Obstacles to Cure in COVID Long Haul

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Well, thank you. And thanks for having me. So I’m Dr. Paul Anderson, a naturopathic physician from Seattle Washington, and that’s where I am right now, in my office. What I do currently, I’ve been practicing for a long, long time, and what I do currently is teach other doctors all in the integrative and naturopathic space, advanced processes, and just dealing with our modern chronically ill society basically. My two big focuses are the chronically ill and then patients with cancer. So that keeps me very busy. I also write a lot for professionals but I also write some books for patients, of a few that we use to help cancer patients, and I’m working on some new ones. 

So that all keeps me pretty busy and then, something I never thought because I’m not that clairvoyant would ever happen, when COVID started because of my involvement in research for intravenous vitamin C and some other things that turned out to be being used in other countries for COVID, I started getting interviewed a lot around COVID and then that led to a lot of people contacting me and consulting for patients or family with COVID. And so on in my spare time, what I do now is, I have two sort of practice groups. One is literally consulting with people who might have a family member in a hospital, and they want information about other things that can be done, which is a very tough thing to do in the North American hospital system anyway. And then the other is a smaller group because I have a very limited time for personal practice, but a small group of people with active COVID that I work with. So I was supposed to be less busy by this age, but I’m just more busy.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Thank you, Paul. You’re always doing absolutely cutting edge, amazing things for medicine, for patients, so thanks for doing what you’re doing now, with people who have COVID. So it’s acute and long COVID as well, right?

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Yes.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah. Well, today we’re gonna talk about long COVID. I’m gonna ask you all kinds of questions and I know that our audience is gonna be really excited to hear from you. I know I am that’s for sure. So tell us about how you see COVID cases complicated by chronic infections, long COVID cases that is–

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Sure, and I think one, just at the, for everything we’re gonna talk about, COVID is almost unique, not really, but almost unique in that it has so many outliers on both sides of the fence. So for example, everything I’m about to say about, chronic infection, patients and COVID, there’s also exceptions where you might have a patient that has a lot of other infectious problems and they really don’t, they get COVID and they have no long COVID problems, and vice versa. People who have nothing going on seemingly, and then they get all this trouble afterwards. So what I always like to just, set as a tone is that everybody’s experience with COVID is very individual, which is kind of a common theme as far as what you do to treat it too. A lot of stuff that I’m gonna talk about is what I see sort of in the middle of the bell curve, the majority of people. And then there’s always people who have it maybe worse or better. 

So I think with chronic infections, the way I describe it to, say I have a current patient who’s dealing with acute at COVID. And I also know that they have a history of a lot of other infections that they’ve been dealing with say, maybe Lyme or chronic Epstein-Barr or CMV, or some complex of whole bunch of infections, which is not uncommon in our world, see those patients. What I usually to caution them around is that that history and their immune system already being so active and maybe beat up by those chronic infections, can have one of two experiences during COVID. One is they get sicker acutely, and we may need to be really aggressive with the acute phase, but the other can be, and I was just having this conversation with a patient this morning, that their body is so worn down and weak, condensed, suppressed by fighting all these other things, it doesn’t have that energy to make ’em feel any sicker than they already are. 

And it’s easier to put across the idea that if you get really a lot sicker and you feel horrible, well, we should be pretty aggressive, here with this acute COVID thing, if the person’s already run down and suppressed and they really don’t feel any worse than they did five days ago, it’s harder to get in their mind that it’s actually, we need to be very aggressive for a few weeks so that COVID doesn’t add to your burden, what you already got going on, even though you don’t feel worse specifically. So I think that it’s, and I guess I started with that because that’s a conversation I’m having a lot right now. I think, especially with omicron spreading faster and I’ve got people who’ve now had two bouts with COVID or other things going on. I’m having that conversation a lot. What my practice with people has showed me over the last couple years is with respect to COVID, if there’s any history of anything chronic, we wanna appear to almost overtreat you during the acute phase. 

One of the things that that does, and by contrast, if we don’t acutely treat you with kind of a lot to force, if we don’t do that, it doesn’t turn out this way. If we do usually the amount of post COVID a person experiences either none or very minimal and very treatable. If we slow pitch because you don’t feel that bad or whatever, and you have a history of a lot of other infections, what we’re seeing with people is a lot of things that we’d already treated and were quiet in their system, whether it’s their Lyme or Epstein-Barr, you could name another a hundred, one, two, three, four, five weeks after they’ve recovered from COVID, they’ve got a bunch of those active again. And so one experience of post COVID is whatever you had before, that was quite is not quiet anymore. So I think and one of the things that I try and get across in training for doctors is, the first thing is history with a COVID patient. 

And if they had anything in the past, even if they thought it was gone, you’d wanna know that that’s on the table for the future, if you don’t keep their immune system, working through the COVID really well. COVID is sort of the great unmask. It kind of pulls up rocks all over the place and whoever’s , it’s just like stirs it all up. So I think that’s the biggest concept really, is if you have a history, it doesn’t mean that you’re gonna have a bad experience, it just means maybe you should be a little more assertive with your treatment of not just COVID but maybe do some preventive things for your past problems. And I don’t know time wise what works, but I just finished a, well, I don’t know finished, the person’s alive. 

I just have a case that we did of a person like that, who had completely silent past chronic infectious stuff ’cause we worked on it for years, and then they got COVID, got really sick. And what turned out was they had activated a whole bunch of their whole infections. We treated them in a way that seemed hyper aggressive to everybody involved, including the patient. But when they recovered from COVID, we treated them for a few more weeks to make sure the old infections were all quiet and their immune system was happy. And since they’ve had, they had zero post COVID problems. So it’s sort of like a little more effort on the front end pays dividends later.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

So then when you’re treating these patients, they have acute COVID, but they’ve also have underlying infections that they know of. And so are you treating them for acute COVID and the underlying infections at the same time? Or are you treating for acute COVID first and balancing their system maybe so they can handle their underlying infections?

Paul Anderson, N.D.

So I would say what I learned the hard way over these last two years is in early 2020, I probably would’ve done a lot of COVID focus treatment, which does have a lot of crossover to other treatments that we do certainly. But I might have kind of said, well, let’s see if anything develops with your old chronic infections. But what I learned was they’re going to develop, now you don’t always know, if the person had five before that all five will get active. But what I tend to do as one of two things, if a person… So for example, this particular person, the most recent one had a lot of trouble with chronic lung bacteria, like mycoplasma pneumonia and other things, they collected a lot of the HHV viruses like CMV and Epstein-Barr and that family. And they had even had some chronic fungal problems in the past. Well, all of those are very clearly helped out by COVID just ’cause of the way COVID works. 

So in their case we talked about it but what I did was concurrently, treated them with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and a bunch of the natural things that we do for maybe COVID. But I also gave them doxycycline for the atypical bacteria. Because doxy not only covers atypical bacteria, but it’s also antiviral and it actually has direct anti COVID effect, so it’s sort of like three for one. I gave them an antifungal at the same time, because one of the more common co-infections that they don’t test for a lot in North America is aspergillus. And I’ve seen people, I’ve seen people with the other SARS, a lot of them would get aspergillus and the aspergillus would kill them. So I prefer not to have that happened. I just start with antifungals early. And then it’s about, really by pill count, it’s about 35% drugs and 65% natural stuff. 

But we just kind of start from day one and a year ago I might have waited, but I’ve seen, these are outliers, but I’ve certainly seen where you get the person who we still don’t know what the genetics are of those people that just get COVID really bad and they go downhill really quick. We know they’re out there. I’ve seen those people kind of slow pitch their treatment on the front then wind up in the hospital or worse. So I just tell people I’d rather over or do it, have you not have problems later and we can fix anything that we mess up with our treatment. So I do prefer that. Now I have had people where a it’s usually four or five days in to an acute bout with COVID where they get a little break, it’s like the lifting and they think they’re getting better and then they get hit with the second wave that’s worse–

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah, I’ve seeing that too.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

And that’s somewhere between four days and a weekend. And I’ve seen people, these were not my patients personally, sadly they were friends who thought they were getting better and the second wave actually killed them. And they weren’t really doing very much treatment. So I know the second wave is dangerous, but what I see coinciding with the second wave when I test people is a lot of infections turn up positive. A lot of the same things you and I would find in our chronically ill people. So I’m kind of testing the same stuff we would with a new chronic illness patient. But a lot of times we don’t get the patient today, they get sick. So they come in and it’s anywhere in that window and then they’re starting to say, “whoa, it’s coming back.” I test them for that stuff and just specifically treat who we find. But I usually try and cover atypical bacteria, just so common, the common opportunistic fungi, or very common. And then the common viruses that we see.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

I’m so happy you bringing this up because when people not only come to us and they have acute or chronic COVID, but also when it’s being discussed, in the news, everywhere. People only talking about COVID on its own, nobody else is really thinking about what other underlying infections that are at play here. So it’s not just COVID on its own, but it’s what else? what else is going on with the patient? Why is so overlooked, do you think?

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Well, I think it’s, it’s the way that medicine is thought of and done, in certainly in North America. One of the things just to give context of more global context, a lot of other countries for whatever reason are very sensitive to and actually look at, co-infections at least not, if not immediately, if you’re not getting better, they will do that. And there’s research from the U.S on coinfections and COVID, but nobody apparently cares about it. But in China, from the very beginning at the three big Wuhan hospitals, when I got all of their data they were collecting and then I had to have it translated. But when I got all of it, I was happy to see from the get go, they started to checking people for other infections because they knew that it maybe it’s not just this virus, but the virus opens the door.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Exactly.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

They had their own group of infections that they got, some are similar to elsewhere. In India, it’s different ones, here it’s probably a little bit different. But I think North America, we’re very in medicine, we’re trained that we really want to focus on the thing that we found the right test for. So one of the frustrating things, and I’ve literally seen, I’ve got this other practice that’s just consulting with doctors who are in hospitals. So they’re not really my patients, because I can’t, that’s up to them to treat the patient in the hospital. One of the problems where I’ve seen patients die is when they found out they had coinfections but they don’t test them until they’re almost dead. And it’s like, well, of course they have those infections. 

And what usually happens with the patients who die, is they have all the infections I just told you about. But then you have some other very hard to treat, either bacterial or fungal infections that they probably got in the hospital, and so then finally an infectious disease comes in and adds in treatment but it’s too late. If they would’ve done it even five days before the person probably would live. 

So, and certainly, not everyone’s dying, we know that, it’s a small number of people, but that illustrates how dangerous it is, ’cause we don’t know what our immune reserve is. We might feel okay, but we might be kind of close to the line or COVID may really knock us down. Or for example, when I got COVID, because I have grandchildren who have all these other kid viruses and things, I had COVID and I had RSV, which is a respiratory virus, and I had influenza at the same time. So I had three viruses that just ran over me. And then of course all the old stuff I used to have woke up too. 

So it’s not an uncommon thing. So I do think certainly it’s more common in people with histories of chronic illness. And that could be somebody who maybe is a chronic autoimmune patient, somebody certainly with history of chronic infections, but also people who are in recovery from cancer because cancer treatment is hard on the immune system too. So yeah, I think it’s a frustrating thing in North American medicine, where it’s not like they don’t know there’s co-infections it’s they just don’t think it’s that common or it’s gonna be that big of a deal and it is.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

It certainly is. I’m so happy we’re having this discussion because it’s shedding light on an area that’s really not discussed. Maybe it’s thought about a little bit but it’s not discussed at all, so thank you for bringing that to the table. So I’m thinking about the people who come in and they have long COVID all of a sudden, but they were never sick before. So I say, I use the words all of a sudden because they didn’t have anything else. It’s, they’re suddenly sick. As opposed to the people who have this history of being sick. Can you tell us about the silent infection that would be causing this? And anything else Dr. Anderson, that you think would be causing this.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

There’s certainly things beyond infections, but since that’s where we’re starting, I’ll stick with that for the beginning of the discussion. There’s a number of reasons why a previously “healthy person” would not, a lot of the people that I’ve seen didn’t have a bad time with their acute COVID, that was not the problem. And they probably were okay, relatively healthy and it wasn’t like me where I got three viruses, they did got the one and they processed it through. Maybe minimal or no treatment. I’ve seen lots of those people. And then four weeks, six weeks later, maybe sooner, maybe later, they start to feel more fatigued, maybe more specific pain, like joint pain, maybe more kind of global, just I don’t feel good, kind of pain. 

Maybe they develop some specific symptoms, like new headaches or dizziness or smell and taste changes that are very, we all know about those. Or maybe they go in and their doctor does some labs and they said, well, it looks like you might be having some clotting problem, or one of those problems. So this all sorts of manifestations of long COVID. And those people of course are always more surprised, like if you were already chronically ill, you would say, well, all right, that kind of makes sense.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Right, exactly.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Virus took me down. Another concept that we’re not great with with in Western medicine, although we acknowledge it, we just don’t think it’s that important, I guess, ’cause no one likes to talk about it, is you have to think of your reserve, and your vitality, and your immunity, and all the things that make you feel healthy. This person felt healthy, they sail through COVID their better now, and then they get these symptoms. Well, what makes you feel healthy is a whole bunch of things on the inside we never see and we really don’t feel in all of that. 

And so it’s, there are many analogies, but it’s sort of like the bucket analogy and you can have either a lot of reserve and that bucket is full, or you can be fighting off things and kind of taking out of your reserve and that bucket’s getting empty. And what happens is, is that we can feel really good and the reserve bucket of goodness and good stuff that keeps us healthy can be really low, but it’s not empty. Well, what if then suddenly you get a virus your body’s never had probably, and it hits you really hard and you, again, you sail through it, you get better, you had like a bad colder flu, but then you’re better. But what you did is you scraped out all the last of the reserve of your bucket.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Just a quick question for our audience. For our audience, what would you tell them those reserves are?

Paul Anderson, N.D.

So, it’s of course it’s many things. One is your immune system balance. And so your immune system, has this sort of ebb and flow it does to keep you from getting sick. And one of the things I always tell people like during the cold and flu season is that you might be the person in your office or wherever where you’re the last person to get sick. Some people are the first person to get sick, that’s a different problem. But people who are the last person to get sick, normally what happens is their immune balance, that bucket’s pretty full. And they get exposed to person A on day one and the immune system responds and fights it off. And exposed to person B and C the next week and immune system fights it off. And then eventually they just don’t realize, well, they’ve been using up all their reserves, and then they finally get it. 

So immune balance is a big thing and immunity comes from 10,000 little things that occur in our body but you can use it up. You can burn it out. Another one though that’s very common is what are things that would lower my resistance? So you can think of that like poking holes in the bucket. Things you might be exposed to before you got sick that you aren’t feeling right now, low level mold mycotoxins in your work or your home. Well they’re immune suppressive, but maybe you don’t have a big problem with it until you get sick. And then you’re rebound like filling the immune bucket up gets harder ’cause you got these immune suppressant things. There are resistance factors that chronic infectious things build up and they may not be bugging you before, but then again, you get sick with something, it wears you down and then those chronic thing use their resistance factors to take over some territory. 

So that’s another… You can either be on the positive or negative side of that. Our hormone system is one of the things that makes us feel the way we do every day. And what often we don’t think about, we think of hormones for reproductive purposes or we might think of it around like our adrenals and energy or other stuff. But one of the huge purposes of all that interaction with your hormones and the balance they normally have is if the immune system needs to up or down regulate, that’s largely your hormonal system that helps orchestrate that. And what we often see in the post COVID patients, especially those ones where they didn’t see it coming, is again, the COVID experience didn’t feel that bad to them, but the bucket for the hormonal control and where that interacts with the immune stuff, it just got overtaxed. 

Hormones are all outta balance and that’s part of feeling, you don’t feel yourself, but also your immune system can’t correct anymore. The other one that’s sneaky, and again, people like you and me think about this one all the time, but it still sneaks up on us is our digestive system has so many components, that again, we don’t think about unless there’s something wrong. When we’re ill, not only, maybe we’re taking things, to help us through the illness or whatever and has to go through our gut, but your digestive system, obviously it breaks your food down, gets nutrients in, which is a critical thing to keep your cells working. But it also has your digestive immune system, which is as important as the rest of your body’s immune system for keeping balance, well, that gets beat up. And then you also have this whole enteric digestive nervous system that’s trying to help auto correct. So if you imagine you get everything run down in your digestive system gets beat up. You’re not really going to be able to respond appropriately. And so usually like we talked about the people who were previously ill, probably weren’t doing great in a lot of these areas. 

And so they know they got, kind of knocked down and maybe we gotta reset all this stuff. People who felt okay but maybe they were, the bucket wasn’t as full as they thought, the virus and, or your immune response to the virus and just being run down will then leave you in the post COVID phase. There’s a little bit of a honeymoon period where your body’s trying to auto correct but it goes from, you were working at 75% max, your bucket’s pretty full, you come out the other end at 15% and now things start to take advantage of you. Stuff that you would’ve been resistant to before now, your hormones aren’t quite right, and your digestive system isn’t helping you like it used to and all those things we talked about. So I really think the surprise post COVID comes from that. And it’s sneaky.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

So it’s basically what the patient was already dealing with in their system, but they may not have known about it because they were able to just ride through it. Just through sheer strength or they just didn’t know yet. :’Cause it was so minimal, but suddenly COVID comes and it can start to tank all of those systems and then it becomes noticeable.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

And really, whether the person was worse or normal or thought they were normal before, when you get on the other side over to someone with post COVID problems, you kind of have to, you consider the history certainly for obvious things. But even if they didn’t have a big fluoride history of any chronic issues, you have to say, well, where are you now? And there are ways to, there’s grading scales of how bad is the post COVID and all that. And what I normally do and what I teach doctors to do is just meet ’em where they’re out there and say is it essentially a small, medium or large problem that we’re dealing with. And then match your investigations to how disrupted you think those things are. 

But certainly looking at their hormonal landscape, at least historically looking at their digestive system function, maybe with testing, certainly looking at chronic infections that like to just hang out and irritate you, but not give you specific symptoms, things of that nature. And then, in really low grade post COVID, it’s a clinical decision, but anything at the medium or high level, I strongly recommend that people do a new screening for mycotoxins, chemical toxins, metal toxins, because there’s a actually research that shows if you get sick enough with a infectious illness, not only there’s direct research, it shows that mess your hormones up. But there’s also research that shows that it can make you much more sensitive to say a low level mold exposure. Or chemicals that you maybe always exposed to but now they’re a big deal. or just the immune suppressive nature. So I think the toxicity side gets overlooked a lot, but because it’s immune suppressive, it’s a big part of post COVID.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Tell us more about how toxins come up to the surface. So there’s toxins, they’re already there. Let’s talk about maybe an old exposure. So there’s acute exposures, there’s chronic exposures, low level. And then there could be somebody who’s had exposures in the past and there’s still a body burden. They might not have acute or chronical level, say they’re out of the exposure. And then their body has been dealing with that. They’ve been okay, they didn’t even know. Then they come into our office and then I test them for all these toxins, inevitably, I’m seeing that they’re high. Tell that patient, why it is that these toxins are affecting them now.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

But not before.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

So there’s two major source issues that people, I mean, if you’re healthy, you don’t like think about sickness and why you might be sick unless . So people naturally aren’t sitting around thinking about this all the time, but just to make it as I guess, crystallize as possible, one possibility is which I see a lot that your threshold when you’re healthy for the normal amount of toxic junk in our world that we live in now, you’re kind of tolerant to it. So these things may not be good for you, but your body between your sweat glands, and your liver and your kidneys and everybody else kind of what goes in, goes out and you don’t keep a whole bunch behind. 

And that process works for you and you’re not getting chronic headaches or you’re not having immune suppression, not whatever. So there’s that sort of tolerance we develop in modern society. An acute illness will just basically take that tolerance away, so the margin between in and out and that little bit you keep not a big deal. You get acutely ill and you lose your margin. So even though you weren’t feeling it before it was there, so that’s one thing. But the other thing is that our bodies same story. We live in a world that’s got way more toxins and 50 or a hundred years ago, our bodies evolved and developed to get rid of toxins, as we had maybe two, 300 years ago, we were still doing pretty good, but we’re not evolving that fast. We’re not growing new types of liver tissue or better. So now, our chemical evolution has way exceeded our human evolution. 

So what happens is that, yeah, we’re dealing with it, we’re going along, but the body can only get rid of so much stuff. And this is one of those misnomers I hear a lot that doctors are taught this, but it’s actually not true anymore. And is that well, the body has natural detoxification systems, which is true. It’s just, they forget the part about the load that comes in is not nearly what the natural detox systems are set up for. So yeah, we get rid of a lot of stuff, but the load is way bigger. So our body then knows these chemicals or metals aren’t good for us. And so for instance, with metals, which in the mineral kingdom, it will take those. And first it puts ’em like in solid organs, like your liver, and your brain and unfortunate places like that. And then eventually it moves it over and your bones, which are set to pick up minerals, don’t want the metals, but they’ll take them. 

So a lot of the metals in our bodies and everyone’s got metal in their bone, a lot of ’em the metal in our body is old stuff. And one of the things that happens is hormonally when you get sick, a lot of the chemistry, the hormonal chemistry that’s trying to help your immune system can go to your bones and release stuff. Now it’s thinking it’s gonna maybe release low calcium or phosphorus or something and it may release bad guy at the same time, old medals.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

So it’s a little bit like when women go into menopause, that’s same yeah.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Natural bone release, but all the bad things that are in your bone go too. And the same thing with some mycotoxins and chemical toxins certainly, your body’s trying to storm ’em in the fat cells, in your liver and other places and you get a fever or you’re ill. And the chemistry of dealing with the fever and the illness will start to break down those storage sites. And so it’s like suddenly, I got this in inject of toxin for myself, really, really common. So you’ve got both low level exposure that you may not notice, not good for you, but you don’t notice it. 

And then you’ve got your own body burden that if you go into a catabolic, a breakdown state when you’re sick, which you do, part of what gets broken down is all the stored junk. So it’s really common then that you get this sort of, post-infectious tide of all this junk. And then that goes, and it’ll disrupt hormone receptors. And as we said, a lot of immune function, but I’ll also just your body getting back on track. So the toxic part is, I’ll think of it as it supports what the infectious things are doing in vice versa. So it’s sort of like they get their own positive feedback that they do. And I think that’s why we see so much of that with post COVID because it just, the infection opens the door and then all those bad things come out.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Can you tell us about mold and COVID what have you seen?

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Sure, well, one thing I think maybe the most straightforward thing is if you have a person who’s just been diagnosed with like a large mold mycotoxin exposure, they didn’t know their house was moldy or maybe work or whatever. And so they have these really high mycotoxin levels with their body dumping out. Most of those toxins that mold put off one of the biggest reasons they hurt us is that, they literally suppress our immune system. Now to the degree that their is a famous immune suppressive drug that’s used in cancer and organ transplants and stuff when we don’t want you to reject a new liver or something that is made from a microtoxin and it’s a common microtoxin that we get exposed to. 

So they’re that good at suppressing your immune system. So of course the worst situation would be if you do, or don’t know, but you’re exposed to a whole lot of that in your home or work environment, you get a new infection and your immune system’s gonna be really disorganized in the way that it goes about it. If you maybe don’t have these exposures, but like we were talking about your body’s kind of stuffed away some mycotoxins to try and get rid of later, and then you’re sick and run down and you’re literally burning up your liver stores that can make you sick longer or like I said, it can have that rebound effect. So there are many bad health things that might go the mold toxins do. But I think in our situation, we’re talking about with post COVID, the immune dysregulation and derailing your immune system obviously is not, that’s like the top of the heap as far as what we don’t want.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

What do you thinks going on with respect to biofilm and COVID acute and chronically. Stop and tell them what biofilm is first. They might not have idea.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

So biofilms are all over the world. They’re in wet places. So the first places they were discovered were in the oceans. If you’re an oceanographer, you know all about biofilms they make the ocean work and all that. First place that we discovered them in humans was in our teeth. So dentists actually, a lot of what they’re doing to try and keep your teeth healthy is disrupting biofilms because biofilms hold, you can think of it like a hive of multiple infectious things that live together. So it’s not just now this is where people get confused. There are particular, usually bacteria, there are particular species of that are biofilm formers. So they’re like the builders, but they let everybody else in once they build this and why do they build it? They build it to protect themselves. 

So for example, there’s some very bad infections that are hard to treat like pseudomonas, you get pseudomonas in your lungs, you can die from it. Well, the reason it’s hard to treat is the bug is tough, but the bug is a biofilm builder. So it builds like armor, well, what will happen, and we have these, the biggest area in humans start with the mouth, but it’s your digestive tract. More so than anywhere else in the body. So the biofilm is natural to us. It’s part of our ecology but if you get some bad actors who can make more biofilm, then you can literally get parasites in there and viruses and fungi and the whole kingdom. And what will happen is they’ll operate now as a community, not as individual bugs. And so that’s its own set of trouble–

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Before you go on, tell them why they create biofilm.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Yeah, so the biofilm is literally formed, whether it’s in the ocean or anywhere else where there’s biofilms to protect the original organism that forms it. And so it’s literally one of their mechanisms for symbiosis, with where they live. So if you have a little organism and let’s say it lives in a coral reef or something like that, and it can’t really survive as its tiny self, it will form a biofilm to attach to something stronger than it. And then it will live there happily. Well, think of that in your teeth or in your digestive tract or whatever, we have a lot of what I call normal biofilms they are just part of our normal biome that’s happy. During illness, the chemistry of illness tends to stimulate biofilm growth and care and feeding because it takes advantage of the illness, the bugs that make them. And then what you get though, is a lot of bugs you don’t want staying, joining in and getting in the biofilm. And then what happens is if you send say, make it simple, let’s say there’s a bacteria that there’s an antibiotic that will kill. 

Not always that easy, but let’s say that. If you have a naked bacteria and it encounters the antibiotic, the bacteria will die. The bacteria’s in the biofilm. It will just laugh at the antibiotic cause it, okay. So, and this again is one of those things where people cannot have a problem with it, ’cause it’s at a low, we call maybe normal level, but then they’re sick for a while or they get a big huge, maybe COVID response or any other infection. And their body will take that opportunity for some of the less friendly bugs to build bigger biofilm structures et cetera. And then more pathogens get in there. So you literally can have people where you’ll test for these things and the bugs are there on the test and the treatments that should kill those bugs don’t do anything. And it’s cause most of ’em are hiding out in a biofilm.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

So what are your thoughts on COVID itself and biofilm? Do you feel you need to bust the biofilm first at times?

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Well, I think I’m only pausing ’cause it’s a multiple choice answer. The way that biofilms affect people to create chronic illness is very dependent on how run down their body got during, during their earlier illness time because biofilms are their natural, but their are not always good for you. If they build to a certain point, they become on the opposition side. So what we normally see is, if someone’s getting in the post COVID phase and we definitely, as I’ve said, you’re looking at their hormones, and toxins, and infections. 

So let’s say you’ve looked and oh gee, these infections flared up during COVID, we didn’t treat ’em back then let’s treat ’em now because they’re making you fatigued and have pain and all this, what I usually say is clinically speaking, if you’re working on those infections through in the way we do it usually is both natural things and maybe some drug things in a mixture, if you’re working on those and you’re not seeing that person turn the corner in a normal amount of time, you should assume that the biofilms are protecting the majority of the bad actors. And what we normally see is if that’s the case and you add biofilm therapies to help open the biofilm up, suddenly the person will have these big responses to the anti infective treatment, which is both good and disturbing at the same time, because they’re like, oh, I wasn’t sick. And oh, now–

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

No I’m yeah.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

You open the door to something So we do warn them about that. But basically, if I truly believed that someone was actually pretty healthy pre COVID and I’ve had those people where they really like, they’ve never had any sign of chronic illness in their life. COVID, wasn’t so bad but now they’ve got you name it. I usually will look at the big areas, get the hormones back on track, get their gut being kind of cleaned up and refurbished, look at what infections they picked up. Just try and kill ’em. And usually in weeks to a couple of months, they’re really turning the corner. Now they might need specific treatments for example, if they lost their taste and smell you might be doing some specific neurological things there. 

Or if they’ve got like chronic headaches or sleep disturbance or something you may be adding things on top of that. But by the same token and what we try and warn people is, if we’re getting three or four weeks into aggressively working on all these factors and you have no change at all, something’s being missed. And so things like biofilms are in a bigger category of resistance factors, meaning the bad guys can resist you in your treatment. And so resistance factors include like those toxic things and biofilms and bad gut function and just stuff that takes away our natural ability to heal. 

So then you have to back up and do that. And then the other area I see in the post COVID and I know it’s been going on the entire time we’ve had COVID post COVID, but it’s getting very, it’s getting more common now because I think we have so many people have COVID we’re noticing it more. And that’s the neuro inflammatory part of COVID because all the same things that mess up your digestive function or make your liver release toxins all these chemistry we have also makes your brain homeostasis, your brain ecology, less stable. So you see people, , ’cause you hear let’s pick an easy one that’s super common taste changes or loss of taste. Some people 2, 3, 4 weeks and they get in their taste back. 

Some people a year later, they still can’t taste. People developed headaches, some people they went away, some people still have them. People develop anxiety or sleep problems or whatever, COVID we know now can cause the same disease as a traumatic brain injury. So you could be in a bad car accident and hit your head, super hard, lose consciousness, have a concussion, or you could have COVID and you could have the exact same problems afterwards. So, the long term neurological problems are also ones that are sneaky. And there’s a lot of underlying things a lot of these things we’ve talked about, until they’re addressed, you can give the person all the procurement and boswellia want you want and all these other things and it’ll help ’em but they don’t heal. So there’s a lot of trauma to lots of systems that we really have to think of these core things we’re talking about.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

What kind of treatments do you like to give to people who are having the neurological issues more than anything else? 

Paul Anderson, N.D.

So I just did a physician training for this and it wound up being three hours long, which nobody liked, but it was good stuff. And I reviewed, there’s probably a thousand papers, but I reviewed 50 of the most useful ones that have been published in the last year or so all about COVID. We’re 99% about COVID. So there’s a lot that’s known about COVID and the nervous system. The communities that treat these problems, whether it’s neurology, psychiatry, ear, noses, and throat are even acknowledging that the standard treatments they would use aren’t working that great. And they’re act actually publishing that things that we might do, like platelet rich plasma or stem cells or nutrients or other stuff like they’re actually putting in papers. Look, we’ve never used these before, but these appear to maybe be helpful.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

I love it.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

None of the other treatments we have do. So I say that to say that number one, they have to be very desperate if they put that in, Psychiatry Journal or ENT journal. But also it goes back to the fact, if you look at the science, the hardcore science for any neurological problem, it starts with what we knew very early in COVID but now we know more mechanism, that you hear about on the news cytokines and cytokine storms and all this. Well, cytokines are just little chemicals that tell your immune system where to go, what to do. And they all do different things at different times. So they’re very, very fun to try and track well, most of them that come along when you’re dealing with COVID that might affect your brain, you don’t notice right away. ‘Cause they are making you hurt or they’re making whatever. 

Well, what happens with the nervous system is the first insult is a one to punch, where the fluid that protects and feeds your brain becomes more inflammatory with these little cytokines. And then the membranes that keep the fluid in your brain and safe and keep the blood out of your brain for the most part. And in the rest of your body, basically get holes in them. So become like Swiss cheese, it’s not supposed to be that way. So the number one protective mechanism, family in your brain gets less protective. Then that allows more inflammation to go in. And your brain then, would always tell patients, why could one person get a headache, and the other one gets anxiety, and the other one maybe has nerve pain or something? 

It’s because your brain does everything and if one area of your brain gets more injured than the other, that area is gonna give you symptoms that are wildly different than your neighbor got. So it’s all the same problem, but tends to be, for example, if you started it out with a little anxiety, you might have a lot of anxiety. Or if you start out with little pain, you have a lot of pain or maybe you get a new thing that you never had before. So in treatment again, there’s two levels. It’s sorta like if you get a post COVID patient and there’s those people where you get their diet dialed in and they’re on the nutrients that we talked about and they start to exercise, get their muscles moving three, four weeks they’re all better, that’s not the patient we’re talking about here. People who do all that and nothing happens that person then you have to step back and say, we have to fix the original insult. 

And even the neurology and psychiatry literature, they say, we have this blood brain barrier problem, which is not good. We don’t have drugs that fix it, which you don’t. And so you have to start there and get your brain and your nervous system protected and then you can fix the other problems. So this whole initial insult with inflammation in your blood brain barrier, interestingly although it shouldn’t be ’cause everything affects everything else. The hormone balance we were talking about is a huge part of getting that back online. What your body does usually under inflammation and acute infection and stuff is kind of shifts hormones towards maintenance during an infection. 

So if you’re healthy, your cortisol will go up and estrogen will actually go up and you’ll kind of burn up your testosterone men or women, it goes down and your progesterone and so some of the other higher order hormones kind of drop or drop a lot. Well, it turns out your blood brain barrier is very sensitive to progesterone dropping and testosterone and DHEA dropping as they do and all that. And so one of the core things is that hormone rebalancing kind of helps stabilize. Then there’s other things that, and again, in the standard research, the number one thing people are trying, because most people know about it as curcumin. And so in the few research papers where they’ve tried curcumin, of course it works and it helps so that, there’s a lot of other plant medicines that we know that help that way. 

So there are things like that. But then there’s also things that we think of often not till we have like a chronic neurological disease or something to use like, and this again is in the standard literature now, Acetyl-L-carnitine, which we use a lot with neuro stuff, but it turns out that acutely in these post COVID patients, that’s very helpful. And then all, the other thing which is at this core, very core level is the mitochondrial damage that COVID causes. And now there’s papers that show that the brain mitochondria are hit very hard. So as with all of our chronically ill people your mitochondria go down with you, all the typical mitochondrial supports, you have to bring in. 

So it’s really building from the very base up. And that’s probably why COVID is so able to disregulate everything. Is it really attacks base processes, your blood brain barriers a pretty base process, your kidney nephrons are your base process, your lining of your arteries is pretty important. So it goes to these places, your mitochondria. So I really think that’s, and we tend to sometimes come in swinging a little higher and treating something obvious and missing the factors nothing’s working anymore.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Well, thank you, Paul. This has been great. I really enjoyed myself, I know our audience has as well. I love how you’re exposing, what is underneath long term COVID. Very few people are talking about and now our audience listening can have a sense of why they’re sick from this.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

And why it takes more than a week or two sometimes to make you better.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Exactly, I mean, it is a lot like chronic tick born does disease from seeing that for sure, similar mechanisms.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Very much, very much. Thank you.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Thank you. Is there anything else that you wanna share?

Paul Anderson, N.D.

I think we did all of the current topics I’ve been working on, so I that’s probably enough.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah, well, tell about your books. I see your books behind you.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

So those two there, I know you probably can’t read them, but the two books back there, one is called “Outside The Box Cancer Therapies.” And it’s pretty much just what it says. Dr. Mark Dangler and myself wrote it together. And it is for anybody the layperson’s made to be read by anybody, but we reference it like a textbook so that cancer patients, when they go to see, say their oncologist, et cetera, could have references and resources to show that it’s not just crazy ideas and all of that. The other thing we did is used our combined 50 or 60 years now of experience to prioritize treatment because once someone’s diagnosed with cancer, the internet can give you a million good ideas. 

And what we try to do is, what’s in the research, but also just what have we seen, if we wanted to allocate your time and resources in somewhere where we start. And so things about that, there’s a lot of things about the cancer research I was involved in and what we learned and things people could apply with their doctor. And then the other one is also a cancer oriented book for either loved ones or the cancer patient. And it’s called “Cancer, The journey From Diagnosis To Empowerment” and whether you have cancer or anything else in life, the more empowered you are the better. Cancer is a disempowering diagnosis and the reason I wrote it was the other books about what to do for your cells and one of the biggest problems in cancer, regardless of how you’re treating it is it’s like getting run over by a truck when you hear you have cancer, and that’s not a position your mind and your body need to be in to maximally heal and do well and have good quality of life. And actually the research is very clear that the more empowered you are, the better you do with drug treatments and quality of life and energy and everything else. 

So, it’s literally a, it’s my experience over three decades of doing that every day with people and what the process is to go from, oh, no, I don’t wanna die, I have cancer, but what do I do to actually moving towards being an empowered and embolden patient. So it’s an easy, quick read. The outside the box has got lots of stuff in it. The journey from diagnosis to empowerment is made to be read quickly. It’s got tips and takes you right through and stories to help you understand.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Great, thank you Paul. Thank you for everything you do for medicine to change the face of medicine. I mean, you do it I wanna publicly thank you for that. It’s a big, big deal.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Thank you, I work hard at it. I’m grateful.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Appreciate that.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Thank you again for coming on here with me today.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Thank you, it’s been fun.

Paul Anderson, N.D.

Has been.