Probiotics vs. Prebiotics: The Differences & Why You Need Both
Aug. 19, 2020 Dr. Bill Rawls
Probiotics and prebiotics are essential for immunity, microbiome balance, and gut health. Dr. Bill Rawls of Vital Plan explains the difference between the two and how they work, plus shares the best natural sources. Learn more about prebiotics and probiotics, and how they aid gut health, here: https://vitalplan.com/blog/do-prebiot…
For more:https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/?s=probiotics Within this link are numerous articles about the benefits of taking probiotics – a must if you are a Lyme/MSIDS patient. A Cochrane review found that probiotics reduced C-diff by 70% in high risk patients (that would be us).
Finally Confirmed! Vitamin D Nearly Abolishes ICU Risk in COVID-19
By Chris Masterjohn PhD, Nutritional Science
September 3, 2020
The first randomized controlled trial (RCT) of vitamin D in COVID-19 has just been published. The results are astounding: vitamin D nearly abolished the odds of requiring treatment in ICU. Although the number of deaths was too small to say for sure, vitamin D may actually abolish the risk of death from COVID-19.
The Vitamin D Treatment Protocol
The vitamin D was provided as oral calcifediol, also known as calcidiol, 25(OH)D, and 25-hydroxyvitamin D. The treatment in this RCT was soft capsules of 532 mcg 25(OH)D on day 1 of admission to the hospital, followed by 266 mcg on days 3 and 7, and then 266 mcg once a week until discharge, ICU admission, or death.
This is equivalent to 106,400 IU vitamin D on day 1, 53,200 IU on days 3 and 7, and 53,200 IU weekly thereafter. If this were given as daily doses, it would be the equivalent of 30,400 per day for the first week, followed by a maintenance dose of 7,600 IU per day.
Version 6 of the Food and Supplement Guide for the Coronavirus
I have now released Version 6 of The Food and Supplement Guide for the Coronavirus to reflect the new study on vitamin D. Purchases of the guide are greatly appreciated, as they help sustain my work on this newsletter and will help me start finishing my Vitamins and Minerals 101 book. (See link for article)
When it was introduced in the mid-1980s, naltrexone was used for blocking opioid receptors. These receptors are meant to be activated by hormones produced by the body called endorphins and enkephalins. However, opioid drugs also stimulate these receptors.
Large doses of naltrexone were originally used for treating drug addiction by blocking the body’s opioid receptors, and therefore the effects of opioid drugs, completely. In doing so, however, it completely blocked the body’s endorphins and enkephalins as well. This was ultimately harmful to health since these hormones play critical roles in myriad parts of the body, such as the immune system.
In contrast, low doses of naltrexone act by temporarily blocking opioid receptors.This causes the body to increase its production of endorphins and enkephalins. In turn, these hormones work to relieve pain, reduce inflammation, and contribute to well-being while avoiding the adverse health effects associated with larger naltrexone doses.
Studies have shown that low-dose naltrexone (LDN) offers multiple health benefits. It has been used in a wide range of treatments for a variety of conditions, including:
LDN, Autoimmune Disorders, Cancer, Treating Pain, and More
The late Dr. Bernard Bihari discovered and developed the therapeutic use of low-dose naltrexone (LDN) in the mid-1980s while practicing internal medicine in New York City. He was treating drug addicts with a new drug, Naltrexone, which blocked the heroin “high.” Unfortunately, 50 milligrams daily had unpleasant side effects. When his addicts started dying from AIDS, he began to search for a drug that would help them.
Dr. Bihari knew that endorphins, small neurochemicals produced by the body, had pain-relieving, anti-inflammatory properties. Dr. Bihari and his colleagues hired a lab scientist to measure patient endorphin levels. He discovered that his HIV patients had sub-normal endorphin levels. His team determined that LDN doses ranging from 1.75 to 4.5 milligrams increased endorphin levels by two to three hundred percent. By blocking the body’s endorphin receptors, LDN caused an overproduction of endorphins.
Dr. Bihari then started a small foundation to study the use of LDN in HIV patients. After one year, he discovered that the patients who took LDN had an eight percent death rate while patients taking placebo had a thirty-three percent death rate. He and his colleagues went on to treat hundreds of patients with LDN.
Endorphins have a positive effect on the immune system by increasingT-helper and natural killer cells. Not only does LDN help people with autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS), it also seems to be beneficial as an adjunct treatment for certain types of cancer. (See link for article)
If you are a Lyme/MSIDS patient and do not know about LDN, please learn about it and talk about it with your doctor. Many patients have benefitted from LDN which is an inexpensive, compounded drug that helps so many things patients struggle with. For more:
INTERNATIONAL PANEL OF MEDICAL EXPERTS URGES U.S. GOVERNMENT TO STOP IGNORING INTRAVENOUS VITAMIN C AS A PROMISING OPTION TO TREAT COVID-19
Jul 21, 2020
Studies in Korea and the United States and ongoing trials in Canada and China suggest high doses of Vitamin C in patients admitted to the ICU with sepsis, including COVID-19 patients, could be the difference between life and death.
A new paper reveals promising results from the use of intravenous (IV) treatment of ascorbate or ascorbic acid — better known as Vitamin C — for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
“Given preliminary data, intravenous high-dose Vitamin C may be a life-saving treatment for patients with COVID-19 and could provide an extremely safe and low-cost treatment option that can be scaled immediately for worldwide use,” said Dr. Kogan, medical director of George Washington University’s Center for Integrative Medicine.
Dr. Kogan added, “It is imperative that Vitamin C be assessed in quality randomized trials. Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to not be interested in financing such a trial. It is unethical to ignore growing evidence of the efficacy of IV Vitamin C and deny funding of a definitive trial.”
“Were reliable nontoxic treatments such as the use of ascorbate validated for this novel virus, this would greatly facilitate the return to a new normal for medicine and for civil society,” said Dr. Davis, president of the Environmental Health Trust. “While our findings are not definitive, they provide an important indication that there could be means to reduce mortality, along with the use of dexamethasone for advanced cases. It is imperative that these findings be taken seriously given the lack of alternative means for limiting deaths from this highly infectious pandemic agent.”
The authors report that a specialized interdisciplinary panel of medical experts in Shanghai and Guangzhou, China, in March advised treating physicians to expand clinical uses of ingested ascorbate for prophylaxis and higher dose intravenous (IV) therapy for COVID-19 and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), along with other supportive therapies, including Vitamin D and zinc.
The use of Vitamin C, a relatively low-cost and nontoxic treatment, “should be considered an important option in light of the growing impact COVID-19 is having on public health and the global economy,” said Richard Cheng, MD, PhD, first author of the report who is an American currently living in Shanghai.
Dr. Cheng is working with Chinese experts in Wuhan, Shanghai, and Beijing, who are carrying out the largest clinical trial of Vitamin C in history aimed at reducing deaths from COVID.
For decades Vitamin C has been known to help people with the common cold to ARDS to sepsis, which is caused by a flood of inflammatory bacterial and viral pathogens.
Cytokine storms, the explosion of free radicals that damage the body’s important biological molecules, is a prime cause of mortality among COVID-19 patients. Cytokine storms lead to uncontrolled inflammation, oxidative injury, and damage to the alveolar-capillary barrier, with secondary bacterial infection.
COVID-19 patients with infections are generally found to have depleted levels of Vitamin C in their systems.
“We need to stay vigilant and the social distancing, personal protective measures are essential, but don’t forget to focus on individual health and individual nutritional immunity,” Dr. Cheng said. “It’s cheap. It’s effective, and it’s not being talked about enough despite its successful past use in the treatment of other viral infections, including viruses similar to SARS-Cov2 like SARS and MERS.”
The article recounts that in March 2020, high-dose IV administration successfully treated 50 moderate to severe COVID-19 patients in Shanghai, China. Doses ranged from 2g to 10g per day, given over a period of eight to 10 hours, for five to seven days. For this group of recent patients, the oxygenation index improved in real time and all were discharged from intensive care and released from the hospital as of March 23, 2020. Doctors in the United States and Korea reported similar outcomes.
High-dose ascorbate has been clinically used for decades with few serious side effects, except in limited cases of carriers of G6PD, a genetic blood disorder most frequently found in males.
The doctors acknowledge that more randomized clinical trials will further validate the effectiveness of Vitamin C but stressed that during an exponentially “growing pandemic where more than a quarter of all children who are positive for COVID-19 have few or no symptoms and many transmitters of the disease are asymptomatic,” innovative approaches are needed to prevent and treat the disease.
“it was the crowning of stupidity to claim that someone could have Covid-19 without any symptoms at all or even to pass the disease along without showing any symptoms whatsoever.”
But what the article does get right is the suppression by ‘authorities’ for anything that competes with their own lucrative drugs and vaccines:
The Shunning of Nutritional Science and Self-Care in the Public COVID-19 Narrative
Editorial by Dr. Alan Palmer, Contributing Writer
[CHD Note: This is Part Three of a four-part series. In Parts One and Two I outline the case for the terrain being the most important consideration when it comes to outcomes from infectious diseases. The terrain represents the health of the individual, their nutritional status, their environmental exposures and surroundings, their access to clean water, personal and public hygiene, etc.]
Enter the spin zone
In the media coverage surrounding COVID-19, why are we hearing nothing about what each individual can do FOR THEMSELVES nutritionally in an effort to build their immune competency to resist and overcome infection? Why is the narrative all about how the pharmaceutical industry is going to “SAVE” us? Could it have something to do with the fact that the pharma-controlled media wants to convince us that we must spend billions of dollars and wait for big pharma to come to the rescue with new, expensive, proprietary and patented anti-viral drugs and a magical vaccine to rescue us from COVID-19 therefore “allowing” us to return to normal life?
I’m not even saying that it’s only nutritional options and natural alternatives that are being shunned. Even inexpensive, easy to access drugs like Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin with zinc are being played down, despite studies from around the world showing it’s efficacy. And, with a history of use for over 60 years in millions of people, it has proven to have an excellent safety record as compared to many other pharmaceutical drugs. A course of treatment is under $30 compared to Remdesivir, which costs more than $3,000. You can be sure that the antiviral drugs being developed for COVID-19 will probably exceed that cost. Let’s be honest; inexpensive, safe drugs or natural alternatives like herbal or nutritional compounds won’t provide pharma with the big payday they are banking on from COVID-19. They are opportunists, and you can bet they are going to make the most out of this opportunity.
No investment and all profit served up in a liability free environment! Can you think of a better business model … ?
Opportunistic organisms in biology are those parasites, bacteria, fungi, yeasts and viruses that take advantage of a weak host that offers them a ripe terrain for infection. These pharma opportunists are getting our government to fund the development and production of these drugs and vaccines to the tune of billions of dollars….AND they will potentially reap hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from the sales (all underwritten by each of us taxpayers). No investment and all profit served up in a liability free environment! Can you think of a better business model and financial windfall scenario for them? In the meantime, as the powers that be, drag their feet on making these inexpensive treatments available to sick patients because they have something better on the horizon, thousands of people are dying. Many unnecessarily. And, since scientists have already said that the virus can and will mutate, the magical vaccine that we have all paid for and millions are relying on, will most likely be largely ineffective in a best-case scenario and outright deadly in a worst-case scenario. Another legitimate concern would be the vaccine’s role in the development of future long-term chronic disease.
A similar situation plays out every year with the flu vaccine and its miserable rate of effectiveness, because guessing which strains will be prevalent the next season to incorporate into the vaccine is a roll of the dice. Three decades of attempts to make a coronavirus vaccine have been a miserable failure, resulting in what is called “pathogenic priming” or sometimes referred to as “immune enhancement”, which is a paradoxical response. This is where a vaccinated person, after later being exposed to the same virus has the risk of acquiring an extremely exaggerated immune reaction. This is something many top scientists and doctors in the vaccine field are warning against. It is not a great scenario when they are bragging about how fast they can get these vaccines to market and taking shortcuts in the safety studies like animal safety studies, followed by long-term human trials to make it happen. Quick to market with a shell-shocked public waiting anxiously for your product. Jackpot!
… oxidative radicals wreak havoc on the body if glutathione is in short supply.
The scientific basis for nutritional effectiveness
There are thousands of studies published that demonstrate effectiveness of various natural compounds in preventing and treating viral infections. They do that in numerous ways, but the two overarching strategies is first to prime or boost the body’s own ability to attack and destroy the pathological microbes and second, to block key biochemical pathways that the virus needs to enter the cell and proliferate. In COVID-19’s case, these pathways into the cell are called the ACE-2 receptors. The cells lining the lungs and airways are particularly rich in these receptors making the lungs a receptive target for COVID-19. Nutritional compounds can also effectively manage the high levels of inflammation and collateral damage caused by the infection, which is one of the main reasons the COVID-19 infection can reach catastrophic levels and, in some cases becomes fatal. Many reports have discussed a phenomenon that can occur called a “cytokine storm”, which is an example of an out of control inflammatory immune reaction throughout the body. The oxidative stress from this reaction causes massive collateral tissue damage. Incidentally, the cytokine storm phenomenon is not new or unique to COVID-19. The literature is replete with studies discussing it in relationship to severe influenza as well.
One example of a nutritional superhero is glutathione. Glutathione the body’s “Master Antioxidant”, is essential for successfully fighting infection and mitigating the damaging effects of the production of oxidative free radicals that are released during infection. These oxidative radicals wreak havoc on the body if glutathione is in short supply. These oxidative free-radicals are now implicated in the cause of the cytokine storm that often results in the loss of life from COVID-19. Fortunately, there are ways that you can boost your own glutathione levels. Therefore, reducing inflammation and oxidative stress naturally not only decreases the severity of the infection and risk of death, but also the long-term health altering after-effects post infection.
N-Acetyl-Cysteine or N.A.C., is another important and related compound. Studies have also shown that taking N.A.C. will not only help boost glutathione levels but may also help to prevent the formation of what is called von Willebrand Factor, an agent that is responsible for the blood clotting problems that frequently develops in COVID-19 patients.
The incredible partnership between the miraculous human immune system and nature
The biochemistry of how the intelligence of the body operates is truly remarkable. And the immune system is a symphony of players that when all working properly and in concert, make beautiful music together. Beautiful unless you are a pathogen. When working in harmony, the different players in the immune system are truly a formidable force to be reckoned with. They seek, identify and destroy the intruder. Rather than using a drug that often has risks of side effects to “kill” the infection, this approach fortifies and builds the body’s own defenses and mechanisms to fight the offending microbe and then clean up the mess and debris afterwards. This includes upregulating white blood cells and immune regulatory players like macrophages, natural killer cells (NK cells), neutrophils and monocytes. As an example, vitamin C greatly increases numbers, activity and effectiveness of macrophages, NK cells, neutrophils and monocytes. Human beings can’t make our own, so we have to get it from diet and supplementation. Vitamin C demands increase substantially during times of stress, injury and infection. Therefore, it is essential to meet those demands with increased consumption when you want your immune system to work at it’s best.
A macrophage grabbing and engulfing a pathogen
Another example of key players during infection are cytokines. Cytokines are proteins that act as cell signaling agents. Some cytokines are pro-inflammatory, and some are anti-inflammatory in action. Some pro-inflammatory response is necessary and appropriate during infection, but it needs to be kept in check to prevent raging inflammation or even an autoimmune shift causing the immune system to attack the body’s own tissues. Various natural compounds are shown to regulate these processes and keep them in balance, preventing damaging downstream effects. Those compounds include fish oil, curcumin (the active ingredient in turmeric), vitamin D, resveratrol and quercetin among others.
We will look further into the way the immune system combats infection and ways to optimize its function in the final segment of this four-part series.
Dr. Palmer’s free eBook 1200 Studies – Truth Will Prevail, now 730 pages long, includes over 1400 published studies – authored by thousands of scientists and researchers – that contradict what officials are telling the public about vaccine safety and efficacy. It has easy search and navigation features including links to article abstracts and studies on PubMed or the source journal that make it an invaluable research and reference tool. Download it free at www.1200studies.com
I must admit the current attitude of our ‘authorities’ to just slap a face mask on really gets under my skin, when there are so many helpful, productive things people can do to strengthen their immune systems. They are majoring on the minors and minoring on the majors.
The key to fighting illness has always been and will always be in making yourself a tough target.
