Podcast Highlights:
00:30 POST COVID EMOTIONAL SYMPTOMS
12:17 RESEARCH ARTICLES
22:39 Why doesn’t everybody get acupuncture all the time?
34:57 Acupuncture and HPA system
Transcript from Webinar:
Hello there. This is Dr. John, back with you. I want to thank Kathryn for doing such a great job. Last week I was a little under the weather, and I really appreciated what she did. I thought you did a superb job, so give her a shout out, a little applause. You’re stuck with me again today, though. I’m back. The good news is, though, is that I have a bunch of great questions that I got. I think this is going to be a very interesting and informative show because of that.
POST COVID EMOTIONAL SYMPTOMS
I’m going to read an email from a dear, dear friend of ours. It says, “A dear friend back in VA” and I don’t know if that meant the VA, like the Veterans Administration or Virginia. “She just recovered from the latest Omicron subvariant and had more than a week of deep depression and accompanying anxiety with suicidal ideation immediately after her gastrointestinal/respiratory COVID symptoms subsided. She has a history of PTSD for many decades ago but has had therapy for that and has been very successful at controlling it. Because of the strategies she acquired during her original treatments with that condition. She had the sense to reach out to a number of friends, including myself, during the depressive episode, which she now appears to be recovering from. But she got shockingly little help from her doctor or the local E.R., her doctor suggested she go to. I should add, she has also been receiving treatment for cancer, but is in remission and was generally in a very positive state of mind prior to getting COVID.”
So she continues, “Her experience led me to do a small amount of research on clinical depression following COVID, and it appears that the symptoms my friend experienced are not uncommon. However, the data I uncovered was inconclusive in regard to the cause. That is, whether this psychosis is another symptom of the virus itself or whether it’s an emotional/psychological response to having had the virus and fear of a reinfection, or if it appears to be both.” My response is “that it can be either of those and more.”
I’m going to go back a little bit and then I’ve got a couple of research studies that I think are going to be a little bit shocking on this as how they pertain to this question.
Now, for one thing, how do I put this gently? I know a great many medical doctors. Mostly secondhand, through their patients, who are totally misinformed about what’s occurring with COVID. Their treatments are not effective, and there are very effective treatments that have been published that, have had well over 99.9% effectiveness. They’re totally uninformed about those. They are totally uninformed about long COVID. They’re totally uninformed about a great many things related to COVID.
Now, that’s not particularly unusual, unfortunately. Medical doctors, particularly in the U.S., are incredibly well-trained. I mean, they go through 8-10 years of study and research in whatever their specialty is. But outside of that, they don’t tend to stay up to date. In my experience on what’s happening now, certainly I’m being grossly, you know, lumping people together here. That has very much been my experience. One case I had a couple of days ago, I had COVID myself a while back. What was striking to me, I wasn’t very sick; a little phlegm on my throat, no fever, etc.. But the fatigue was overwhelming. Worst fatigue I’ve ever had.
I was doing a telehealth with one of my patients that I’ve been seeing for many, many years. She asked me how I was doing and I was relaying that. She said, “Yeah, no, I understand. I’ve had that exact experience for 15 months.” Now her case was not from COVID, but it was a vaccine side effect. She’s quite clear about it; she got vaccinated one day and this happened the same day. And for 15 months, she says, “What I do is I plan one activity a day. Today I went out and picked some tomatoes, and then I know that I’m going to have to go inside and take a nap for several hours, and that’s the total energy expenditure I have for that day.”
This is a very sharp woman. I’ve known her for a long time. Her husband’s a medical doctor. I said to her, “So what does your husband think about this?” She said, “He thinks it’s all in my head.” Because in his reality, COVID injuries don’t happen.
Now we know they happen. There are hundreds of thousands of them. You know the only debate is how many and how severe. But they occur. We know.
However, many doctors still refuse to classify anything after a vaccination as a vaccine injury. That’s just what they’re trained. They’re told that doesn’t happen. They don’t question it. So her very own husband, a medical doctor, a very bright guy, I know him, says it’s all in her head.
05:55
I actually read a couple of studies to her about this, which made her feel a lot better because she really got that it wasn’t all in her head. So the symptoms, unfortunately, that this person’s friend has experienced are actually very common.
They’re not uncommon at all. By that I mean it’s not 100%. It’s not 50%. However, the numbers of suspected cases of neurological, mental, emotional injury are going up every day. And doctors are surprised by it. When you read that the studies, the very people that are doing it, and you look at their quotes and they say, “We knew there was a problem, but we were shocked by the severity and the volume of the problem.”
So many of the hospitals and hospital groups are now getting to the point where they’re having so many people come in with long COVID that they are not arguing about it anymore. They realize there is long COVID. They’re trying to come up with treatment strategies to treat it.
07:09
Dr. Patterson, who works at Stanford, has come up with amazing testing for long COVID. He looks for cytokines, and he measures multiple different types of cytokines, which are inflammatory chemicals to see if they’re still lingering in the system after COVID.
I have one patient who has been tested several times, and she shows a clear inflammatory pathway problem; she even has an index for it. Go ahead and look Dr. Patterson up. He calls it the Long COVID Index, and he gives a point scale rating to this. She shows up with long COVID, and she has long COVID symptoms. He put her on a very, very cutting edge, I’m going to call it, a “treatment protocol,” which unfortunately in her case did zero to benefit her. It made her worse overall because it just flatlined her emotionally.
Now, for some people, he swears it’s working, and he’s getting great results. Kaiser, now has some people focusing on long COVID. One of my patients was in two days ago and met with a doctor from Kaiser about long COVID and the doctor said, “Oh dear, I’m treating people from 2020. You just have not had this long enough for me to even talk to you about it.” So they’re not even calling her a long-COVID case, even though she does meet the technical criteria for long COVID.
In terms of my friend’s friend, we are seeing lingering and ongoing cytokine storms. Now, does that mean the virus is still active? I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it. Although they are finding virus present, particularly in the guts of the tissue of inflammatory bowel disease patients for months and months after they think that the virus has cleared. We don’t really know for sure, but it seems like a cytokine storm has been set off, it’s continuing, and it’s continuing to cause that level of inflammation.
It could be that the cytokine storm is causing this person’s problem. Or it could be that fear of being reinoculated, re-infected, etc. is causing anxiety. Those both make perfect sense, but there are lots of other possibilities, too.
10:06
One doctor I’ve followed for about 20 years because he really had what I thought were the first cohesive explanations and treatments for Lyme disease. While using his treatments, I got very, very, very good results. Well, he’s now doing a lot of COVID cases all over the world. He practices in several countries. He says that one of the things that he’s seeing is that COVID infections have re-triggered a lot of underlying problems.
For example, he has treated a lot of Lyme disease over the years. Patients thought that they were in remission, that the Lyme was gone. But then after COVID, it really stimulated the Lyme, and they’re having to treat the Lyme all over again. He’s also seeing that with a variety of viral infections: Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, Human Herpesvirus six, Parvovirus; all of those are getting reactivated and needing to be treated again. So that’s another possibility.
We see a huge correlation worldwide between cases of Lyme disease and Lyme co-infections and mental/emotional disorders. There are some doctors as soon as you walk in with OCD, they will say, “Aha, this person has X” and they will assume that you have X until they have proven that you don’t. Now, usually they don’t prove it because the patient does have that co-infection. That’s how common it is.
These are all really possibilities. Now in practice, I am primarily treating for inflammation, those cytokine storms, and we have very specific treatments for different cytokine increases. We are also treating for micro blood clots, which seem to be one of the big problems with this, also.
12:17 RESEARCH
Now, I’ve got a couple of studies here that I’m going to talk about because they really, really pertain highly to this question. One was from June 30th. It was reported in Healthday news. It was done from Copenhagen University Hospital. The doctors looked at the association between COVID 19 and specific central and peripheral neurological diseases. They found that COVID was associated with a pretty significant increased risk of specific neurological disorder. They looked at a lot of people. They included 45,535 COVID patients. Plus, they also looked at influenza patients and pneumonia to get kind of baselines on those. So over 45,000 COVID patients; that’s a lot.
What they found is that patients with COVID 19, had increased relative risks of developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, Narcolepsy, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Dementia of any type, and had a higher risk for ischemic stroke compared to individuals who had not had COVID 19. That’s a pretty significant list.
Many of those could certainly trigger the type of experience that this woman had. You know, if that’s stimulating Parkinson’s or M.S. or Alzheimer’s, it could really certainly cause those types of neurological, mental, emotional issues. They looked at this for quite a while.
14:14
There’s another study that came out that I found even more shocking. I’ve given it to a few of the medical personnel that come in to see me, and they’re equally shocked. This was a study that was done at the Department of Psychiatry at Westchester Medical Center, Health Systems in Valhalla, New York. This one was in Medscape’s Coronavirus Resource Center. Again, I get maybe ten or more, maybe 12 actual medical journals every day, and I go through them looking for interesting cases. This came through just the other day. What they’re saying is “Patients experiencing brain fog and other persistent symptoms of long COVID show significant deficits on neuropsychiatric testing that corresponds with prior acute COVID 19 infection, adding to mounting evidence of the significant toll the chronic condition can have on mental health.” That was their statement.
They said that many clinicians have observed symptoms, and they’ve described that, so they decided to do a study on that. They enrolled patients who had experienced acute COVID 19 disease 6 to 8 months prior and had undergone neuropsychological, psychiatric, medical, functional and quality of life assessments. About half were treating seeking treatment for brain fog. About half were treating or seeking treatment for other ongoing psychiatric sequalae. Now, this is shocking. The overall battery of assessment showed that 62% of participants had neuropsychological test impairment with the results below the 16th percentile on two tests. That means they were amongst the bottom 15% of people that tested on these tests. This is over a broad range of people that have done the tests, and they were in the bottom 15%. That’s stunning. While 27% showed scores indicative of severe impairment below the second percentile in at least one test.
What does that mean “below the second percentile”? That means you are the worst. Below second percentile would put you in the one percentile, which means one out of 800 people are going to test that low, and 27% of these people were in that area of being below the second percentile.
Now, if that’s not frightening, I don’t know what is. Those reporting brain fog had scores that were even lower than expected on tests of attention, processing speed, memory and executive function. That quote was, “Based on what we’ve observed, we did expect to find some impairment. However, we were surprised to find 27% of the study sample had extremely low neuropsychological test scores.”
The brain fog group also reported significantly higher levels of depression, fatigue, PTSD, functional difficulties and lower quality of life. This sounds like the person that my friend had sent us the information on.
An analysis of serum levels of the inflammatory markers amongst these participants showed that 45% of the patients had an elevated interleukin-6 level; interleukin 6 (IL-6) is a very common mediator of inflammation. 20% had elevated TNF-alpha, and 41% had elevated C-reactive protein compared with reference ranges. In my opinion, those are the minimums that should be tested for anyone who comes in and complains of brain fog.
Like my patient whose husband has said, “It’s all in your head…” Well, in one way he’s right. It is all in our head. It’s that her brain is not functioning properly. Her mitochondria are not functioning properly, but it isn’t because there’s something inherently wrong with her psychologically. It’s that the psychological problems have been created by the disease.
19:22
Then another study came up at the APA meeting. An online survey of 787 survivors of acute COVID, and all respondents (100%) reported having persistent symptoms of the virus, and as many as 68% indicated that they had not returned to normal functioning, despite only 15% of them having been hospitalized with COVID. So 100% reported persistent symptoms.
A large proportion showed significant depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. The most commonly reported persistent symptoms were fatigue 75.9%; brain fog, 67.9%; concentration difficulties 61.1%, and weakness 51%. Now, that’s pretty consistent with what I am seeing in my practice in terms of the breakdown. 88.2% said they experienced persistent neurocognitive symptoms with poor memory and concentration. 56% reported problems with word finding and 54.1% had slowed thinking.
High rates of anxiety were 41.7% and depression was 61.4%. 40% showed probable PTSD when they did testing on them. Now, in our sample, 40% of respondents had a prior psychiatric history, which indeed may have been exacerbated by COVID. At the end, it says, “In pandemic, the brain tends to be overlooked.”
21:22
There’s an article by Avindra Nath, MD, who I really like and has some really, really great things in here about how the coronavirus affects the brain. So back to the question, “Could this be from the actual physical effects of COVID?” Probably. In my opinion, probably. Could it be fear that’s been triggered by fear of COVID? Yeah, that’s really possible, too. But the bottom line, it’s probably all of those.
You need to find a doctor who is willing to treat you for the problem. That’s willing to treat you for the inflammation and at least test you for it. It’s stunning to me the number of patients that I have come in that are reporting these problems, who have not been tested with very straightforward tests to see what’s going on. Anyway, that’s my very lengthy short answer to that question.
If you have a follow up, go ahead and send that in and hopefully I can get to it before the end of the show.
22:39 Why doesn’t everybody get acupuncture all the time?
Kathryn sends out a newsletter, a little blog once a week. Today it was on acupuncture. What a thought. It’s kind of interesting. The question that arises out of this blog is, “Why doesn’t everybody get acupuncture all the time?” Right? Why not? When you see the benefits, when you see the statistics, when you see the numbers, it’s very clear that acupuncture is phenomenally powerful at treating hundreds and hundreds of different conditions.
Anxiety is right at the top. So it really begs the question, why isn’t everybody using acupuncture? And the answer is very simple. Hypnosis. Mass hypnosis.
If you say something over and over and over and you say it loud enough, pretty soon everybody starts to believe you. If you go on Wikipedia today, it will say that acupuncture is a pseudoscience with no validation or science behind it. Now, I personally know dozens of people who have tried to get the Wikipedia page on acupuncture changed because everything about it is wrong, and it’s not just an opinion that it’s wrong. There are hundreds of studies showing that what they’re saying is wrong. However, Wikipedia isn’t what they pretend to be. Wikipedia is very, very tightly controlled, and since the pharmaceutical industry controls the media in general, I mean, there are only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise on television. Now, why would anybody allow that? Since you can’t go to the store and buy the drugs, why would they be advertised to you? Obviously the answer is then you go to your doctor and you put pressure on the doctor, and 70% of the time they will prescribe the drug that you ask for versus another drug that might be equally as good or better.
We’ve grown up with that. This was very purposeful. It was one of the most planned and beautiful, really, assaults on our freedoms. It goes back to I call it (because other people call it this) Rockefeller medicine. What occurred was that when Roosevelt broke up the steel trusts, and he broke up the oil trusts, and the Rockefellers made them break up their companies, and they broke up the railroad trusts. Well, those are really, really, really wealthy people, and they did not like that. They did not like their trust being broken up. A couple of people, who had a beautiful plan for them, said, “Look, why not put your money in an industry that’s foolproof, that you can’t lose, that not only will the government never break you up, they will actually force people to use your product.” These wealthy people were like, “All right, how do you do that?” And he showed them.
It was the pharmaceutical industry, and as we know, almost all of what happens in Congress is bought and sold. The pharmaceutical industry is the largest lobby in the world. They give huge amounts of money to person A, and then when they get elected, then they’re beholden to that company. It’s a horrible system. It couldn’t be much worse. However, they sold these magnets, these leader of industry, on this plan. They said, “Look, we will basically buy the votes of these congress people, and we will have them pass laws to make all forms of medicine illegal except the ones we do, which is pharmaceutical based. And they did. Hundreds and hundreds of medical schools were driven out of business. You had homeopathic schools. You had diabetic schools. You had anthroposophy schools. You had tons of schools doing different forms of medicine, many, many great forms of medicine. They were driven out of business. They didn’t take on a pharmacological centric system. They were just driven out of business. Pretty soon all of your medical schools were teaching pharmaceutically based medicine. Now, if you look at the conversations the doctors have on their own newsletters. I get multiple newsletters for doctors by doctors, and they complain constantly about how the pharmaceutical industry has completely taken over medical training and runs the medical system.
If they don’t order the right drugs, they get punished, being whatever the pharmaceutical company says. If they ordered the wrong drugs, which are basically things that have very low cost, (the generics), then they get in trouble and can lose their licenses. You see this, I could show you a dozen studies, an article today. Anyway, now we have the system that’s telling you the only thing that works is pharmaceuticals, unless you need surgery.
Otherwise, it’s all pharmaceuticals. It’s all pharmaceuticals. It’s all pharmaceuticals. So when you go to many doctors and you say, well, I’m thinking about acupuncture, they’ll just look at you like, “Are you an idiot? Why don’t you ask me about drinking seawater?” It’s the same kind of look. Now, sometimes, mostly, I hope it’s because they’re untrained. They don’t know. They’ve never studied acupuncture. They’ve never looked at the 54,000 studies on the NIH sites showing the value of acupuncture and actually showing how and why acupuncture work.
29:04
Then comes along a fellow named Edward Bernays. If you want to have fun, you just check out Bernays; it will make you want to vomit. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. He saw Freud’s early work and said, “Wow, whoa, I can sell anybody anything with this.” He’s the person that got the starlets smoking on the Macy’s parade so that women came out of the closet and started smoking publicly. He’s the one who got the Surgeon General to recommend cigarette smoking because it was healthy for your lungs. It got doctors promoting specific cigarette brands because obviously they’re the expert, and if they say smoking is safe, well, obviously it’s got to be safe. Plus, you like smoking anyway, so you’re willing to listen to that advice. Bernays taught them the ins and outs of how to set up non-profit companies that would say that your product was good. It wasn’t Pfizer saying that product was good. It was this research into the benefits of A, B and C that was saying this drug was good.
It gave it an air of legitimacy, and that’s continued to come down the pike. People just don’t think about doing acupuncture, which is as close to being 100% safe as anything could be, and it’s over 99.9% of the time that it’s beneficial.
I’m going to talk a little bit about Kathryn’s newsletter here. She starts out by saying you should see your doctor once a year and your dentist a couple times of year. But she points out that there are many ways that acupuncture can change a person’s life. We have this happen all the time where people will literally get off the bed and go, “Oh, my God, oh my God, my life is completely different.” That’s not a hyperbolic statement. Now, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes you just feel relaxed.
By doing acupuncture, you look at your health from a completely different perspective. You might start looking more in depth at your health. You might start eating better. A lot of long-term acupuncture patients find they no longer need all the medications that were prescribed by their family physician because their symptoms are controlled by acupuncture.
31:43
The big thing about acupuncture, though, is prevention. There’s an old story, I’m assuming apocryphal, although it’s probably been repeated dozens of times in some form or another, where a gentleman was getting an award as being the greatest doctor in his region. He said, “I can’t really accept this.” And they said, “Oh, don’t be so humble. You’re a very famous because you heal people.” And he said, “Yeah, but that’s the problem. You know, my father, when people came to see him, he would treat them at the very first sign of them being out of balance. And they didn’t get sick. But he really wasn’t as good as my grandfather, who patients would come to see my grandfather, and they never had the initial symptom; they never got sick at all. That is the sign of a good acupuncturist.”
The thing with acupuncture is it balances your system. That simple. There are hundreds of physiological ways that I could go on that acupuncture works. I mean, the Chinese mapped out the complete neurological system over 2500 years ago, and there are people who had mapped it out 5500 years ago before that. This is not a new understanding. It’s just there’s no money in it. Trained acupuncturists can spot a problem of decreased immunity from a mile away. It can look like any number of things.
I’m doing a webinar for continuing education for acupuncturists. It’s an eight-part series on cardiology. The biggest part of the course is how to spot cardiovascular problems with just a visual inspection. There are dozens of things to see. It’s shocking how many things that you can see. People come in and I’ll say, “Oh, you’ve been doing A, B and C.” and they’re shocked. Well, of course I can see that; that’s my job.
One of the big things that acupuncture does is it’s a stress reliever. Something that’s really big lately is our discussions about the vagus nerve. Vagus means wanderer; it’s the longest nerve in the body cranial nerve. It connects many, many, many different systems, and it’s largely responsible for parasympathetic activity. So it means it controls those things that you are not conscious of control, like the your stomach, your heart rate, your digestion, etc. And when those get out of balance, you start to get problems in any of those systems. Well, acupuncture actually treats that vagus nerve system and has for thousands of years and it treats it very effectively.
34:57 Acupuncture and HPA system
Many of you have heard of the HPA system, right? The system that really is largely in charge of your adrenal and also your thyroid system. So your hypothalamus, your pituitary and your adrenals and acupuncture is very effective at treating those and treating them before you’re couch bound with chronic fatigue; you want to get it before that. I’ll tell my new patients you know, the first time you’re here, it’s new, and you maybe have little trepidations. A lot of people are afraid of needles, although after you get acupuncture once, you certainly won’t be afraid of the needles because you don’t even feel them. But the first time, sometimes you’ll just kind of lay there because it’s new, but by the second or third treatment you will just pretty much pass out. You’ll just go to sleep. You may snore and you’ll wake up incredibly refreshed. During that time, one of the things that’s occurred out of the many is we have shut off your stress hormone system, right? Your cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc.. We’ve let your body go back to its normal state, so when you wake up, you have a completely different sense about your body and about your mind and you’re thinking differently and you’re breathing differently, etc. now.
Kathryn had a statement in here that said, “Regular acupuncture treatments can help you save money.” What?! It’s true. It goes back to the prior benefits. If you don’t need as many pharmaceuticals, you’ll ultimately save money. If you don’t need as many pharmaceuticals, you won’t have side effects for which you need other pharmaceuticals and maybe other medical interventions. So, it actually does overall save money. I have so many patients that will come in and go, “Oh my goodness, you know, I haven’t been coming in lately. I’m now going to come back. I’m going to get on the straight and narrow, and I’m going to come in and get acupuncture because it’s just so wonderful.”
Another reason for getting acupuncture is for pain. For many years, the number one thing that we treated with acupuncture in the United States was pain. There are very, very specific points and very specific treatment modalities. A lot of with electroacupuncture that literally stimulates different parts of the brain. We put a needle in your hand and your elbow and it stimulates the cervical plexus in your neck, which sends a message up to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus releases feel-good chemicals, opioids, enkephalins, etc. that then come down to what’s called the periaqueductal gray, which is where pain is felt. It blocks the pain, symptoms. In China, there’s very, very little anesthesia used. I mean, if someone’s getting heart surgery, they’ll have anesthesia. Even then, most of the pain reduction is done with acupuncture.
I have several volumes, and in it, it lists different surgeries. Hysterectomy, oophorectomy, having a testicle removed, having an eyeball removed, etc.. And it gives the very, very specific frequencies of electroacupuncture that are used to block the pain signals. Now, those are pretty intense. On a lesser level, if you’ve got arthritis, we get the body to release certain chemicals that are going to help put out the fire from the arthritis.
This is a system that’s been around for 3000 years. You’ve seen the iceman who was pulled out of the Austrian Alps, had tattoos on his body of the acupuncture system, and he was buried 5500 years ago. The Chinese and the people who worked with Ötzi had completely 100% drawn up, and understood the entire neurological system of the human body thousands of years ago,
I invite you to go to thebalancingpoint.net and you should see a QR code there that will take you to a talk that I did at the Commonwealth Club about three years ago, and it’s titled Electroacupuncture for Neurological Disease,” It’s about 45 minutes. It’s the most popular talk I’ve given, and it goes into this entire history of acupuncture and very specifically why and how acupuncture works.
I invite you get to your acupuncturist. Get in and get some treatment. I am the chairperson of the Acupuncture Advisory Committee for a major malpractice insurance company, and I’ve got to tell you, we don’t get sued. I mean, it’s incredibly rare because acupuncture is so safe. It’s just it’s amazing. These companies have more lawsuits against medical doctors in one day than often have against acupuncturists in total in a year. So go check out be the talk at the comment at thebalancingpoint.net that I did at the Commonwealth Club. As I said, there’s a QR code there. So if you can’t sleep some night, go ahead and turn it on for a while.
Kathryn, any questions?
Kathryn: We have quite a few.
Irene says hi.
Dr Nieters: Irene, hi. I was just talking about you the other day. It’s good to hear from you.
41:10
Kathryn: She comments. “A friend of hers is a neuropsychologist. She says the MRI have shown a bilateral hippocampus damage of people who had COVID. She says she’s only seen it in one time or another case until now.”
Dr Nieters: I don’t have any MRI’s that show that the symptoms are consistent with that. Most of my patients are doing more labs and blood tests, but that’s great information. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You get inflammation in there and everything changes.
She’s also wondering when and where are the CEU courses? I sent a link on Facebook where to find it, but it’s going to actually be a 15-course series.
It’s a 15-course series, and the older I get, the less my span of attention. I find that that’s pretty consistent with our culture. So rather than doing two days of 15 units, I’m doing an hour a week. That gives people, you know, they can be refreshed, they can get the information and then gives them time to do a little research and not in any way feel stressed. So it’s an hour a week. So really easy.
42:26
Kathryn: We have another question. “Do you have remedies for all the COVID symptoms?”
Dr Nieters: No, I have one patient that we have found nothing to work, and that’s one of Dr. Patterson’s patients. And this person has just horrible discomfort up in their sinuses and behind their nose and up into their brain. They can barely think. This is a really, really, really bright person with a really intense job who I have treated her for micro clots, which I originally believe she did have micro clots, but that didn’t fix this.
She’s been treated she’s under treatment from three different doctors at this point and making no progress. I have some other ideas that I’m going to do with her, but I’m waiting until she finishes her interventions with these three doctors because I don’t want to do anything that would interfere. So, no, I don’t have any success with her. I have a patient that is 15 months of fatigue now, but I haven’t seen her, so that’s a little different in acupuncture. You know, if we can see people and check their pulses, it gives us a lot more information, and I have not.
Those two people are the only ones I can think of that we have not gotten at least good results. There are a couple we’re still working on. Like I have a woman whose has a 12-year-old son. They came in together. He had COVID, developed long COVID. She was vaccinated, developed a vaccine injury, and there were identical symptoms. She was a therapist and could not function for several months. It’s all on telehealth now, and she couldn’t do any telehealth. He’s now doing great in school, and she’s about 90%. I’m anticipating getting her that last 10%. We’re getting really good results, but not perfect.
Kathryn: It seems like the remedies are all individualized for the person.
Dr Nieters: They are. We don’t really do protocols. Early on, I was seeing a lot more micro clotting in the long COVID patients that were coming in to see me from around the country, COVID injury, vaccination injuries were almost all related to micro clotting. That is no longer the case. That’s now a factor, but mostly it’s the elevation of these cytokines, these highly inflammatory chemicals. It’s a matter of getting those back in order. Calming the inflammation. It’s all about inflammation and micro clotting.
Kathryn: Another question is, I’m having significant problems walking since my COVID booster on December 1st. I also have reoccurring fatigue, intermittent weakness, depression and anxiety.
Dr Nieters: Yeah, well, it sounds like you’re right in line with what we were talking about today. Well, one thing I would recommend is getting a blood test, but I would look for regular inflammatory markers, high-sensitivity CRP, that’s C-reactive protein, homocysteine, and then I would do fibrinogen and D-dimer. Fibrinogen tells us if you have too many clotting factors in your blood or that you’re normal, but we’re looking to make sure you don’t have too many. D-dimer is the breakdown of clots. So if you’re doing fibrinogen and D-dimer, you’re kind of surrounding the blood clot issue. Those are not extremely expensive tests, and I would definitely start with those, platelets also, which will come on to standard CBC for five bucks or less. I would do platelets to see if those are elevated.
Kathryn: Did doctors get kickbacks for prescribing these drugs?
Dr Nieters: I take the fifth.
Kathryn: We also had a question that someone was cleaning out all the magazines. Their right sinuses almost smelled infected the next day. Should I have worn a mask?
Dr Nieters: Yes. And particularly since you’ve had that happen once, it will probably happen if you do it again. So, yes, I would wear a mask. Actually, a respirator would be more in order for that. Just to make sure you don’t get anything up there. If you take a shower shortly afterwards. If you use a netti pot or XClear, which is a xylitol squirt up into the nose, or if you do like the water picks and do a saline solution, etc., any of those things will wash the irritant out of the sinuses and make it much less likely that you have a problem.
That’s it. Wow. Thank you, guys. Great questions. I mean, tons of great questions. You made it all fun for me, and that is, of course, what’s important. Thank you. Go ahead and keep emailing us with your questions. This is Dr. John. I’ll be back with you next week.
In the meantime, Be happy. Be healthy. Thank you.
REFERNCES:
https://irp.nih.gov/our-research/research-in-action/viruses-on-the-brain
Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM, is an acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, functional medicine, writer, teacher, and leader in the community. In this episode, John talks about his experience with the importance of finding your vision and purpose in life, in order to create the right goals for you.
Disclaimer: Dr. John Nieters received his Doctor of Oriental Medicine and Acupuncture degree from Five Branches. His use of “doctor” or “Dr.” in relation to himself solely refers to that degree. Dr. Nieters is a licensed acupuncturist in California. This video is for general informational purposes only. It should not be used to self-diagnose and it is not a substitute for a medical exam, cure, treatment, diagnosis, and prescription or recommendation. It does not create a doctor-patient relationship between Dr. Nieters and you. You should not make any change in your health regimen or diet before first consulting a physician and obtaining a medical exam, diagnosis, and recommendation. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. TheBalancingPoint.net, Alameda Acupuncture, and Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM are not liable or responsible for any advice, course of treatment, diagnosis or any other information, services or product you obtain through this video or site.
