
Introduction to Long COVID 1:41 And how the integration of those is so powerful. 1:45 Now I've spoken on that issue many times, including my own life story, how powerful that combination can be. 1:54 So today we're going to take a look at Long COVID. 1:58 What is it? 1:59 And basically it's ongoing symptoms after COVID or COVID vaccination. 2:04 Now, in my personal experience as a doctor, they tend to show up a little bit differently. 2:11 That may not be true overall, but in the clinic, I see more nerve damage problems from the vaccination and I see more of some of the other problems had COVID. 2:32 Now, of course, if people had Covid and were vaccinated multiple times, then it's just a layering on of problems and makes the solution a little bit more 2:43 difficult to get to. 2:45 And the idea with long COVID is that it can last months or longer. 2:49 It affects multiple body systems. 2:52 The, some of the more common things are hideous levels of fatigue, like people unable to just walk to their car and then other lesser levels where people 3:02 that used to be runners can't run anymore. 3:04 People that use to work out with weights, can work with weight anymore, so fatigue brain fog where it feels like you're like your. 3:13 Walking in quicksand through your brain, you just have trouble pulling up words. 3:17 You're having trouble with some relatively basic concepts and some severe cases. 3:24 Breathing issues, lung problems, insomnia. 3:28 Insomnia is a huge one. 3:30 And it's interesting. 3:32 The more complex the problem is. 3:36 Often, the most important thing is starting with the basics, right? 3:41 Everybody wants to fix everything all at once. 3:43 Well, with long COVID, that's very difficult to do. 3:46 It can be fixed, but it's generally not an overnight fix. 3:50 And we need to make sure that people are sleeping. 3:53 We need bowel movements regularly, that they're not constipated. 3:59 We need to make sure that their gut is healthy, their microbiome. 4:02 Now, people don't necessarily like to start with those things, but it is important to get those basics, the basics of life handled. 4:10 Otherwise, it's very hard to rid of the deeper symptoms. 4:13 So, we see a lot of reactivations. 4:16 People who have had Lyme disease historically or co-infections. 4:21 suddenly they're back with a vengeance. 4:24 And some of them, it's pretty easy to trace. 4:27 There's a big, big uptick in Bartonella cases, and that can cause some very distinct symptoms, particularly brain-related symptoms. 4:36 Also, we're seeing an uptake in retroviruses. 4:40 Now, a very high percentage of our DNA, the estimates are about 8% or so, are actually retroviruses that our ancestors picked up and they've gotten into
Symptoms and Common Complications 4:52 our DNA. 4:53 And as long as you're healthy, those retro viruses, you know, don't seem to bother you much. 4:58 But when you get weakened by something like COVID or certain vaccinations, then the retrovirus is really come out and wreak havoc. 5:07 POTS, that's postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. 5:12 So you stand up and your heart rate just shoots through the ceiling. 5:16 Dysautonomia. 5:18 Pots is a type of dysautomia, but you have other cases where you could do a tilt table test, for example, or we do what's called a raglan's test here in 5:27 our office on almost every patient. 5:31 You go from lying down to standing up and your blood pressure should go up from 5 to 10 points. 5:36 With severe dysautonomia, you stand up, and you're blood can drop 20 to 25 points, very scary stuff. 5:46 So those are very, very common with long COVID. 5:50 You also see a lot of nerve damage. 5:52 We're treating several patients right now that developed small fiber nerve damaged within days of getting vaccinated. 6:01 Again, I'm not seeing that quite as much with actual COVID, more with the vaccine. 6:07 And I've got several cases that have been confirmed by their medical doctors that that is what occurred. 6:13 Also, we see microclots. 6:15 Now micro clots are clods that if you do a normal scan, you're not going to find them. 6:21 So we do lab testing for certain things to see if the body is clotting in general. 6:27 And as you'll see later in the presentation, in Chinese medicine, We have a huge advantage in that area because we have A variety of ways of testing For 6:37 what's called blood stasis, where the blood isn't moving. 6:40 and certainly with the clot, that would be the case. 6:42 And so why it's complex? 6:44 There isn't a single test. 6:46 There is no single tests to prove long COVID. 6:50 Now, we're looking at antibody tests for the spike protein. 6:55 And if that's positive, we're going to assume that that is an issue. 6:59 But even then, that isn't the only problem, because the spike protein, which would be present if you have spike-protein antibodies, 7:07 could be attacking anything. 7:08 It could even be stuck in anything, so even there is no single test. 7:14 Symptoms can vary widely. 7:16 Some people have every symptom that I mentioned, some people only have one. 7:21 And there can be multiple root causes of that. 7:23 As I mentioned, it could be cardiovascular. 7:26 And as you'll see later on, there are many other things that can because by like immune system problems, nervous system, 7:34 problems cardiovascular problems. 7:38 Why it's complex. 7:40 It can affect the hormones and the feedback loops. 7:43 In fact, often it affects hormones. 7:46 Early on in the COVID pandemic, we had a lot of women having significant menstrual changes. 7:54 Either they stopped having periods or they started having very heavy periods. 7:58 We had one patient that was 80 years old started to having period again. 8:02 Obviously the first thing you think of is some form of cancer. 8:05 So of course we referred her out to her gynecologist who examined her and said, no, You're having a period. 8:11 So it can throw all of those hormones and feedback loops off. 8:16 And so most of the hormonal activity in the body is run by feedback, loops, either positive feedback or negative feedback. 8:27 During menstruation, the estrogen levels get very low. 8:30 The body starts putting out a higher level of follicle stimulating hormone, which will stimulate the follicles to produce more estrogen. 8:41 When the estrogen gets to a certain point, the feedback tells the pituitary, we don't need any more FSH. 8:49 And then you shift over to luteinizing hormone which then causes you to ovulate, and then your progesterone goes up. 8:57 But those are all feedback loops. 9:00 And those feedback loop can easily become dysregulated with long COVID. 9:07 So we've got the adrenal dysfunction of people who just have no energy, hard to get out of bed. 9:13 One of the problems is often adrenal disfunction. 9:15 We're looking at problems there with the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. 9:25 Hypothalamus is reading everything. 9:28 It's like the master control room, the blinking lights on a submarine or in a nuclear facility.
Why Long COVID Is Complex 9:35 And when it sees that a change needs to happen, maybe you need more thyroid hormone, may be you a need a more luteinizing hormone. 9:43 Maybe you needed more estrogen, etc. 9:45 it sends a closed loop message to the pituitary. 9:49 The pitutary then sends out what are called trophic hormones. 9:54 thyroid stimulating hormone being one of those. 9:57 So doctors call that a thyroid hormone often, but it's not. 10:01 It's a pituitary hormone that is stimulating to either make more or less thyroid hormones. 10:08 That can get thrown off. 10:10 And then you have the sex hormone dysfunction, which is very, very common with long COVID. 10:16 In conventional medicine, the focus is of course on diagnosis and symptom management generally. 10:22 People will go to one of the major clinics who specialize in treating long COVID. 10:31 I support that because they do a tremendous amount of testing, very expensive testing. 10:37 And so I love that. 10:38 However, I find that a lot of times their treatments just are the same. 10:44 Four different people that have four different problems, but the treatment is essentially the same. 10:49 But I do love the testing and I also want to rule out something that's very severe. 10:55 A cancer, a brain tumor, et cetera, and conventional medicine is very, very good at those procedures. 11:03 And it is evidence-based mostly. 11:05 There are certainly quite a few exceptions, But mostly it's evidence based. 11:10 Again, it's going to rule out serious conditions. 11:12 And so I love that and I loved patients to start there even. 11:17 The diagnostics, they'll run blood tests. 11:19 They'll do heart testing. 11:20 There'll be lung testing, autonomic testing which is, as I mentioned, the tilt table type test to verify whether there's POTS or dysautonomia and they 11:32 will do imaging, right? 11:33 They can check out the lungs and the heart or the brain, et cetera, which all very, very helpful. 11:40 The treatment is pacing, is the term that's used now, but it's really energy management. 11:46 I had one patient. 11:48 had been told by a major facility that she had chronic fatigue, ME-CFS, and that, she, had to take two years off. 11:59 She could only get up to eat and to go to the bathroom. 12:02 Well, this was a very, very powerful woman who had, been an exercise teacher, et cetera. 12:09 And so we would do deals, right? 12:12 She loved the Warriors, going to, the San Francisco Warriors game. 12:17 And so we would set up a week ahead of time, a pacing system for her. 12:23 Okay. 12:24 You can do your life. 12:27 The last two days before the game, have someone else walk your kids to school, go to the. 12:32 Game the next day, plan nothing, do nothing. 12:35 Stay in bed, eat, goto the bathroom, like the clinic said. 12:39 And she was able to completely. 12:43 Get over her chronic fatigue. 12:45 It took a while, but she was able to get over it completely. 12:48 Medications, you know, if they find a virus, they'll give an antiviral. 12:52 If they. 12:53 Find a bacterial problem, I'll given antibacterial for anxiety, depression, et cetera. 12:59 So they will give medications and then sometimes they do rehab. 13:03 They may do lung rehabilitation. 13:05 And if it's affecting the brain, They made do cognitive interventions. 13:11 The very powerful stuff. 13:13 Functional medicine's a little different. 13:16 The focus is on root causes and eliminating the root cause rather than doing primarily symptom management. 13:25 They'll do some different testing. 13:27 As I mentioned, there is now a test for spike antibodies, which can be very helpful. 13:33 And there are people who've figured out tiers. 13:36 So if you're under a certain level, you are probably asymptomatic. 13:39 If you were in the next tier, your going to have some symptoms. 13:42 and if your in top tier you probably can't get out of bed. 13:45 That's really valuable. 13:47 Also with functional medicine, I mentioned thyroid. 13:51 Well, typically the HMOs in the San Francisco Bay Area, I get a lot of their tests and they typically do two tests, thyroid stimulating hormone and T4. 14:04 T-4, so when the thyroid is stimulated, it makes several different hormones and the most abundant is T 4. But that doesn't have much bioactivity. 14:15 When you need bio activity, one of the iodine molecules is broken off by a deiodinase and becomes T3. 14:23 And that's the energy bunny. 14:27 These HMOs don't test for T3, and that is an extremely significant oversight. 14:34 A very high percentage of females, some estimates are 50 to 55%, do not do a good job of converting T4 to T 3. So if you're just checking TSH and T 4,
Conventional Medicine Diagnostics and Care 14:48 you could really be missing the boat. 14:51 With functional medicine, we check T SH for sure. 14:57 Free T3, the amount that's unbound, free T4, maybe T 3, T 4, but also reverse T three. 15:07 And that is a very important test for people that are under stress. 15:11 If you have long COVID, you are in stress, so reverse is an attempt by the body to shut down your energy functions. 15:22 So what it does is it binds in the same receptor sites as T but it doesn't have much activity. 15:30 So it really, really shuts down your ability to use your thyroid hormone. 15:35 And then we would test for thyroid antibodies, thyroid peroxidase, antithyroglobulin antibodies and maybe some other things. 15:44 But that's A big difference between functional medicine and more what I'm going to call conventional medicine is how deeply the testing goes in that direction. 15:55 Now with conventional medicines, they go very deep in other directions. 15:59 It's a whole body system, right? 16:01 Much like Chinese medicine, functional medicines is a body. 16:05 It's treating everything. 16:07 Your microbiome can contribute to anything actually, but particularly to long COVID. 16:12 All of your hormones can. 16:14 And it's an extremely personalized approach. 16:18 When I have new acupuncturists come study with me or when I'm teaching a class, they want protocols. 16:24 What's your protocol? 16:25 Like if you go to a conventional medical doctor in an HMO, They'll have protocols if. 16:30 If you have symptom A, you get drug B, right? 16:34 And there are protocols, I don't do protocols because no two people are alike. 16:42 I know that seems obvious, but it's true. 16:45 Right. 16:45 You get a headache. 16:46 Well, there are many, many different types of headaches and in functional medicine and Chinese medicine, they all deserve different kinds of treatments. 16:54 So it a whole body system and it is a personalized approach. 16:59 to you. 16:59 So the diagnostics, inflammation markers, your conventional doctor may do that also, but usually the functional doctors do right at the beginning. 17:09 Your hormones, again more detailed testing, so example if they were going to test for testosterone, they don't just test total testosterone. 17:20 They do free testosterone which tells you how much is in unbound and you're able to use. 17:26 And there's some other testosterone tests that can also be done with that. 17:30 gut health, microbiome, intestinal integrity. 17:34 Very, very rare for a conventional medical system to test any of those on a significant level. 17:43 I mean, there are stool tests now that measure hundreds and hundreds of markers to tell the health of your microbiomes, to how it's out of balance, 17:53 if it is out-of-balance, are there yeast problems, etc. 17:58 And also several different tests that will tell if you have leaky gut, which is a real thing, the gut actually leaks. 18:06 And there are some good reasons why that happens and some bad things that it does. 18:11 For one, if have leaking gut you also have a leaking brain. 18:16 It's just the way it is. 18:18 Again, I'll do a session on that and explain why it's so, but it so. 18:23 Then they'll nutrients and additional testing. 18:26 You know, what are your vitamin levels? 18:28 What are your mineral levels? 18:30 Those fundamental, fundamental things. 18:33 Magnesium alone has hundreds of different functions in the body.
Functional Medicine Root-Cause Testing 18:37 If your B12 is off, you're not going to have energy. 18:40 if your iron is too low, your not gonna have any energy, so you want to go deeply into those. 18:46 treatment, it might be an anti-inflammatory diet, some targeted supplements. 18:52 Often supplements can get to the root a little faster than some other things. 18:57 You're going to want to do the gut repair. 18:59 If you don't, heal the If you don't balance the microbiome and if you recreate gut integrity, nothing else will ultimately work. 19:10 And then nervous system support. 19:12 So these are some of the ways that functional medicine would treat. 19:16 Now in traditional Chinese medicine. 19:19 It focuses on balance and energy, what's often called Qi. 19:24 Now, there are many different kinds of Qi, I'm not going to get into a discussion of that right now, but it's really, really misunderstood in many ways. 19:34 And it can be measured. 19:36 We have many devices to measure Qi in the body or Qi flow in a body. 19:41 In fact, you can go to a hardware store and get an electrical testing unit that measures ohms or resistance, and you can map out the acupuncture channels, 19:54 right? 19:55 They're the areas of lowest resistance to energetic flow. 19:59 Literally, you could get a $10 device and map it out. 20:02 Now, ours cost a lot more than $ 10 and they're a little more accurate, but we will map the energy systems in your body so that we know exactly what needs 20:12 to be treated. 20:14 and we do what's called a pattern-based diagnosis. 20:18 We're not looking at one symptom. 20:20 Now, we will gather all your symptoms, and then we'll do more testing. 20:25 But it's a patterns- based diagnosis, which is much broader than a symptom- base diagnosis and the pulse is a critical element of traditional Chinese medical 20:41 diagnosis Essentially, there are three positions on each arm and three depths. 20:46 Now it's, you know, they're lots of overlap and 27 different pulse types. 20:51 So you can imagine you've got nine pulses on or locations on the left hand, nine on, the right hand 27, different possibilities. 21:00 And you could imagine what that matrix is like for one thing. 21:06 Someone sits down and I feel their pulses. 21:08 I can tell what they have pots. 21:09 It will, it'll stand out like crazy. 21:11 They don't have to say a word. 21:13 The tongue is an underused, in my opinion, diagnostic tool. 21:20 it's the sublingual veins, the veins underneath your tongue. 21:24 And after you watch this presentation, go look in the mirror, lift your. 21:28 Tongue up and see what the two veins look like. 21:32 Ideally, you can't see them. 21:34 If you CAN, it means that there's some blood stasis. 21:38 The blood is not moving well, which means it's more prone to clotting and high blood pressure and many other cardiovascular problems. 21:46 And if they're big purple earthworm looking veins, go see your local acupuncturist or herbalist. 21:53 Cause that's a life threatening condition. 21:55 So my mom used to say that the eyes were the windows to the soul, Johnny. 22:01 And for me, the sublingual veins are the window into the cardiovascular system. 22:06 and so symptom patterns, Chinese medicine is based on pattern diagnosis. 22:11 Basically there are five major branches. 22:14 in TCM treatment. 22:15 I got my doctorate at Five Branches University. 22:19 So first, what most people know of is acupuncture, which would include electroacupuncture and moxibustion which is a heat application. 22:29 But that's usually the acupunture, electro acu puncture. 22:32 You're going to insert very, very fine needles into acuplcture points. 22:38 Usually you don't even feel them and that is going help rebalance the energy. 22:43 For an injury, you put the acupuncture needles in and it draws what they call the soup.
Traditional Chinese Medicine Approach 22:48 It will bring at least 15 different chemicals or products to the site of the injury to really boost up the healing process. 22:59 So there are many different ways that acupunture works. 23:02 Then herbs, there are 10,000 formulas, base formulas. 23:08 And those can be combined in an infinite number of ways. 23:11 These are very researched. 23:13 The same people that do the medical research in China are doing the herbal research. 23:19 It's amazing and incredibly safe. 23:22 the Cleveland Clinic had a herbal clinic. 23:27 We use the same brand of herbs that they have used. 23:30 They went through almost 500,000 cases, five, half a million. 23:36 And they found three times they had some, what they considered a negative effect. 23:42 One headache, one case of itching and one of diarrhea. 23:46 That's in half-a-million. 23:47 Now you give half million people aspirin and you're going to get deaths. 23:52 Right. 23:52 Depending on the dosage, you could get a lot of deaths. 23:55 And so the herbs are much safer than taking an aspirin. 23:59 If they're given to you by a competent herbalist, You do not want to go online and pick out an herbal formula because you don't know how it's going to 24:08 act in your body. 24:09 It could actually do the opposite of what you want because they are very powerful. 24:14 Third is the Tai Chi, Qi Gong, which are meditation and movement oriented, stretching, martial arts, etc. 24:24 to move the energy in your body yourself rather than having the acupuncturists do it. 24:30 Then food therapy, and it's very different than Western food, therapy. 24:35 It's seasonally based, our bodies developed, to be in rhythm with the seasons and the Chinese medicine we do, we really work with that. 24:44 And it's very specific to specific cases. 24:48 I will give out handouts often of a huge list of foods that you can eat and a hugely list, a list foods to avoid if possible. 24:58 and it is really based very personally on you. 25:02 not a condition. 25:04 You know, I could get 10 people to come in with multiple sclerosis and they could all get a different diet plan. 25:10 They could each get different herbal plan and each could different acupuncture treatment. 25:16 Then there's the kind of hands-on work called Tweenaw, which is Chinese massage, and then cupping, where you're putting cups on the body to pull the blood 25:27 to the surface and the energy to surface. 25:30 And then gua sha, which is a kind of a scraping technique to do a similar issue to cuping. 25:38 So the importance of balance. 25:41 Now in Western medicine, they call it homeostasis, keeping things in balance, so a quote from Sun Tzu Mao. 25:49 I'll tell you a dozen reasons why Sun Tsum Mao is so important, but one, you know, David Brownstein is the thyroid guy, right? 26:00 He's the specialist. 26:01 Well, Soon-Samal was doing treatments that are as good as David's or better in 600 A.D. 26:08 and certainly better than what you get from most conventional medical systems. 26:14 He was doin' this in six hundred A D. 26:16 And he said, the way of nurturing life is rooted in yin and yang. 26:21 If yin and yang are in harmony, life is secure. 26:24 If they lose their proper balance, disaster and illness arise. 26:30 So think Einstein, E equals MC squared, where E equal energy, M equals mass, C equals the speed of the light squared. 26:40 Energy and mass are interchangeable and not absolutes. 26:44 but they're relative.
Integrative Healing, Pacing, and Recovery 26:45 Think the theory of relativity, right? 26:48 And so that's much like yin and yang, all right. 26:51 The ying is, mass is relatively yen, the body, et cetera. 26:55 While energy is a relatively yang. 26:58 But they are always, always interacting and you want to keep them in balance. 27:03 So. 27:05 Integrative approach conventional for safety you're looking for really serious stuff and ruling it out functional going to root causes and TCM going To 27:16 balance and so when you put those all together you have just miraculous healing possibilities so Key concept, pacing is critical, 27:27 avoid overexertion, and recovery is not linear, right? 27:32 People will start up and they get really excited and then they'll level off for a while. 27:36 And then there'll go up, then the level of for awhile. 27:39 Maybe they overdo it and actually go down for while, so. 27:44 The recovery is not linear. 27:46 Our body will heal at the rate that it needs to. 27:49 I'm going to say here, the most important thing is that you also need to treat the emotional trauma. 27:55 We have several different ways of doing that in the clinic. 28:03 but you need to treat the emotional trauma. 28:05 There are some good online systems available that we have seen our patients have really good success with. 28:13 So don't leave that piece out of it. 28:16 Complex condition, no single solution and it requires patience. 28:21 Listen to your body, gradual progress and get professional guidance. 28:27 Be happy, be healthy, and thank you for tuning in. 28:32 Without you, I wouldn't do this. 28:35 And I love doing this, so thank Most approaches just manage symptoms. 28:55 Here we get to the root. 28:57 So real healing, real clarity and balance can begin. 29:02 Visit alamedaacupuncture.com. 29:05 That's alamedaacupuncture dot com to learn more, explore our supplements or book a call. 29:12 We'd love to hear from you.
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