August 13, 2024 • 13 mins
In this episode, Dr. Paul Anderson provides an in-depth discussion on COVID-19, offering valuable insights into the virus, treatment options, and recovery strategies. He covers:
4o
- Understanding COVID-19: An overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, how it spreads, and the symptoms associated with COVID-19, including the spectrum from mild to severe cases.
- Prevention Strategies: Practical advice on reducing the risk of infection, including hygiene practices, mask-wearing, social distancing, and the importance of vaccination.
- Treatment Options:
- Conventional Treatments: A look at the standard medical treatments for COVID-19, including antiviral medications, corticosteroids, and supportive care.
- Integrative Approaches: How to complement conventional treatments with supportive therapies, such as nutritional support, herbal remedies, and immune-boosting strategies.
- Managing Long COVID: Understanding long COVID (post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection) and its symptoms, along with strategies for managing lingering effects such as fatigue, brain fog, and respiratory issues.
- Immune Support: Recommendations for strengthening the immune system before, during, and after a COVID-19 infection, including key vitamins, minerals, and lifestyle changes.
- Mental Health Considerations: Addressing the psychological impact of the pandemic, including anxiety, stress, and the importance of mental health support during recovery.
- Vaccination: Discussion on the role of vaccines in preventing severe disease and reducing transmission, along with considerations for those with underlying health conditions.
- Recovery Tips: Guidance on supporting recovery after a COVID-19 infection, focusing on rest, hydration, gradual return to normal activities, and ongoing health monitoring.
- Research and Developments: An update on the latest research and developments related to COVID-19 treatments, variants, and public health recommendations.
4o
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Good Dan, Welcome to Medicine Health with doctor Paul Anders
and that's me. I'm doctor Paul. Thank you for tuning
in wherever you're listening or watching. Please like, share, subscribe,
and hit notifications because sometimes the algorithm pushes us over
and we really do appreciate everyone's support and all the
new viewers that we're getting. But today we're talking about
vitamin C and specifically in this subsection COVID nineteen and
(00:26):
vitamin C. I've done a lot of different interviews on
this since COVID became a big deal. Because of my
history doing research with IV vitamin C very early in
the pandemic, I was asked to comment and do some
looking at what they were doing in Wuhan and other places,
and also just comment on the practicality of vitamin C
(00:48):
as a support agent. Now, the first thing I want
to say when it comes to COVID nineteen and anything is,
of course, whenever we talk, especially you know on public
social media, we have to be careful how we describe
things when it comes to COVID, and we need to,
(01:09):
you know, make sure that you know that whatever it is,
your local or country's public health policies are is what
you should be doing. And whatever the standard of care
they have decided is supposed to be there is what
you should be doing. Here in the US, we have
the Centers for Disease Control. We have a whole list
of things that are on the menu. Then they have
(01:31):
a whole list of things like vitamin C that they
have a lot of comment on. And we get to
the CDC and you look at the long rite up
about vitamin C. They're sort of very cautious, and you
know they say, well, we just don't have enough evidence
to say yes or no that we should be doing this.
(01:54):
And so you just need to know that that's the
state of where it is, at least in the US
where I'm fill me. I will tell you that in
other countries they don't have all of those distinctions. In
other countries, a lot of times these things are used
right alongside standard of care treatments. So how did vitamin
(02:16):
SEE and COVID first get some notoriety. Well, this was
what I was asked to speak about early on, and
that was the fact that it was reported out of Wuhan,
China in twenty nineteen that of many many things they
were trying with the COVID nineteen patients in the hospital.
(02:37):
One of the things that they tried was intravenous vitamin
C and so somebody saw that and they said, well,
you know, Paul used to do research on that. Let's
have him do some trainings for us, Let's have him
talk about it. So we've done a lot of that
over the years. Now we'll get into the mechanics of
what they did in Wuhan and then what we studied
(02:57):
since then. But you need to keep in mind when
it comes to that particular reporting of those cases from Wuhan,
that those were people in the hospital and who were
very sick. Most of them were in the intensive care unit,
and so the stakes are very high. But also you
(03:17):
generally are in the hospital, you don't leave un till
you're either better or you die, and so you're captive,
so they're going to do something with you as an intervention.
The other thing that got less press back then with
COVID nineteen in Wuhan and vitamin C was that they
(03:39):
had imported to Wuhan large, large quantities of vitamin C
powder ascorbic acid powder. And the important part about that
is their goal was to give that out to people
in the community to try and keep them out of
the hospit because the hospitals were full and the ICUs
(04:03):
were full, and they thought, doesn't matter how good this
stuff works, if it even works a little bit, anything
we can give people to keep them out of the
hospital is better. So as a preventative or maybe a
slowing down agent, etc. Oral vitamin C and a number
of other things were used. I've done the whole programs
(04:23):
and newsletters on that, etc. So there was both these
things going on in Wuhan. Well, then you might ask, well,
would there be a difference if let's say, especially now
with omicron, where you're less likely to go to the hospital.
But if I go to my doctor and my doctor
does intervene as vitamin C, are they going to do
the same thing in their office as they would do
(04:47):
in the hospital at Wuhan or one of these other
studies that we're going to talk about. And the bottom
line is no, not usually, because the dynamics are different
in the hospital. I have you there, you can't leave.
I've got IV access in you. I can give you
either continuous slow drip of vitamin C twenty four hours
a day or every hour. I can give you a
(05:08):
little tiny dose or every twelve hours a little bit
bigger dose, whatever, and it basically keeps your vitamin C
levels up because we know that they go down during illness,
and the lower they go, the more inflammatory we are,
the slower our immune cells work, et cetera, et cetera.
So when it comes to IVY vitain C in a hospital,
(05:31):
you're going to tend to get lower doses over a
longer period of time. If you go to a doctor's
office where they do IV vitamin C and you're getting
sick with anything, they will probably give you a higher
dose in a shorter amount of time. So you think, well,
well that still help me. My experience personally, and this
(05:52):
is anecdotal. I do not have this in a research
study that's published, But my experience is if we could
get to people with a higher dose, so twenty five,
fifty or seventy five grams of vitamin C intravenous, there's
a lot of ITEMC early when they were febrow first
couple of days, and we can do that once or
(06:12):
twice in a row. Often the disease time period was shortened.
And also none of those patients even back in the
alpha delta days that we did that preemptively with ever
had to go into the hospital. So yes, that's anecdotal,
that's not published anywhere, but that has been observed in
(06:34):
many places. So the dosing does depend on where your
setting is. It's easier to give you a shorter IV
with a higher dose let your body distributed over the
next twenty four hours if you're out patient. If you're inpatient,
it's easier and probably just safer to either have you
on a continuous drip or in every hour drip or
(06:56):
every twelve hours, but so you're kind of keeping your
vitamin C levels up continuously long term. Now what did
the Wuhan hospitals note First off, well, the first thing
that they noted was that the people who got the
vitamin C so they distributed it to a group with
COVID who got vitamin C in the ICU, and a
(07:19):
group without vitamin C who just got standard of care.
Everyone got standard of care. It wasn't like vitamin and
C replaced that. But the people who got in Wuhan
who got the vitamin C IV had shorter hospital stays.
They were a little bit more likely to get off ventilators.
And leave the hospital and live. So that looked really good.
(07:42):
So then everybody said, when we started talking about this
early on, the first thing was, well, you know, here
in North America, we don't do that much vitamin C
in the hospitals. And that's still true. Even though we
do have an approved drug from the FDA intravenous drug
called SCORE, and it's vitamin C for intravenous use, we
(08:05):
don't use it as much as maybe we should, and
it's used in research. So the first questions that we
started to get were, we don't know how to use
vitamin C, you know. I mean, they know how to
do it technically, but we don't know about dosing. We
don't know the pharma pharmacy end of it, you know whatever.
So I worked with a medical editor and we published
(08:29):
a basically a how to, very short publication, how to
use vitamin C intravenously in the hospital for things such
as COVID nineteen. And it also had instructions not only
for the medical staff but for the nursing staff and
the pharmacy staff, just how to do it, what to
do whatever. And what I will say is in places
(08:52):
where we were able to work with the ICU physician
and to start it. And again this is anecdotal. These
are my cases, my personal experience, but it matches other experience.
We saw things similar to what they saw in Wuhan,
and this was fairly early on. And this is back
even with you know the original strain alpha delta, et cetera,
(09:15):
so that you know the more dangerous strains. And we
had people who could get off their ventilators and go home,
people with a lot of comorbidities. A lot of that
sort of thing happened. Now did it happen a lot? No,
Because if you bring a new medical treatment to a hospital,
you have to have a very motivated, you know, someone
(09:37):
in the hospital to actually make that happen, and time
being of the essence, especially with an ICU, especially on
a ventilator or something COVID patient. Often by the time
they sorted it out whether they were going to do
it or not, the patient would have passed away in
many cases, so earlier it's better. And generally speaking we
(09:58):
saw the same thing they did. Well. Then the next
hurdle came in that people were saying, well, yeah, but
there's no randomized control trials, so we did this is
all anecdotal. That's true. It was well, then we started
to have randomized control trials that were set up because
they said, well, here's the reports from Muhan, we got
reports from elsewhere, let's do it randomized control trial. And
(10:22):
I've reported on the two that have published. There's a
few more that are in the works and are being published,
and there's some reviews now in the works that are
being published. And the bottom line was when they did
the randomized control trials, all the two the first two
that got published had slightly different endpoints that they were
(10:42):
looking at. The overall theme was preserved, which is shorter
hospital time, higher survivability. And then in one case they
were looking at chemistry, blood chemistry and the infamous interluke
in six, which is associated with the side of kind
storms and stuff like that would come down in the
(11:04):
vitamin C group. It didn't come down in the other group,
and a whole number of other things. So I think
the important thing about it is is it magic? Is
it a cure? Is it whatever? No? Is it probably
a really really good tool in my personal experience using
it in COVID and other infections. Yes, if you know
(11:24):
what you're doing and do it correctly. Is it still
really early in the research end of it to prove
that that's going to help. Yes, it really is. And
that's where a lot of the reticent from hospital based
staff comes from. The just don't have enough data behind it.
And that's kind of what the CDC says. If I
(11:45):
get a chance over on the YouTube channel and we
upload this and then we can, we'll do it. In
the show notes for the podcast, I will get some
links not only the studies, but some of the newer
reviews that have come out, etc. We'll get these things uploaded,
So if you're watching live today, it'll be uploaded probably
next week sometime, so we'll put that together. But we're
(12:08):
about out of time here. On medicine Health with doctor
Paul Anderson, I just want to kind of update everyone
on IVY, vitamin C and COVID nineteen. Obviously, taking it
orally as a support and minor preventive very useful intravenously
if your labs check out, and doing it as an
(12:31):
outpatient or when you're early in the illness really is support,
at least by many people's experience, as being helpful and
shortening disease, not needing to go to the hospital, etc.
And then if you're inpatient and you're in a facility
that will do intervenous vitamin C. Again, our data now
(12:52):
shows and it matches the Wuhan experience of my personal
experience that the low and slow dosing like to do
in the hospit that'll continuously is associated with more likelihood
of getting out of the hospital and shorter hospital stays
than those who don't get vited and see. And the
cool thing is it can be done right alongside all
of the other standard of care things. It's not either
(13:14):
or all right that gets us out of time for
today on medicine and health. I'm doctor Paul, and I
really appreciate all of the new subscribers. So whether you're
on a pod burner or on YouTube, please like, share
and subscribe or on YouTube. It's a dr Online, doctor
a Online, and you can find us there if you
(13:35):
just search that and you can subscribe you to the
notifications wherever you are. It's very important because the algorithms
sometimes push us out of your feeds, and the notification
will let you know when we do something new. All right,
thank you very much. I will see you all next
week on the podcast.
Good Dan, Welcome to Medicine Health with doctor Paul Anders
and that's me. I'm doctor Paul. Thank you for tuning
in wherever you're listening or watching. Please like, share, subscribe,
and hit notifications because sometimes the algorithm pushes us over
and we really do appreciate everyone's support and all the
new viewers that we're getting. But today we're talking about
vitamin C and specifically in this subsection COVID nineteen and
(00:26):
vitamin C. I've done a lot of different interviews on
this since COVID became a big deal. Because of my
history doing research with IV vitamin C very early in
the pandemic, I was asked to comment and do some
looking at what they were doing in Wuhan and other places,
and also just comment on the practicality of vitamin C
(00:48):
as a support agent. Now, the first thing I want
to say when it comes to COVID nineteen and anything is,
of course, whenever we talk, especially you know on public
social media, we have to be careful how we describe
things when it comes to COVID, and we need to,
(01:09):
you know, make sure that you know that whatever it is,
your local or country's public health policies are is what
you should be doing. And whatever the standard of care
they have decided is supposed to be there is what
you should be doing. Here in the US, we have
the Centers for Disease Control. We have a whole list
of things that are on the menu. Then they have
(01:31):
a whole list of things like vitamin C that they
have a lot of comment on. And we get to
the CDC and you look at the long rite up
about vitamin C. They're sort of very cautious, and you
know they say, well, we just don't have enough evidence
to say yes or no that we should be doing this.
(01:54):
And so you just need to know that that's the
state of where it is, at least in the US
where I'm fill me. I will tell you that in
other countries they don't have all of those distinctions. In
other countries, a lot of times these things are used
right alongside standard of care treatments. So how did vitamin
(02:16):
SEE and COVID first get some notoriety. Well, this was
what I was asked to speak about early on, and
that was the fact that it was reported out of Wuhan,
China in twenty nineteen that of many many things they
were trying with the COVID nineteen patients in the hospital.
(02:37):
One of the things that they tried was intravenous vitamin
C and so somebody saw that and they said, well,
you know, Paul used to do research on that. Let's
have him do some trainings for us, Let's have him
talk about it. So we've done a lot of that
over the years. Now we'll get into the mechanics of
what they did in Wuhan and then what we studied
(02:57):
since then. But you need to keep in mind when
it comes to that particular reporting of those cases from Wuhan,
that those were people in the hospital and who were
very sick. Most of them were in the intensive care unit,
and so the stakes are very high. But also you
(03:17):
generally are in the hospital, you don't leave un till
you're either better or you die, and so you're captive,
so they're going to do something with you as an intervention.
The other thing that got less press back then with
COVID nineteen in Wuhan and vitamin C was that they
(03:39):
had imported to Wuhan large, large quantities of vitamin C
powder ascorbic acid powder. And the important part about that
is their goal was to give that out to people
in the community to try and keep them out of
the hospit because the hospitals were full and the ICUs
(04:03):
were full, and they thought, doesn't matter how good this
stuff works, if it even works a little bit, anything
we can give people to keep them out of the
hospital is better. So as a preventative or maybe a
slowing down agent, etc. Oral vitamin C and a number
of other things were used. I've done the whole programs
(04:23):
and newsletters on that, etc. So there was both these
things going on in Wuhan. Well, then you might ask, well,
would there be a difference if let's say, especially now
with omicron, where you're less likely to go to the hospital.
But if I go to my doctor and my doctor
does intervene as vitamin C, are they going to do
the same thing in their office as they would do
(04:47):
in the hospital at Wuhan or one of these other
studies that we're going to talk about. And the bottom
line is no, not usually, because the dynamics are different
in the hospital. I have you there, you can't leave.
I've got IV access in you. I can give you
either continuous slow drip of vitamin C twenty four hours
a day or every hour. I can give you a
(05:08):
little tiny dose or every twelve hours a little bit
bigger dose, whatever, and it basically keeps your vitamin C
levels up because we know that they go down during illness,
and the lower they go, the more inflammatory we are,
the slower our immune cells work, et cetera, et cetera.
So when it comes to IVY vitain C in a hospital,
(05:31):
you're going to tend to get lower doses over a
longer period of time. If you go to a doctor's
office where they do IV vitamin C and you're getting
sick with anything, they will probably give you a higher
dose in a shorter amount of time. So you think, well,
well that still help me. My experience personally, and this
(05:52):
is anecdotal. I do not have this in a research
study that's published, But my experience is if we could
get to people with a higher dose, so twenty five,
fifty or seventy five grams of vitamin C intravenous, there's
a lot of ITEMC early when they were febrow first
couple of days, and we can do that once or
(06:12):
twice in a row. Often the disease time period was shortened.
And also none of those patients even back in the
alpha delta days that we did that preemptively with ever
had to go into the hospital. So yes, that's anecdotal,
that's not published anywhere, but that has been observed in
(06:34):
many places. So the dosing does depend on where your
setting is. It's easier to give you a shorter IV
with a higher dose let your body distributed over the
next twenty four hours if you're out patient. If you're inpatient,
it's easier and probably just safer to either have you
on a continuous drip or in every hour drip or
(06:56):
every twelve hours, but so you're kind of keeping your
vitamin C levels up continuously long term. Now what did
the Wuhan hospitals note First off, well, the first thing
that they noted was that the people who got the
vitamin C so they distributed it to a group with
COVID who got vitamin C in the ICU, and a
(07:19):
group without vitamin C who just got standard of care.
Everyone got standard of care. It wasn't like vitamin and
C replaced that. But the people who got in Wuhan
who got the vitamin C IV had shorter hospital stays.
They were a little bit more likely to get off ventilators.
And leave the hospital and live. So that looked really good.
(07:42):
So then everybody said, when we started talking about this
early on, the first thing was, well, you know, here
in North America, we don't do that much vitamin C
in the hospitals. And that's still true. Even though we
do have an approved drug from the FDA intravenous drug
called SCORE, and it's vitamin C for intravenous use, we
(08:05):
don't use it as much as maybe we should, and
it's used in research. So the first questions that we
started to get were, we don't know how to use
vitamin C, you know. I mean, they know how to
do it technically, but we don't know about dosing. We
don't know the pharma pharmacy end of it, you know whatever.
So I worked with a medical editor and we published
(08:29):
a basically a how to, very short publication, how to
use vitamin C intravenously in the hospital for things such
as COVID nineteen. And it also had instructions not only
for the medical staff but for the nursing staff and
the pharmacy staff, just how to do it, what to
do whatever. And what I will say is in places
(08:52):
where we were able to work with the ICU physician
and to start it. And again this is anecdotal. These
are my cases, my personal experience, but it matches other experience.
We saw things similar to what they saw in Wuhan,
and this was fairly early on. And this is back
even with you know the original strain alpha delta, et cetera,
(09:15):
so that you know the more dangerous strains. And we
had people who could get off their ventilators and go home,
people with a lot of comorbidities. A lot of that
sort of thing happened. Now did it happen a lot? No,
Because if you bring a new medical treatment to a hospital,
you have to have a very motivated, you know, someone
(09:37):
in the hospital to actually make that happen, and time
being of the essence, especially with an ICU, especially on
a ventilator or something COVID patient. Often by the time
they sorted it out whether they were going to do
it or not, the patient would have passed away in
many cases, so earlier it's better. And generally speaking we
(09:58):
saw the same thing they did. Well. Then the next
hurdle came in that people were saying, well, yeah, but
there's no randomized control trials, so we did this is
all anecdotal. That's true. It was well, then we started
to have randomized control trials that were set up because
they said, well, here's the reports from Muhan, we got
reports from elsewhere, let's do it randomized control trial. And
(10:22):
I've reported on the two that have published. There's a
few more that are in the works and are being published,
and there's some reviews now in the works that are
being published. And the bottom line was when they did
the randomized control trials, all the two the first two
that got published had slightly different endpoints that they were
(10:42):
looking at. The overall theme was preserved, which is shorter
hospital time, higher survivability. And then in one case they
were looking at chemistry, blood chemistry and the infamous interluke
in six, which is associated with the side of kind
storms and stuff like that would come down in the
(11:04):
vitamin C group. It didn't come down in the other group,
and a whole number of other things. So I think
the important thing about it is is it magic? Is
it a cure? Is it whatever? No? Is it probably
a really really good tool in my personal experience using
it in COVID and other infections. Yes, if you know
(11:24):
what you're doing and do it correctly. Is it still
really early in the research end of it to prove
that that's going to help. Yes, it really is. And
that's where a lot of the reticent from hospital based
staff comes from. The just don't have enough data behind it.
And that's kind of what the CDC says. If I
(11:45):
get a chance over on the YouTube channel and we
upload this and then we can, we'll do it. In
the show notes for the podcast, I will get some
links not only the studies, but some of the newer
reviews that have come out, etc. We'll get these things uploaded,
So if you're watching live today, it'll be uploaded probably
next week sometime, so we'll put that together. But we're
(12:08):
about out of time here. On medicine Health with doctor
Paul Anderson, I just want to kind of update everyone
on IVY, vitamin C and COVID nineteen. Obviously, taking it
orally as a support and minor preventive very useful intravenously
if your labs check out, and doing it as an
(12:31):
outpatient or when you're early in the illness really is support,
at least by many people's experience, as being helpful and
shortening disease, not needing to go to the hospital, etc.
And then if you're inpatient and you're in a facility
that will do intervenous vitamin C. Again, our data now
(12:52):
shows and it matches the Wuhan experience of my personal
experience that the low and slow dosing like to do
in the hospit that'll continuously is associated with more likelihood
of getting out of the hospital and shorter hospital stays
than those who don't get vited and see. And the
cool thing is it can be done right alongside all
of the other standard of care things. It's not either
(13:14):
or all right that gets us out of time for
today on medicine and health. I'm doctor Paul, and I
really appreciate all of the new subscribers. So whether you're
on a pod burner or on YouTube, please like, share
and subscribe or on YouTube. It's a dr Online, doctor
a Online, and you can find us there if you
(13:35):
just search that and you can subscribe you to the
notifications wherever you are. It's very important because the algorithms
sometimes push us out of your feeds, and the notification
will let you know when we do something new. All right,
thank you very much. I will see you all next
week on the podcast.
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