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Category: Covid-19

6 Things That Most Doctors Miss, Which Worsen Pain and Prevent Healing, Part 2

Posted on by Andrew David Shiller, MD

This is Part 2 of a two-part video

 Watch Part 1 HERE

Summary:

One of my readers wrote in:   “Hey Doc, I’ve been doing all the things they taught me in rehab to recover after my accident and surgery.  Pacing myself. Doing the exercises. I’ve progressed, but I’m stuck. I still have significant pain and my regular doctor has nothing to offer except drugs that mess up my head. And I haven’t been able to increase my exercise tolerance enough so I’m still limited in function.  Why is that happening?” It’s a great question and I’ve heard variations of it over the years. Many people just get “stuck” with persistent pain or fatigue or weakness. And the conventional approaches often don’t have a solution. Based on a few decades of integrating natural healing methods into medical and rehabilitative care, I have often been able to help people who “tried everything”. Because they didn’t really try everything. They just did the conventional stuff. The key to success has been to look for and address the six things that I talk about in this video. So please check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks Andrew David Shiller, MD

Did You Know:

  • Movement Toward Health is a training program that teaches you skills for transforming your health, reducing pain, improving mood and energy. It opens periodically for new members. You can get more information and join the waitlist here: www.MTHTribe.com. 
  • Dr Shiller is available for telemedicine consultation worldwide regarding chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, fatigue, and stress-related illness.  Learn more here https://www.drshiller.com/consult
  • Dr Shiller gives regular free mind-body training sessions on zoom. Learn practical tools for transforming suffering, reducing stress and inflammation.  You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com

Related Posts:

Full Transcript:

Hey, it’s Dr. Shiller we’re talking today about the six things that can worsen pain and lead to disability and um, and slow the healing and recovery process. And it’s really important to check this out cuz this is not typical stuff you’re going to hear from conventional medicine. It’s not typically treatable with drugs and procedures, but it is treatable and fixable and healable through things that you can learn to do for yourself.

So these are game changing principles that have completely shifted things for so many of the people who have come to me with the, with that situation of I’m still suffering and I tried everything. Well, like, no, you didn’t try every, everything. These are things you didn’t try. Let’s do that. And in many, many, many cases, profound difference.

So let’s open this up. Let’s talk about it. . And so I first want to talk about, well, how does that process happen? What worsens it? Why is it that things tend to snowball after injury or illness and get worse and worse? And that leads to the clarity about like, okay, so what do we do about this to help you get better?

And so a little background of what I bring to this conversation. I trained in physical medicine, which is also called physiatry, pain management, internal medicine at some of the top places in the United States, and have worked in integrative rehabilitation medicine and pain management for over 20 years.

And so I’ve seen literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people who’ve had persistent challenging problems. alongside with my formal training, I did decades of training and clinical practice and teaching in what you might call complimentary or natural healing. So I developed this broader perspective than what they taught me at at Duke University in Harvard Medical School, and that’s, let me see, the things that conventional medicine over often overlooks.

which are really important to the recovery process and in my experience, that has been what has enabled me to frequently help people who are kind of stuck in that I’ve tried everything and I can’t get better place. And so my experience is mirrored in that of many of my colleagues who I’ve spoken with and who I’ve trained with, where when we bring these new perspectives, then there’s frequently dramatic results.

Frequently the patients who are stuck and not getting better are suddenly getting a whole lot better in feeling better. So it’s extraordinarily like a privilege and gratifying to be like, wow, this is actually. and helping means that person who was stuck in suffering with pain, inability to do stuff, brain fog, various kinds of symptoms, is now feeling better and able to function better.

And I want to be clear that this is not alternative, and this is not antagonistic to conventional medicine. It’s broadening the model. It’s understanding things more fundamentally, more systemically, more holistically, but not in the flaky. Like a grounded scientific way of understanding, well, what is your biology?

What is your mind body system? How does it function? How does it get out of function? So we’re gonna share six things that. Worsen pain and disability and prevent and block the healing process. We’re gonna share an overview of that and then in other videos I’m gonna drill down into those so you can get the detail and understand them more comprehensively.

But I really want you to have the big picture. This is probably gonna be two videos so that it’s more easily digestible. And so I really want you to plug into this whole learning series if this is a topic that seems important to you. So I want to tell you how to get access to it because I’ve set up a program that’s called Movement Towards Health, and it’s really about a training program.

It gives you skills for transforming the biology of pain and suffering and disability to the biology and the psychology of wellbeing and recovery. Um, and. , there’s a wait list for that program. It opens up periodically. My suggestion is get on that wait list because what will happen is you’ll get notifications about as these videos come out, so you can watch them.

There’s also a place in there where you can binge watch them all at once, once they’re all in place. Um, and you’ll also get notification about the program and more information about it. You might find it interesting and you might want to join. If you don’t, it’s fine. Just enjoy and learn and be inspired.

to understand what it is that is perpetuating, creating the suffering that you’re having so that you can make conscious choices about what to do about it. Because most doctors are not gonna do that because they’re not aware about it. And of course, it doesn’t mean that they’re bad people or bad doctors.

It just means that the conventional medical model sees things a certain way and there’s a broader way of seeing things. and what I’m doing is sharing that broader way so that you can make conscious choices and do the stuff that you need to do so that you can feel better and live better. Okay, so we’re jumping in.

Problem one that worsens pain and illness and prevents healing is what we call autonomic imbalance. Okay? That’s a big scary word, but really what it means is like this, you probably know that you have a stressed. And a relaxation response. It’s built into your entire brain, spinal cord, and your whole nervous system.

It touches every cell in your body. One aspect of it is fight, flight, freeze. That’s your stress response, and the other is your. Rest, digest, and heal or relaxation response. And they’re meant to be in balance with each other. But what happens is that chronic pain, chronic illness shift the, the scale towards an overactivity of that stress fight, flight, freeze response, and a bunch of other things can shift the scale towards that, which feeds into chronic pain and chronic illness, and the underlying biology that drives chronic pain and chronic illness.

So it could be. The trauma, the injury, the illness. It could be earlier things that happened, your life that were traumatic. It could be stress, it could be lack of sleep. It could be chemical exposure or toxic exposure. It could be early life stress or adverse events, which are more and more proven to be associated with chronic pain and honest chronic illness.

And the issue is autonomic imbalance, where the system is shifted to an overactive fight flight, freeze. There are simple things that you can learn to do to bring balance to that fight, flight, freeze response. Some of them are things that you can learn on your own for free, and they are life changing for many people and they’re also life skills, and they empower you to deal with the difficulty in life no matter what it is.

So there are things you can learn on your own. There’s things you can learn together one-on-one with a therapist or in groups or various contexts that support you to retrain your system from being in this fight, flight, freeze response to being in a more relaxed, anti-inflammatory, healing oriented response.

And that’s also part of what we do in movement towards health. So moving on to number two is mood instability or mood imbalance. And the most common things you might think about are like depression and anxiety. There’s other things that go along with its symptoms of O C D. It’s a complex picture. The thing I want you to understand is that the biology of.

Depression and anxiety isn’t what we’ve always thought, which is, oh well, it’s about serotonin problems. Well, yeah, there can be issues with neurotransmitters and, and that’s how some of the pharmaceutical companies have made tons and tons of money, and they push that point of view because that’s how they make their money.

But there’s an aspect of it that has to do with inflammation. There’s an aspect of it has to do with. Your balance of your stress and react and, and relaxation response, that autonomic balance and it’s lifestyle. These are conditions that are affecting your thoughts, your emotions, and your core bodily functions.

Your brain, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your gastrointestinal system, your physical activity, your thoughts. All this stuff is deeply integrated and those things that you can do on those three levels of thought. Reframing and and mindset training of training your mind with various tools to shift your biology, of diet, of nutrients, of physical activity, lifestyle, stuff that can have a huge impact.

And the reason this is so important is because we know that depression and anxiety are part of what’s in that vicious cycle with chronic pain, with disability, with the disability cycle. And so we’ll talk more about that in a bit, but you really gotta get the mood stuff under. Number three is your overall biochemical, metabolic state of your body.

And so check out this slide, which shows some of these relationships, but like I mentioned, your. Brain and brain chemistry and your autonomic system function, your thoughts and your emotions, your gastrointestinal functions. So the biome, the barrier function of the gut, the immune system, the hormonal system of the body.

Um, these are profoundly integrated and they have a huge impact on how your body function. They have a huge impact on how you think, how you feel, how much energy you have, how much strength you have. They have an impact on sensitization of your pain pathways. So this is complex biochemistry and anatomy and metabolic stuff, and there’s things again that you can do.

That’s the big part of the gift of the functional medicine model, is how to look at all that in a scientifically based way where we can think ration. about how to address these different aspects of dysfunction, like it shows in the slide and, and that involves, again, lifestyle stuff. It’s diet and it’s nutrients, it’s mind body therapies, it’s physical exercise, physical treatments.

And these things have made a profound impact for so many of my patients who are dealing with these difficult pain and related syndromes. So the point of all of this is to sensitize. that there are these dysfunctions that can be part of what’s perpetuating the challenges you’re having, and these are things that are within your control to work on.

They’re things that typically aren’t fixed by drugs, although sometimes medications can support the process. They’re things that are fixed and changed by the things you do for yourself sometimes in conjunction or in cooperation with appropriate care caregivers or therapists or practitioners. Okay, so that’s an overview of the first.

Of the six things that can worsen pain and disability and prevent recovery. And and that’s especially true if you’ve sort of done all the right conventional things and you’ve tried everything and you haven’t gotten better, you need to [00:11:00] think about these things. And so in summary, these are dysfunctions.

These are shifts in the functioning of your whole mind body unified system. And they’re not really taught in medical school, though they are supported by medical research. I suspect that in 20 or 30 years, they will be much more widely taught in medical school. Um, but there are, there is hope and there’s help.

There’s things you can learn to do. There’s practitioners who can help you, and the first step is understanding them so you can start to actually address. , in my experience and in the experience of many, many practitioners with whom I’ve worked or trained or, or, or taught, um, that the effects can be dramatic when you actually start to shift the underlying biology that makes these things worse.

We covered three of the six thing, these six things. Um, the second video will show you the rest of those. Look for the link below this video to get to that video, which is the se, the, the second set of three. Um, I want to share that [00:12:00] movement towards Health is a training program to give you skills to address these underlying issues.

And I encourage you to get on the waiting list. Movement towards Health opens periodically, and if you’re on the waiting list, you’ll hear about it, you’ll get an email and you won’t miss out. Um, and you’ll also get access to the additional training sessions that go into more depth into these aspects that go into more depth on the six things that can prevent the healing process from happening.

And I just wanna stress that. , this is about empowering you. You’ve got the capacity to learn things that shift your biology, and when you learn those, you actually are acquiring life skills. It’s about building your resilience, helping you have skills to live more effectively despite all the difficult things that are going on in life.

And we have a lot of different thing, difficult things going on in life in our generation. Okay, so obviously this is an overview video. I encourage you to go to mth tribe.com, get on that wailing list, dive deeper [00:13:00] into the materials, see how it impacts you, what you learn from it. So thanks for watching this.

Um, if you like this, I encourage you, first of all to leave a comment or shoot me an email. With one thing you learned about it, and also share the video wherever you’re finding it. Share it with people you care about, who you think might benefit from starting the OR, or deepening this learning process about this journey of self-healing.

So thanks again. Take care.

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Protect Yourself from Corona, Because Your Government Won’t

Posted on by Andrew David Shiller, MD

Summary:

Whether or not you believe in vaccines, conspiracies or microchips, the government and mainstream media don’t have an adequate plan to protect you against corona.  And they might be hurting you more than you think.  Here’s some food for thought about how you can empower yourself to survive and even thrive in this pandemic.

The Basics Of The COVID Problem:

  1. Only a very low percentage of people who are exposed to Coronavirus get sick and die. 
  2. But the virus is transmitted very easily.  
  3. Because it is transmitted so easily, large numbers of people get sick and die. And many people get moderately sick but become debilitated by “post-COVID syndrome” which we don’t really understand.  

The Mainstream Gov’t and Media Approach To COVID in Broken:

They are basically saying “Lockdown, mask, and social distance and wait for a vaccine”.  That’s a very limited and narrow response.  And it’s purely theoretical.  They’re putting all their money in an investment with a very uncertain return.  And Your physical, social, economic, and mental health are being put at risk. In contrast, there are things you can do to protect yourself.  We’re talking about making minimal investments in sensible things with scientific support, which are likely to help you and the people you love.

What’s Stupid About “Lockdown/Mask/Distance/Vaccine”?

  1. We don’t have a proven vaccine yet.  Pfizer COVID vaccine had a dubiously high success rate in preliminary data.  Moderna also has made progress.  But we don’t know the real outcomes of those vaccines in broad delivery.  And broad vaccine delivery is very difficult.  The Pfizer vaccine, for instance, needs to stay frozen.  No so easy to transport that to millions of people.
  2. There has never been a successful coronavirus vaccine.
  3. Lockdowns are creating unprecedented economic, social, and mental health problems that will cripple the world for decades.
  4. They’re not teaching you things you can do for yourself to enhance your health and make infection/illness less likely.
  5. If you’re isolated, inactive, stressed, depressed, and eating junk, you’re more likely to get sick.
  6. Most of the vaccine trials are exploring new technology that has never been used successfully and safely in a vaccine.
  7. So basically, the mainstream approach is generating massive destruction, hoping to be saved by a vaccine that doesn’t exist yet, while neglecting to teach you how to make yourself more resilient, and less likely to get sick.
This is not meant to imply that the social distancing or other government measures are wrong.  I’m suggesting that they’re not enough.  There are other things you can do to protect yourself. Hmm, so what’s a person to do?

Here’s What You Can Accomplish With Minimal Expense:

There is a ton that you can do. Abundant research over decades has shown us that simple lifestyle measures can: 
  1. Reduce tendency to catch viral infections
  2. Reduce tendency toward overactive inflammation.
  3. Speed recovery from illness.
  4. Possibly reduce the likelihood of infecting someone else
  5. Enhance well being and mental health
  6. Reduce likelihood of development and progression of many chronic illnesses
  7. Enhance your quality of life.

What Are Lifestyle Measures and How Do I Get Started?

Your health is the outcome of a highly refined self-healing system that has been with you all your life.  The healing intelligence in your mind-body system is only beginning to be understood.  It is way beyond what science has come up with.  But science has been looking at the outcomes of three kinds of self-care and finding that these kinds of self-care can enhance your health in ways quite relevant to this pandemic.  I suggest thinking about three aspects of your complex mind-body unity: 1.Mindset and Mind-Body There are simple ways that you can learn to:
  • Reduce stress 
  • Put yourself in control of your life
  • Have positive thoughts 
  • Relate constructively to difficult emotions
  • Heal traumas
Clinical research for decades has shown that Mind-Body states like enhanced sense of control, decreased stress, positive mood, and happiness can:
  • enhance your immune function 
  • reduce inflammation 
  • improve sleep
  • reduce suffering from pain
  • improve digestion.
2.Metabolic/Biochemical There are simple things you can learn to do with diet and supplementation that enhance general health and resistance to viral infection. For instance:
  • Vitamin D, Zinc are known to 
    • Prevent viruses to get into your nasal passages and lungs
    • Help your body clear viruses 
    • Preserve the integrity of the mucus layer that protects you from infection
    • Reduce viral reproduction
    • Reduces overactive immune responses that make people super sick in COVID disease
    • Decrease duration of some viral infections in clinical settings.
  • The Standard Western Diet of saturated fat, sugars, and refined carbs is TOXIC.
    • It activates the part of the immune system that can cause chronic inflammation.
    • Impairs the body’s response to infections
    • Leads to obesity, heart disease, and other conditions that make corona worse.
  • There is an intelligent way to eat that can enhance a variety of health measures, including immune function.
    • Eat healthy fats
    • Less simple carbs
    • Broad variety of colorfull fruits and vegetables
    • Healthy protein
3.Movement You were made to move.  Movement might be the best medicine ever invented.  Regular moderately-intense exercise has been shown to:
  • Increase immune system detection and response to infections
  • Reduce stress and enhance mood, energy, and well-being
  • Reduce immune overactivity that can lead to severe disease
  • Reduce the loss of immune function that is otherwise proven to exist in people  with obesity, diabetes, and the elderly—exactly the groups who are at greater risk from covid. 
  • Reduce upper respiratory infection, which is how COVID starts. 
    • Less incidence, less intense symptoms, shorter recovery, less likely to infect other people.
This video is an overview and big picture.  I will dive into these other issues in future posts.  I’m here to help you build your health and stay well.
I encourage you to work with the recommendations of the public health and government authorities.
But to also empower yourself to be well, to be resilient, to keep yourself and your family from getting sick.
Please comment and let me know your thoughts and questions!

Did You Know:

Dr Shiller is responding to the chaos and overwhelm of the corona pandemic by offering regular free stress-busting mind-body training sessions on zoom. You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com
Dr Shiller is available for telemedicine consultation worldwide regarding chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, fatigue, and stress-related illness.  Contact the office or schedule a consultation at www.drshiller.com.

Related Posts:

Full Transcript:

Hi, I am Dr. Shiller, and what you need to know is that the mainstream authorities and mainstream media are not going to protect you from the coronavirus, like they should.  They are not addressing the complexity of this pandemic, and they are doing things that I see as being potentially very harmful to you and the rest of the public.  I have been watching this going on for a while now through the eyes of an extremely well-trained medical doctor who really knows how to think critically about medical research and health in general. I am getting pretty fed up with the whole situation, and it is time to speak out about it. The mainstream course of action that most people are following is not addressing the complexity of this problem, and it is potentially harmful to you. I am going to give you some food for thought about all of that, and I want to give you some information that could help you empower yourself to survive or even thrive in this pandemic.  I have heard a lot of people suffering on both sides, right. There is an aspect of suffering right now, which is clinical; people are getting sick, some people are dying, some people are experiencing prolonged symptoms from post-corona syndrome. On the other hand, a lot of people are sick from the response to the pandemic, the lockdown, the social distancing, the loss of economic and social opportunities.  There is a lot of really bad stuff happening in the world.  We are in a crisis.  Now look, I am not a political person and this is not political and it is not conspiracy-oriented.  It is really about trying to empower you.  I do think that the mainstream authorities are doing a crummy job, but my main point is to give you information so that you can make good choices and empower yourself to actually survive and potentially thrive in a really bad situation. So, let us take a step back in case you have not noticed why am I making a big deal about this.  We have this coronavirus, and there is a pandemic and it is everywhere, and it does not have a very high death rate, less than 1% of people die from corona of the people who get it, and that number keeps going down for a variety of reasons.  Some people go on to get post corona, which can be a really severe sort of dysfunction that happens, that can last months, and we do not completely understand it.  So, there is real pathology happening, and the real pathology is happening because it is so ineffective.  The real pathology is not happening because the virus is dangerous to most people, it is not dangerous to most people, but it spreads very quickly in society, and so the mainstream approach has been, well let us prevent the spread, and then let us like invest billions of dollars in vaccine development, and that is how we will deal with this problem.  Well, that is just upside down and backwards and really, really messed up as far as I can see, and the reason is because we do not know that a vaccine is going to work and because locking down and social distancing slows the threat of the spread.  It slows how fast it gets moved through a society, but there is no evidence that it is going to change the long-term number of people who get exposed to corona.  There are advantages in the short-term, but as a long-term solution, it is probably not going to accomplish anything, and we definitely do not have any evidence; evidence that it does anything in the long-term, but it causes a lot of economic and social issues.  We will unpack that in a second. So, those huge issues, economically and socially it is no joke, like huge parts of the population in many places are sliding into poverty.  There is an increase in mental illness.  There is an increase in domestic abuse.  There are kids who are not in school, who are dropping out, and who are going to be lost, potentially, from getting a proper education. Because their informative years, well they are not getting it now, they are going to lose their opportunity to be in the group to get properly educated, and that hurts everybody. The main thing that I want to get at is this, and I will explain this in more detail, but there is a lot of air space between when someone gets exposed to the virus when they get very sick, and our mainstream media and government agencies are not doing enough to address that.  They are missing the boat that people who are getting exposed and sick, keeping them from getting very sick, starting early. Lockdown, and waiting for a vaccine is stupid, and it is not science-based, it is really a fantasy.  Meanwhile, there are things you can do for yourself, and they are not telling you about it, they are not emphasizing that, and they are certainly not putting money into supporting human beings to actually get healthy, and that is what I want to talk about. So, let us take a step back and just think about what really happens in an infection, right.  We are worried about people getting sick from COVID, but the mass majority do not get sick, but here are the steps to a bad outcome.  The first is exposure, the second is when there is an infection and it actually gets in and creates a clinical illness, and the third is when that clinical illness goes out of control and basically, people get very sick and some die, but some go on to live but are sick for a while, and so this is a virus that is highly transmissible, it is all over the world.  The horse is out of the barn and you cannot shut the door anymore.  Okay, it is everywhere, and this thing, sitting and locking down are temporary solutions.  You could argue that they help reduce the overload on the healthcare system, and that might be true in places where the virus is suddenly starting to spike, but again it is a short-term answer and do not kid yourself that it is a long-term answer, and so the real question is how to keep people from getting severe illness.  So, let us talk about that.  Why does someone get really sick?  Let us talk about the biology, right. You have layers of cells called mucosa that line basically all of your orifices, all of your openings and your mucosa like in your nasal passages and your throat and your lungs have very specialized cells.  They are immune active.  They are a barrier.  They are a defence against infection, and certain things get through that mucosal barrier, and when things get through the mucosal barrier, then you often get a clinical infection with symptoms.  You know for some people who never get symptoms, what probably happens is the virus comes into them, and either it comes through the mucosal barrier but it is completely controlled by the immune system, or it just moves through, and it sits on the surface and their mucosal system like deals with it, so they do not get it, and they might get a nasal swab, and there is viral particles in there that might be dead, but it shows up in the PCR, and they are not infectious, but they get a positive test.  So, we are calling that infection without clinical illness, but when people do get clinical illness, that mucosal barrier is compromised.  The virus gets in and it creates a local infection, and local infection means inflammation.  The immune system gets activated, and sometimes it creates systemic infection.Usually, that starts in the upper airways and goes into the lungs, and that is why the main thing people get with corona is pneumonia and all of the things that go along with really, really bad pneumonia, but it gets into other organs too.One of the effects of this massive inflammation that happens in a very, very small number of people is that it creates a vasculopathy, and vasculopathy is when the blood vessels get sick, you get clotting, you get blood vessels closing off, and that means the organs get sick and die.   You get tissue damage, because you are not getting enough blood, you do not have exchange of gases, you are not removing waste products, and cells die, and that tends to happen in the lungs, and that results in that horrible pneumonia, where people cannot get oxygenated and they go on the ventilator and blah, blah, blah, blah.  By the way, it looks like early results suggest that they are getting better at dealing with that in hospitals, but that is not what I want to talk about today. The point is that inflammation and vasculopathy is what makes people really sick with coronavirus. So, the real thing is how to keep people from getting very sick, and there is a lot of room between when someone gets exposed and when they get very sick; there are a lot of things that go on.  There are a lot of aspects that are genetic that have to do with lifestyle, that have to do with the way a person has been living and how well they are that determines how their body responds. Unfortunately, the main response from the authorities and the mainstream media is vaccine only.  A journalist or somebody pressed Dr. Fauci a couple of weeks ago about, okay what vitamins and supplements do you take? And he was pretty dismissive, he says he takes vitamin D and C, but he dismissed a whole set of other things, that actually I have proof, in a very sort of, whatever, not very appropriate way, but they are focusing on a vaccine, and at the moment there is no vaccine.  There is no safe vaccine.  There is no effective vaccine.  They are putting billions of dollars into developing that vaccine, but we do not know if one is going to exist and whether it is going to work and be safe and be effective.  There are illnesses that they have tried to develop vaccines for and it did not work.  So, basically, the whole approach is based on a theory that we are going to have a vaccine, and most of the experts who look at the situation say, if we are going to have a vaccine, it is going to be sometime in 2021.  Well, what are we doing until then?  We are sitting around and we are waiting, right.  There are lots of things that can be done to help people from getting sick, and we are just waiting, you are waiting and you are being helpless.  Basically, the approach is to sit in a lockdown and we are going to take care of you with a vaccine, and it is not happening, and so the helplessness feeds into the problem.  Okay, so I said there is a lot of room between when someone gets exposed and when they get very infected, and there are two main aspects to that.  You may have heard about early treatment, and there are people who are out there who are proposing various kinds of early treatment.  There is the HCQ, zinc, azithromycin thing, Dr. Zelenko, and then there are other more mainstream approaches that are using more conventional medications early when people are first getting sick.  We call that early treatment.  The idea is when someone gets sick, start treating them and do things to prevent that inflammatory cascade that results in a whole like conflagration and people getting really sick.  I am not going to talk about that today, although it is worth discussing.  I hope to get to that in another video. Today, I want to talk about things you can do to yourself, because that is what puts you in the driver’s seat, and that potentially helps everybody, and these are things that you can do without much money and without special equipment, and you can do it at home.  So, let us talk about that.  What we want to do and look there is evidence, scientific research, fairly well done scientific research that shows there is things you can do that are lifestyle-oriented, that reduce the likelihood of getting infected, reduce the severity of infection that can enhance the recovery and reduce the amount of time before you recover and potentially reduce your likelihood of infecting other people. In the meantime, they also help you feel better in general, and they are part of what is involved in living a healthier life in general.But the mainstream policy and the media are basically feeding you fear, and they are feeding your fear, and the fear is making you feel more helpless, and fear and powerless are no joke.  Fearfulness and powerlessness create sickness.  I have done a lot of research about stress and things like that, and you know one of the things they do in laboratory animals, poor little guys, is they give them restraint stress.  They take a rat and you put it in a small cage, you give it some sort of shock it cannot get away from.  Basically, you give it a noxious stimulus in a setting where it has no choice but just to sit there and suck it up, and guess what, you create profound physiologic stress that leads that animal to get sick.  So, let us just step back here for a second.  We got this circumstance where there is a pandemic moving through the world, and the mainstream authorities are saying, shelter in place, stay in your house, you are powerless, there is nothing you can do but wait for a vaccine, put on the mask, do not have contact with the people you love, do not do the stuff you love, do not go out and be in nature, do not get connected to your family members.  Okay, in some circumstances, those measures might be appropriate, but the way they are getting applied across the whole spectrum of society is potentially contributing to the illness itself because there is a vicious cycle.  When you are powerless, you cannot do stuff you care about, you get less physical activity, you get less time outside, you get less connection with people that actually help give you a feeling of safety, security, and happiness, and all of those positive things you can do for yourself are part of what helps you stay healthy, and not doing them is a vicious cycle that feeds into making you more susceptible to be ill.  So, that is what I want to speak to you today.  How to break that vicious cycle and how to do stuff that actually helps you be healthier? So, the way I am going to look at it.  There is kind of three main realms of how to understand your biology and physiology, and I call them three handles, okay, and so you can look at the diagram and there are three handles.  There is mind, there is movement, there is metabolism, okay.  I am going to unpack those in greater detail, but just the concept of what those are is they are like handles on your physiology.  There are ways that you can grab onto the way your entirely body works as one unit.  All of your systems work as a unit.  You have a mind-body unity.  Your health is dependent on that integrated functioning of all these different aspects.   Your immune system, your cardiovascular system, your mind, your emotions, your neurotransmitters of your brain that go every place in your body, communicate with your immune cells, communicate with your intestinal tract, absorption of nutrients, your muscles and your movement system that actually are endocrine organs.  When you move and do stuff physically, you generate biochemistry that modulates your immune system, that modulates your emotions, that reduces stress, that enables your sleep.  So, these three areas are incredibly integrated and interconnected, and they are incredibly important, and I just want to unpack them a little bit and talk about them.  They are windows into your biology, they are ways that you can choose to enhance your ability to be healthy and to be well.  You can choose to enhance your ability to deal with a potential infectious disease and abundant research that shows that in a lot of different realms.  There are ways that you can empower yourself and not be helpless and hopeless, and for those of you who are waiting for a vaccine, a lot of these elements have to do with how your body responds to a vaccine. So, let us unpack this a little bit.  Let us talk about mind, okay, the one on the top.  Mind is all of your thoughts and emotions and feelings and the way that that connects to you and to every bit of your body, and the most important part about this is mindset, and let me just emphasize it again.  If you are in a passive help me fix me mindset, then you are basically putting yourself as helpless, and helpless is not good for you, and what I really want to encourage you to do if you are not doing it already is thinking about how to be proactive and how to learn and figure out how to do things for yourself that make you healthy, that make you stronger, because it has a profound impact, and I want to emphasize that impact, right.  We talked about how helplessness increases stress.  Well, what is stress? You have a stress response, your stress response is get up and go, and you have a relaxation response that is rest and digest, and they are meant to be in balance, right.  You are meant to get up and go and do stuff.  Stress is normal. Stress is not bad.  If I have to go run for a bus or if I am dealing with some sort of difficult deadline, it gets me up and moves and focuses my mind so I can do and accomplish things in the world, that is good.  Making love is stressful, okay, so is sports, but the issue is when it is chronic and it is purposeless and it is associated with negative emotions, like helplessness, disconnection, depression, anxiety, that kind of stress is toxic.  So, it is really important to balance your stress response and relaxation response.  There has been abundant research since the 1970s, showing that chronic stress results in impaired immune responses, it results in people getting more infections, having decreased responses to viral exposure and to vaccine treatment, to development of chronic pain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, various kinds of cardiovascular problems, obesity, unhealthy eating behaviors.  These are all stress-related.  When you are under chronic stress, you want to eat sugar and fat and simple carbohydrates, because they feel good, it is comfort food, it is totally natural, but like I will talk about in a minute those things are poison to your immune system.  So, figuring out how to put yourself in a situation of “I have control and there are things that I can do to help myself”.  Learning stress management if you are into that and open to that, I teach like a once a week free online thing.  You can go to mindbodygroove.com, that URL will be in the notes below, and basically, it is simple techniques for reducing your stress level, enhancing your sense of connection to what matters to you, to coming back home to yourself to calm and clarity, hugely important.  All of that stuff about stress is related to where you are at emotionally.  A lot of us have really painful things happen in life.  We have had loss, we have had grief, we have had trauma.  Some of us have experienced abuse, all of that stimulates the core part of your brain that generates your stress response.  If you are walking around with unresolved negative emotions, that is poison for you as well, and there are simple techniques to deal with that, some of them are things you can learn on your own.  There is therapy, there is support groups, there is lots you can do to learn how to actually work with your emotional state and heal those negative emotions that are otherwise continuing to pump out and cause your body to produce stress chemistry, and that stress chemistry affects your thinking and your behavior, and the vicious cycle that takes you into a negative place.  So, really wanting to encourage that. Okay, movement.  Your movement system, what is that? Your movement system on a certain level is your muscles and bones and joints and all the stuff that moves you around.  It is your mobility.  It is your structure.  You are made to move.  Even if you have some degree of debility or disability because of illness or whatever other reason, the more you move, the better.  Your movement system, your muscles are endocrine organs that produce chemistry that affects so many aspects of your health and well-being.  When you do vigorous exercise, you generate an acute stress response, and in the short-term, acute stress stimulates your immune system to better fight viruses, to produce better immune responses to vaccines.  This has been studied over and over in other realms and infectious diseases like common colds and influenza and other viral infections, where people who have lots of good, the right amount of physical activity tend to have better immune responses, less infections, less severe infections, and better recovery.  The people who tend to be most susceptible to corona, people with obesity, people who are elderly, the immune system is weakened in those states, and if you wait around for a vaccine, your body might not even respond to it if your immune system is depressed.  Exercise on a regular basis enhances that immune vigilance so that your body can actually amount an immune response.  It is important to know that too much exercise is not good.  The amount of exercise that professional athletes get like for an hour or more of super intense exercise actually impairs the immune system.  So, you know, the most common recommendations are 30 to 60 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity.  I want to mention other kinds of exercise, because there are things that are more mindful exercise, whether it be yoga or tai chi, pilates, other things that are more about creating a deep relaxation response.  Most of the vigorous exercise studies that have been done have looked at how the stress response affects the immune system, but what they have not looked at is how the stress response actually evokes the relaxation response, and so what you are doing with a relaxation exercise like yoga or tai-chi is you are directly activating that relaxation response with all the biochemistry that is very healthy, that potentially modulates the immune system.  It is an area that needs more study for sure.  What else about that?  Yeah, I want to acknowledge that it can be hard to get the right kind of exercise, especially as we get into the winter time, especially if you are in a situation where there is social distancing and lockdown, but there are ways to do it.  The key thing is to find out what works for you.  I recommend to most of my peeps that they do something outside, do it away from people, be connected to nature.  Nature itself can be very healing.  If you cannot do it outside, do it inside.  There are tons of free stuff online, ways you can learn aerobic exercise, pilates, strength training, tai chi, yoga, stuff like that.  It works, it helps, and find a way, find a study buddy, find someone you are going to do it with, where you will get online at the same time, maybe you will be on the phone with each other while you are both watching something on Facebook at the same time or whatever it is that you want to do, but find some way to support yourself to do it on a scheduled regular basis at least three or four times a week, and I suspect you are going to see good results in how you feel and potentially positive results and how well your immune system works. Okay, the last area here, let us talk about metabolism.  This is all your biochemistry, and when it comes down to it on a cellular level when your body is fighting an infection, it is all about biochemistry.  Your immune system is a biochemical factory that is interacting with all of your other biochemistry, and there are certain aspects to nutrition that have been shown over and over again that have a huge impact on how the body responds to potential infectious diseases.  The biggest thing is what you eat.  The standard western diet full of saturated fat, simple carbohydrates, and sugars is toxic, it is poison, it impairs your immune system and makes it not function as well to fight potential viral infection.  It also shifts other aspects of your immune system to create chronic inflammation, so that if you do get an infection, you are liable to develop a more robust immune response, which could be toxic and destructive to you.  So, simple stuff like eating more whole grains, eating healthy fats, looking for a balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, eating lots of colorful foods that have what we call phytonutrients.  Phytonutrients or polyphenols or those colored chemicals that are in brightly-colored fruits and vegetables, those sop up free radicals, those reduce immune activation, they are profoundly helpful to actually help your immune system function in a more balanced way. Let us talk about micronutrients, and this is where the whole Dr. Fauci thing is kind of funny because he was quoted as saying, “I take vitamin D and vitamin C and everything else is nonsense.”  Very disappointing.  You know, when I was coming up in medical school and residency, we read Dr. Fauci’s book.  He was the editor of the big book of internal medicine.  He is a brilliant scientist, but apparently, he has not been studying nutrition science.  He has not seen the science that has shown that zinc in animals and humans has profound effects on immune defences.  It helps the mucosa affect well, work better, and reduce entry of viruses.  It actually prevents viral replication.  It modulates the immune system from having too much of a strong response.  There are layers and layers of evidence supporting people that have healthy zinc levels in their body, and there is evidence that much of the world is zinc deficient.  I do not know why he is not talking about that, but it is real science, there is more science about that than there is about a COVID-19 vaccine which does not exist yet.  You can see, I am a little passionate about this, because I think they are really doing a disservice to you.  So, again, the right amount of zinc.  Next thing vitamin D.  Vitamin D has evidence in COVID itself.  A recent study came out over the summer 2020 that people with low vitamin D levels tend to get worse infections in the hospital with COVID-19.  They tend to have worse outcomes from having low vitamin D.  So, you want your vitamin D to be in the middle range, healthy, robust, not too high, not too low, and you want to get it in a healthy way.  Vitamin D comes from sunlight, it can come from supplementation.  Deeper topics for another time, but I want you to start looking for the right information about this stuff.  Press your doctor about it, and if he does not know, press him or her, and if they cannot tell you, maybe find another doctor.  There are other micronutrients that are relevant, and again this is not the place to go into the details.  Selenium, iron, other things that actually, there is scientific evidence that they are modulating and helping the immune system function well, and most of the research in all these areas for sure just to acknowledge is done in other models of viral infection and looking at immune infection, because the whole COVID thing is too new.  So, a lot of this is an extension from other models of infection with various other viruses and influenza, but these are real relationships, and they are things worth thinking about. So, somehow, our government agencies are spending billions of dollars on a vaccine that has not been developed and has not been proven that it can be developed, and they are not investing much that money, and they are not investing much energy into helping the public figure out how to actually enhance their own health through lifestyle, through the mind-body system, through the movement system and the metabolic system.  These are real science-based ways, common sense ways, things that you can do to not feel disempowered and out of control, things that you can do to step up to the plate to help the health of yourself and your family.  I really strongly urge you to seek out good sources of information for these things and to learn how to actually take care of yourself, because it is not just about shifting and dealing with the situation of COVID, but the fact is that this could be an opportunity, it could be an opportunity for all of us to have a wake-up call, because the fact is part of the reason we are all getting sick from COVID and part of the reason COVID rips through certain populations is because they are not healthy, and it is not to blame them, because health is really complicated, and lifestyle choices are really complicated, and I do not have judgment towards people who are old or people who are obese or people with diabetes or hypertension.  It is complex, it is genetic, it is historical, but the fact is there is things that every one of us can do, and when you start to get proactive about your own health, your mental, your emotional health as well as your physical health, it puts you in a better place to just be in life, to deal with the responsibilities and opportunities you have to make a difference in your life, to make a difference in the lives of your family, and I want to support you in that. So, this is sort of the first video on this topic.  Leave comments if there is more stuff you want to know, if you have comments, if you have questions.  The intention is to try to dive more deeply into some of those topics.  So, if you want to get notified about future ones, you can actually click on the link below, and you can get on the mailing list so that you will find out about new future videos.  So, I hope you enjoyed it.  Share it if you like it, like it if you like it, and I wish you all the best.  You should have a healthy and productive end of 2020 and a healthy and productive 2021 and onward.  Wishing you all the best.
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