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Hello everybody. And welcome to this. Week’s Empowering Women. I am Dr. Julie McLaughlin, your host. And today we’re going to be talking about the season of long COVID Part 3. So if you missed my other talks, go back and watch them. But I have some slides to share with you, um, here. And so first thing we want to do as always is thank ChiroSecure. They have provided so much educational information and so many experts, um, on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, you name it. They are everywhere. So let’s do some thumbs up some little hearts. Uh, let’s let’s get the ChiroSecure, uh, videos boosted up on the feeds because they are really, really so helpful in our profession. So the season along COVID so, you know, if you’ve seen some of the videos before that I myself have long COVID, um, I got COVID last spring, so I’m going on six months with this.
And I have learned along the way. So I want to share with you some things. So if you’re experiencing this, if your patients are experiencing this or you’re not quite sure, um, if some of the symptoms that you see are kind of crazy, if it is long COVID. So what we’re going to talk about a little bit, I’m going to give you a little bit of overview in case you missed my other videos of what long COVID is. So the timeline of COVID is when you first get it, it’s acute for about two weeks of symptoms. And some people just get better after that. Some people get no symptoms. We know this, right, but the post acute COVID can be symptoms up to 12 weeks. Once you go beyond the 12 weeks of symptoms, it’s going to become chronic COVID or long COVID, or they call it post COVID sequella.
So those are the timelines. So if you have patients, if you’ve had COVID somebody in your family, that’s where you want to know if you’re falling into what category. So the most common symptom of long COVID is that your symptom will change. So there’s more than 50 symptoms of this post acute COVID syndrome. And the most common one is that it changes. So the symptoms that you have in the beginning that you think are so terrible, they’re going to change, and you might get a better one, or you might get a worst one. Um, but they’re always, always changing. And when you look at some of the statistics, 39 million plus people have been infected with COVID and then about 30% of them are going to get long COVID. And this is the deal you can get long COVID. If you were sick in the hospital, you can get long COVID.
If you’re on a ventilator, you can get long COVID. If you’re asymptomatic, you can get long COVID. If you had a very mild disease and you might not even realize it because you let’s say you had the mild disease and you get over it initially. And then a couple months later, maybe a symptom pops up, you really fatigued, or you have brain fog, or your ha your heart is racing and you don’t understand why, and you don’t link it back to COVID because you figure you got over it. But the truth is that maybe you didn’t get over it and you have long COVID. So if you’re having, if you had COVID and you have symptoms that are strange, and there’s no other explanation for them at all, and you’ve had them really checked out, I want you to think about possibility of long COVID.
So according to the American heart association, one of the biggest problems with COVID is not the virus so much, but it’s the inflammatory or cytokine storm that occurs in that reaction in our own immune system. So that is what we’re really worried about is that cytokine storm. So one of the things that we’re going to talk about today is something called mass cell activation. So there’s some studies out and I’ll show it to you here in a second, but are the cytokine storms triggering this dysfunctional mass cell and causing long COVID? Because as you know, in my other videos, I’ve been on this quest to see what caused this long COVID. I was perfectly healthy. I took no medications. I’ve never had any health issues in my life, and yet I still came to live on COVID. So I’ve been on a mission and I’m sharing that mission with you guys to find out.
So this is a study from November, 2020, that shows that COVID-19 hyper inflammation and post COVID-19 illness long COVID maybe rooted in mass cell activation syndrome, right? So what are the symptoms of that? And these are the highlights from that study that much of the COVID-19 hyper inflammation is consistent with mass cell driven inflammation. What that means is the symptoms of long COVID and the symptoms of mass cell activation are the same. And I’ll show you those here in a second, the prevalence of severe COVID-19 is similar to the mass cell activation drugs, inhibiting mass cell activation. And they’re mediators are a promise with co COVID. I’m going to go over some of the over counter things and some of the natural things that you can do later on in this presentation as well. So hold on for that. So none of the authors currently treat, um, mass cell activation syndrome patients with COVID-19, um, that had the severe forms or had increased mortality.
So the dysfunction of the mass cells in the mass cell activation may be an underlying cause for this long COVID condition. So exactly what is mass cell activation syndrome. Now I’ve had, because I do functional medicine in my practice. I’ve had patients in the years past, come in with this condition, and this is what it is. It’s a multi-system inflammatory syndrome. It’s the same thing as long COVID. If you look up what is long COVID is a multi-system inflammatory syndrome. Now this is a microscopic, uh, photograph of a mass cell. So mass cells are cells that are responsible for the immediate allergic reaction from these little circles in here, they release something called mediators. I know it’s a weird thing for them to call it, but they release these mediators. One allergic reaction is triggered. And so the mass cells can be activated by medications, infections like COVID right, a certain foods insect or a reptile venom.
It can also be genetic. And guess what else, if those mass cells, even aren’t activated, they could just get triggered and become abnormal. And then they grow uncontrollably. So they call that mastocytosis. When the mass cells just kind of go crazy and form almost like an autoimmune condition. So when we’re looking at this, what are some of the symptoms? So it’s going to be heart-related symptoms, skin related symptoms, lung related symptoms, and gastrointestinal track. So those are all symptoms we’re seeing in long COVID right? So in the heart is tachycardia, rapid heart rate, low blood pressure and syncope or fainting in the skin related. What are we seeing? We’re seeing hives, we’re seeing rashes. We’re seeing swelling. We’re seeing flushing. We’re seeing COVID toes and long COVID right in the lungs. We know COVID causes, you know, SARS, Kobe pneumonia. Like I got because wheezing, shortness of breath and stridor.
Those are from the mass cell activation. And we know that long COVID and Colby can cause gastrointestinal tract symptoms like diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain and mass cell activation can cause the exact same thing. So what lifestyle changes and supplementations can we do to help with the mass cell activation symptoms and with long COVID? So like I said, when COVID has 50 symptoms, but this relates specifically to the mass cell activation symptoms. So if you’re getting some of these symptoms, some of these things could help you. So over the counter, if you’re you have that tendency to want to over the counter medication, there’s different types of anti-histamines, there’s the H one and there’s an H two, and you want to take both types. So in the H one classification, it would be Benadryl or hydroxyzine in the H two class, it’s going to be Zantac or Pepcid.
And I know it seems really crazy that you would take two different types of anti-histamines, but these symptoms are really, really significant and severe. I can tell you, I couldn’t walk from my bedroom into the bathroom without my heart rate, going up to 150. So, and if it’s triggered by all of this mass cell and all this histamine in our body, we need to kind of suppress it. Some of the natural remedies. And these are things that I actually take that have been really effective is Perilla seed extract at 150 milligrams twice a day. History set, which is a product from a pure Encapsulations two capsules per day course to 10,000 milligrams, twice a day. Um, stinging nettles 300 milligrams per day, bromelain 500 milligrams, three times a day, and butterbur at 75 milligrams twice a day. So those are some of the things that are going to help control the mass cell activation symptoms.
And it will help with those same symptoms if you’re experiencing long COVID. Now, one of the things that you can do with lifestyle is do an anti-histamine diet. Now we all talk about like an anti-inflammatory diet. We know what that is, and this kind of overlaps it a little bit, but there’s some added things. So I’m not going to make you sit here and listen to me, read them all. But if you want to see these, pause the video and take a look at these. The other thing that’s not on this list is an interesting little side note is that, did you know that leftover food can have high histamines in it? So if you prepare, you know, something for dinner, you prepare chicken for dinner and you have leftovers and you have it the next night, that’s going to have histamines in it. So be really careful of that. Or if you go to the deli and you buy something that was prepared, that’s basically a leftover watch out for that because they have high histamines. And I can tell you from experience avoiding these foods really, really do reduce your symptoms. So in today is veteran’s day. So I want to thank you all you veterans out there, and we know that freedom doesn’t come free. So thank you very much. And thank you, chiropractic care for having us. I’m Dr. Julie McLaughlin from Vital Health Protocols, and I will see you next time. Bye
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