Merry Christmas!

I hope you are enjoying the day with people that you love. Many of us are not spending the holidays with the people we normally would due to the Covid 19 pandemic. We’re waiting with bated breath for the vaccine to be administered to the public at large.

But in fact, there is a lot we can do on our own to greatly improve our health so that we can boost our immune system to fight Covid 19 and minimize the impact of the virus. Taking the right supplements, eating whole foods, getting good sleep, exercising and reducing stress can have a huge impact on our health and it’s doesn’t take long.

Check out this video from Dr. Mark Hyman as he talks about how people can reduce their risks by improving their health. Mark Hyman, MD is the Founder and Director of The UltraWellness Center, the Head of Strategy and Innovation of Cleveland Clinic's Center for Functional Medicine, and a 13-time New York Times Bestselling author.

The Functional Medicine Approach To Treating COVID-19 And Post-COVID Syndrome

So we know that improve our metabolic health, improving our immune system and improving our overall health can help us fight the virus with little to know negative side affects. The question is what can we do to actually do to improve these factors.

Below is an excerpt of a conversation between Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Patrick Hanaway regarding their approach to healing our bodies so that we can fight this virus, and many other virus that may come our way.

Dr. Patrick Hanaway is a board-certified family physician trained at Washington University. After 10 years as Chief Medical Officer at Genova Diagnostics, Dr. Hanaway became the Chief Medical Education Officer for the Institute for Functional Medicine. In 2014, Dr. Hanaway was the founding Medical Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. His research focus is on nutrition, the microbiome, and evaluating value in Functional Medicine models of care. Currently, his teaching focus is on cancer, COVID, and uncertainty.

Dr. Patrick Hanaway: Then as everything shifted, those first two weeks in March, we said at the Institute for Functional Medicine, we have to do something about this. So we dove into bringing about 20 different physicians and scientists together and said, “Let’s look at the literature around viral infections, and what do we need to do? What are the things that are going to be able to be beneficial for viral infections? In particular, let’s look at the original SARS virus and the MERS virus,” the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus that were both corona viruses and what’s effective, and how can we dial that in?

Dr. Patrick Hanaway:: So we put that all together, and in the beginning of April, we laid it out for everybody, and we said, “Well, the things that are going to be most helpful are going to be those things that are going to be able to be both antiviral, they’re going to decrease viral growth. They’re going to improve the immune system, and they’re going to decrease symptoms.” We laid it out. We talked about vitamin D, we talked about melatonin, things that are now like, oh, wow, this is a brand new thing in November. And it’s like we laid it out and we laid out the doses.

Dr. Patrick Hanaway:: We said, we want to work with quercetin, a bioflavonoid. We want to work with vitamin A and vitamin C. We want to be able to use anti inflammatories, like curcumin. We want to be able to use green tea extract or green tea, another bioflavonoid to be able to help out. We could see the data is there to be able to bring all of these components into the mix, including things that I think are particularly important in the post-COVID syndrome, like N-acetyl cysteine, that’s a precursor for glutathione. So we had an idea of what that was, and we laid those things out and fortunately thousands of clinicians have looked at that.

Dr. Patrick Hanaway:: It wasn’t just we were grabbing any ideas, we were going through it in a very rigorous way, and setting up here is the evidence that is for this and here is the risk of harm. When we look at what’s been done with hydroxychloroquine or remdesivir, where the evidence is not that great, and the risk of harm is significantly greater for things. So don’t we want to … Why wouldn’t we use things where the risk of harm is very low and-

Dr. Mark Hyman: Or non existent.

Dr. Patrick Hanaway:: And there’s very clear evidence, not only from a biological plausibility, like it makes sense because the research is there and the science fits, but from a scientific evidence-based perspective around other kinds of viral infections, because none of us had data on SARS-CoV-2 for the first six months. What we found time and again is, this is helpful. We’ve seen it from clinicians, I saw a piece yesterday that was comparing primary care practices to integrated practices, and the rates of hospitalization in those two groups. There was an eight fold reduction, 8X, eight times reduction in the hospitalization in people who are getting this kind of functional medicine approach. Now, that’s all reported data. It’s not a randomized trial, but it’s like there’s something here and-

Dr. Mark Hyman: 800% reduction, that’s a lot.

Dr. Patrick Hanaway:: Yes, exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman: We get excited if there’s like a 20% reduction in progression to the ICU or, a couple of days less than the hospital [crosstalk 00:15:59]-

Dr. Patrick Hanaway:: We’ve seen with the vitamin D data out of Spain, where they were able to show that when people were getting adequate doses of vitamin D, and they were hospitalized, that those patients didn’t end up getting into the ICU, and didn’t end up dying. The patients who were in the control arm who didn’t get the vitamin D, they had a much higher rate of going into the ICU, and several other patients in that small cohort died. So it’s like we’re seeing this, we’re seeing the data is coming out, but we know the information now and the interventions are not toxic and they’re not expensive and they can be broadly applied.

Dr. Patrick Hanaway:: So we’re looking for how do we do the research? How do we team up with academic centers to say, let’s do the research on this? We … Unfortunately, we haven’t really had takers yet around doing that, although people … And it’s interesting is like, we found when we were doing research at the Cleveland Clinic, they want to isolate a specific variable, or will do research on vitamin D alone. Well, I’m not telling my patients just to take vitamin D. I’m saying, “Hey, take these bioflavonoids to help your gut microbiome, take these anti inflammatories, take vitamin D, help your overall metabolic health and eat this really good diet,” and they’re doing better.

To hear the whole interview with Dr. Hanaway, you can check out the video below. Not only does it have great insights to Covid 19, but it also discusses healing from cancer.

Mamas, this Christmas I want you to be healthy and stay healthy. I want you to not live in fear, but know what you can do right now to help your own body prevent disease and restore itself. I want you to enjoy life with energy and purpose and you can’t do that without your health.

As stated in the first video, on January 13-20, Dr. Hyman is presenting an 8 part docuseries on longevity. This is not only about living long, but also making sure those years are healthy. Its about adding years to your life and adding vitality to those years.

You can watch it for free by heading over to longevityfilm.com and signing up to be notified when the episodes are made available.

Do it for you. Do it for your kids. Do it for your future grandkids. You deserve to feel good. You deserve to have an immune system that is working well to protect you. You deserve to have energy and mental clarity and a healthy gut.

Merry Christmas!!

Cheers,

Emily