The School of Greatness - 1063 Use This Science to Boost Your Immune System & Fight COVID-19 w/Dr. Roger Seheult

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

“Just go for the truth and speak what the data speaks and let the rest take care of itself.”Today's guest is Dr. Roger Seheult, who is quadruple board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, Critical Care Medicine and Sleep Medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine. He is the cofounder of MedCram a medical education company where his mission is to demystify medical concepts for people around the world. This episode was so powerful that it had to be split up into 2 parts! Make sure to watch out for the next episode coming soon!In this first episode Lewis and Dr. Seheult discuss, the importance of Vitamin D and how it can treat COVID-19 and other diseases, the natural remedies for boosting your immune system, the first thing we should do when we start feeling sick, and so much more!For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1063Check out Roger’s website: https://www.medcram.com To learn more about hydrotherapy go to: www.hydrotherapyathome.com and www.hydro4covid.com Check out Greatness Coaching: www.lewishowes.com/mycoach The Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod

This is episode number 1063 with Dr. Roger Schwelt. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Author Steve Maraboli said, Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.

And physicist Marie Curie said, nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less. I am very excited about our guest. His name is Dr. Roger Schwelt. And Roger is quadruple board certified

in internal medicine, pulmonary disease, critical care medicine, and sleep medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine. He's the co-founder of MedCram, a medical education company where his mission is to demystify medical concepts for people around the world. And this episode was so powerful, it was constantly blowing my mind that I had to split it in two parts. So make sure you watch out for the next episode right after this one coming soon. It was constantly blowing my mind that I had to split it in two parts.

So make sure you watch out for the next episode right after this one coming soon. In this first episode, we discuss and dive so deep into the science around the importance of vitamin D and how it can actually treat COVID-19 and other diseases, the natural remedies for boosting your immune system based on science, what's the first thing we should do when we start to feel sick, and it's different than what a lot of people tell you, what the research shows and proves about contrast showers being good for us, the difference between COVID-19 cases at home versus COVID-19 cases at the hospital, and if it's worth taking supplements or not for our health. And this is a game changer.

I think you're going to be blown away by everything Dr. Schweltz is sharing. So make sure to share this with a friend if it inspires you. Just copy and paste the link lewishouse.com slash 1063. Text it to someone, post it on social media, and make sure to share it out anywhere you think people would be inspired by it. And before we get into this, I wanted to let you know that we just launched our Greatness Coaching Program, and it can be your high-performance system for 2021 and beyond. It includes coaching, accountability, community, and my new Greatness Playbook, where you will

reflect, plan, and create powerful vision for your life. I'm a big believer in having the right tools, the right training, the right strategy, and the right coaching to support you in your goals. If this feels like it's something you'd be interested in and a great fit for, then make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash my coach to apply today. Again, at any moment, make sure to share this episode with a friend when something inspires you and triggers you to look deeper into the science and let me know what you're thinking along the way as well. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Roger Schwelt. Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness. I am very excited about our guest. Dr. Schwelt is here to educate us on COVID, on vitamin D, and how to prevent

these things and optimize our health and a lot of other topics. He is quadruple board certified in internal medicine, pulmonary disease, critical care medicine, and sleep medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine. Doctor, welcome to the show. Very excited that you're here. You're a massive overachiever, and you do tons of research and data on many different topics, but one of them that's important for a lot of us today is understanding COVID. And you've been talking more about the impacts of vitamin D and how it can help prevent COVID-19

and potentially treat COVID-19. Is that what I've been learning more from your content? So are you able to share a little bit about the backstory of this discovery you've been finding and the research you've been finding and some ways we can apply this to our own life? Yeah, thanks, Lewis, for having me on. I'm not really an overachiever.

It's just, it took a lot of milestones to get to do what I do today, which is pulmonary and critical care. So I take care of patients in the hospital, in the ICU. Many of them recently obviously have COVID-19. Obviously it didn't used to be that way. I would just take care of regular people in the ICU. And now we've just been totally flooded with, with this here in Southern California. And just as a clinician, as a physician, I've had to look into and to try to keep up with all of the science that's coming down from COVID-19.

A year ago, we knew nothing about this disease and science focused on this like a laser and things started to come out. And what we were kind of forced to do was to look and see if we had current treatments available that might work for it. And that's how we have come to this position. But the vitamin chemistry major. So yeah, total nerd type of thing here. But one of my jobs as an undergraduate researcher in the lab was to make vitamin D products for the graduate students to do their research on.

I worked with Dr. Okamura, who was a biochemist, but he worked with, he was a chemist, but there was a number of biochemists, this was at UCR, that were looking at vitamin D and its ability to bind to its receptor and make all of these things. So let's talk a little bit about vitamin D since we started with that. If you just go to Google and just Google vitamin D and the structure of vitamin D, one of the things that you'd be struck with is it's a bunch of rings and circles for those of you who don't know chemistry. But then do the same thing for testosterone or estrogen or cortisol or aldosterone. These are essential steroids that the body needs to live.

If you lose these steroid hormones, you'll die in a matter of weeks to months. And if you look at vitamin D, it's unique to any other vitamin, vitamin B, vitamin B3, B6, B12, C, none of those look like this. Vitamin D is a steroid hormone. And what that means, what we know that that means, is that vitamin D binds to its receptor and goes into the nucleus of cells. And it affects how that cell transcribes its DNA, how it makes proteins. And so that's the first thing that you ought to realize, that vitamin D is not just some cofactor that binds to something and allows something to happen. It actually changed the behavior of your cells. So what does that mean?

So with vitamin D, it changes the behavior of your cells, enhancing the behavior of your cells, making it healthier, stronger, indestructible in a sense. It depends, yeah, it depends on the cell function. So sometimes the vitamin D will inhibit transcription of proteins. Sometimes it will enhance the transcription of proteins. And depending on what you want or what you need, that could have different effects. Vitamin D in general, is it good for people? Or am I hearing

you say that sometimes vitamin D may not be good in certain cases? No, it's good to have it when you have it. And in other words, sometimes you don't want to be transcribing proteins. For instance, if you're in a cytokine storm, and what is a cytokine storm that causes pneumonia and COVID-19? It's where you have too much cytokine. Cytokines are proteins.

And where are those proteins coming from? They're coming from cells that are producing them. And so vitamin D modulates this. It's the person with the lever that's saying, this is what we need at this moment. This is not what we need at this moment. Wow. Okay. So what else have you been finding in the research on vitamin D on how it actually can prevent COVID? Yeah. So vitamin D is kind of like the the cry wolf the boy that cries wolf because for years medicine has been looking at vitamin d and saying oh man it's good for rickets but it's probably good for a whole bunch of other things and they've done studies on it and sometimes

it comes up blank sometimes it comes up so it's kind of like yeah when a lot of scientists heard that vitamin d might be beneficial in covet 19 they, they said, yeah, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me type of thing. So that's why there's been a lot of resistance to saying that vitamin D is working. But if you go back to a study called a meta-analysis, this is where they take tons of studies and they pool it together so that the robustness of the data is huge and they can find things better. There was a study, a landmark study that was published in the British Medical Journal just a few years ago by a scientist named Martin O, who did a meta-analysis looking at vitamin D supplementation. And he found pretty significantly

that vitamin D supplementation on a regular basis, taking it either daily or weekly, decreased the incidence of acute chest infections. And this has been borne out multiple times. There's an Irish study that looked at this called TILDA. And they reported it recently as well. This is for acute chest infections, so generally viruses, viruses that affect the chest, so influenza, rhinovirus,

probably coronaviruses in there too, all of this done before COVID-19. So we knew from a medical standpoint that vitamin D supplementation, especially in patients, you know, this was done in Northern Europe where vitamin D deficiency is quite, you know, plentiful. So to see that that worked there, now let's take it and apply it to COVID-19 to see if it also works in COVID-19. Of course, the studies take a long time to do and we didn't have those studies early on. So that's where things started. time to do and we didn't have those studies early on. So that's where things started. And what have the studies shown you? Are you doing some of these studies yourself in your labs or are you seeing research that's being done and applying the science? No. So I'm not actually doing the research, but you almost need somebody to do this type of work

where you basically look across the spectrum, see the data that's coming out, and put it together and make sense of it. Yeah. So what have you seen with this? Yeah. So, okay. So you've got to remember before we get started in the research is that there are certain types of research that tell you certain things. There are large observational studies where you just kind of look and see what's going

on, and you'll see things that are associated with each other. It doesn't tell you that one is necessarily causing the other. You just see them showing up together. And that sort of gives you a hypothesis like maybe these are connected. For instance, if you saw that a lot of people with lung cancer also carried cigarette lighters in their pocket, right? You couldn't say that the cigarette lighter is causing the cancer, but they're showing up together. So maybe there's either something else that they're both causing or caused by each other. So that's what we started seeing in the first part of 2020 is observational studies. What did we see? We saw that people who are showing up to the hospital with COVID-19 were deficient in

vitamin D, that people who did worse in COVID-19 were deficient in vitamin D. We started seeing that people who are older, people who have darker skin, are the people that also are deficient in vitamin D, and they also have worse COVID. And so we started to see this connection, but the words that go through any graduate of medical school or any biostatistician will tell you that association does not necessarily mean causation. And so that's where we were for the most of 2020 until just the last few months, was these studies over and over again. Yes, we can predict how well they're gonna do based on their vitamin D levels. Yes, if they're lower,

they're probably gonna have a worse course. But the part that we couldn't say what based on that data was if we give vitamin d is that going to change something because maybe the disease is making the vitamin d go down and make them sick and it's just like you know if i take a cigarette lighter out of someone's pocket is it going to make their lung cancer go away or prevent right so that's the kind of thing. So now enter randomized controlled trials. And this is what we do. We say, okay, we're going to start off.

We're going to randomize people. We're going to blind ourselves to it, blind them to it. For one, we're going to give vitamin D. For the other, we're not. And then we're going to see what happens. Yeah. And so how many of these trials have been going on?

And what are the findings from these blind tests? So there's a lot of trials going on right now looking at this. There's one where they're actually going to look at about 5,000 people. It's being conducted in Great Britain and we don't have that data yet. The data that we do have are on a few. Let's talk about those. So there's one called the Shade Study. This was done in India on just about 100 or so people where they gave mega doses of vitamin D in people coming into the hospital with COVID-19. 60,000 units they gave. Is this injected? Is this orally?

This is oral medication. Generally speaking, when you buy over-the-counter tablets- It takes 5,000 or 500, right? You're like- Exactly. Exactly. This is 60,000 or 500, right? You're like... Exactly, exactly. So this is 60,000 units daily for seven days. That's a lot of vitamin D. It is a lot of vitamin D. So for seven days, they did this. And what they found was that the inflammatory markers

in those patients were lower. And they found that as opposed to only 20% of the patients clearing the virus after three weeks, 60% of the patients cleared the virus in three weeks. So it wasn't powered to look at survival and these sorts of things. They didn't notice any difference there in terms of that, but that was a study that was done. There was another study that was done in Brazil where they gave 250,000 units times one. They just gave them a whopping, I mean, it was like, yeah. You're drinking vitamin D in supplement form.

Exactly. It was incredible. They didn't see any difference there, although they did measure that vitamin D levels went up inside, so it worked. They did not notice any improvement. The problem there, though, of course, is there was some problem with the randomization in that study where the intervention group, the vitamin D group, actually had sicker patients, more diabetes. And so it wasn't clear whether or not that was just a bad randomization or whether there was no effect. The one that has the most promise, and this is the thing you got to understand about vitamin D, is vitamin D, so let's back up a little

bit and talk about vitamin D. So people say, well, should I take vitamin D3, D2? What is vitamin D? So this is how it works. You have cholesterol in your body and it's hanging around. And when ultraviolet B radiation comes from the sun, it comes through the epidermis, which is the top layer of your skin, and then it penetrates down into the dermis. And it comes with just enough energy to do a conformational change on one of the carbon bonds, which flips it to be kind of nerdy here, but it actually converts, the ultraviolet radiation converts the cholesterol structure into vitamin D. When you get sunlight, is there a certain amount of sunlight on a daily basis we should be consuming on the skin? So you typically want to, there's people that have gone into the details of this

and I can never remember, but you need about 15, 20, 30 minutes of sunlight a day. And since we're on the topic, there's different types of ultraviolet light. There's UVA, UVB, and UVC. So let's dispense with UVC because it doesn't have much to do with the conversation, although there is some data that UVC can kill coronavirus, but that's another topic. UVA can penetrate pretty far. And unfortunately, UVA has no role in the production of vitamin D. It's not useful. UVA is ultraviolet radiation that causes skin aging. It can cause cancers on your skin, melanoma. So it's not something that you really want to have. And sometimes it can actually even penetrate through glass. Unfortunately, UVB does not penetrate glass. So sitting in front of a window with the sun coming in is not going to help you in terms of vitamin D. You actually have to be in the sun.

You have to be exposed with no blockage, nothing in between. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's UVA. So UVA will not penetrate glass. Sorry, will penetrate glass. UVB will not penetrate glass. And it's the UVB that we need. So how do you get UVB? That's just sitting out in the sun. You got to go in the sun. And what about people who say, you know what, I don't want to look older with my skin. I don't want to get skin disease or cancer. So I'm going to lather up with all this sunscreen to protect my skin. Should we use sunscreen or is it more, you know,

be in the sun for 15 minutes, then put sunscreen on? Yeah. So that's exactly right. B is not going to penetrate sunscreen very well either. So it's, it's really, it boils down to this risk benefit, you know, so you've got to look do i want to look good and and not have wrinkles or do i want to be healthy so so there are some there are some solutions to this right so uh fish oil is rich in vitamin d there are certain uh uh like mushrooms that are rich in vitamin d and of course we look we live in 2021 right we've got supplementation so you can take that and not get the risk there. So that's a good benefit.

So is supplementation, if I'm taking vitamin D vitamins, 500, 5,000, whatever, vitamins, is that as powerful as 15 minutes of sunlight or is it not going to be as beneficial? Yeah, it depends. It depends on too many things. It depends on your skin color. So unfortunately, if you're interested in getting a lot of vitamin D, the darker your skin, that's melanin that's blocking that ultraviolet radiation. And so you've got to stay out in the sun longer to get the same amount of- It's natural sunblock. That's correct. So you need to stay out longer than if you're more fair-skinned or lighter-skinned, then you only need 10, 15 minutes.

That's correct. And that is the reason why it was thought that why are we seeing so many people of skin color coming into the hospital with COVID-19 particularly? Those are the ones with the lower vitamin D levels historically. Is this what you're seeing in your hospital in California? Absolutely. Absolutely. Really?

Wow. So to go back, so you go through, you get vitamin D, but you're still not done yet because now the liver has to convert that into something called 25-hydroxyvitamin D. The liver takes a little hydroxyl group, puts it onto the carbon, and now it's ready to be used. This is the form, by the way, that we measure when you go to the doctor and you get a blood test. We're going to measure the 25-hydroxyvitamin D. So all of these studies that we've talked about, we're measuring 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. But the studies that we were describing, like, for instance, the SHADE study and the Brazilian study, these are given vitamin D.

So they still have to go through the liver. They still have to get hydroxylated. And that can take several days. So in this last study that was done in Cordona, Spain, they jumped right ahead and they supplemented these patients. They gave them pretty high doses of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D to start off with. And the results in that pilot study were pretty astounding. In the intervention group, they went from 50% of patients needing intensive care unit to just 2%. And that's a massive reduction in terms of the need for intensive care.

So, okay, so what did they do when they came into the hospital? They gave them this dosage right away. They gave them a high dose of this medication called 25-hydroxyvitamin D, otherwise known as calcifediol. That's the medical name for 25-hydroxyvitamin D. They gave it to them on day one, day three, and on day seven. And it reduced to 2% eliminating it? It went from 50% of the patients in the placebo group needing ICU to 2% of the patients in the intervention group,

in the calcifidyl group, needing intensive care. That's a dramatic reduction. So intensive care, meaning being on a ventilator, being taken care of the whole time. And the others, only 2% being in there. And then what? Their symptoms went away eventually after 14 days? Yeah. Nobody died in the intervention group. 7.7% of those in the placebo group died. So there was also some issues with randomization there, except in the opposite direction, that there seemed to be sicker people in the placebo group, so the randomization wasn't perfect. But they're planning on doing a much bigger study. So we'll get some data probably here in the next few months.

So this is a drug or this is a supplement? So we'll get some data probably here in the next few months. So this is a drug or this is a supplement? This is a drug. So you're required a prescription for this. And it's not cheap. It's actually currently used by kidney doctors to treat problems with the parathyroid gland, which is responsible for calcium in patients with kidney disease. So it's not readily available.

But it is available if you need to use it in the hospital. And we've been doing it recently, just started recently. And so I don't have a lot of data on our patients that we're seeing, but obviously some people are getting better, some people are not. What are you recommending to people in terms of a daily prescription for natural remedies? Is it go out into the sun at 8 a.m. for 15 minutes? Does it take vitamin D supplements? Does it eat mushrooms? What are you suggesting to your patients? So for people who have not contacted COVID-19, we actually did a video on this on MedCram. It was update 59. We recently just did the top 10 tips for, you know, if you actually have positive COVID. And so what I'm recommending is based on a lot of it's based on data in other viruses.

Some of it's based on data in COVID-19, but we can just go down the list. Number one, vitamin D. So let's talk about vitamin D. How much should you be taking? The, you know, there's been some studies that show that if people who are at risk for vitamin D deficiency, so people who are darker color, living at higher latitudes, specifically above the 35th parallel, which is around the southern border of Tennessee. If you're in California, it's kind of just south of Santa Barbara, that area.

Then taking vitamin D supplementation is a good idea. So how much is too much? We actually probably overestimate the toxicity of vitamin D. It's probably one of the safest fat-soluble vitamins. That being said, it's not completely risk-free. But the Endocrinology Society says this. They say that what is the maximum dose that you can take without supervision from a physician?

And for someone who is at risk for vitamin D deficiency, the answer is 4,000 international units daily. 4,000 daily? Yeah. Okay. And so what would I do if someone asked me, I take 5,000 international units daily just because I had my levels checked.

I think the right answer is, if you can, get your levels checked. Got it. And where would you want to be? It's measured in nanograms per milliliter. I would say based on the data that we've seen, the retrospective data in the United States, we see that there is an increase in SARS-CoV-2 positivity once you start going below 50 nanograms per milliliter. once you start going below 50 nanograms per milliliter. So if you're not above 50,

you might want to bump it up at least over the winter season. And wouldn't you know it that what are we seeing? We're seeing a rebound in SARS-CoV-2 in the winter season. So this is not rocket science. It's because we're not getting enough sunlight. The days are short. People don't have enough vitamin D. And so this is what the theory is. So that's vitamin D.

Number three? So the other thing that I would talk about is NAC. That's one of the things that we've been talking about. NAC is N-acetylcysteine. There is some pretty good data that shows that SARS-CoV-2, when it infects your cell, it knocks out the receptor called the ACE2 receptor. This ACE2 receptor is very important in regulating oxidative stress in your body. We could talk for an hour about oxidative stress and hydroxy radicals and things

that are very high in people who get COVID-19. So diabetes, obesity, oxidative stress is very high. So you get this viral hit and it tips you over the edge. So one of the things that may be beneficial is consuming products that are antioxidants. So berries, strawberries, raspberries, elderberries, blackberries, all of those are excellent things to do. But if you want to increase even more, then taking 600 milligrams of NAC twice daily was shown in a previous study to reduce

the symptoms of the flu virus in a winter season when it was done prospectively. So in other words, they randomized people to placebo versus 600 milligrams of NAC twice daily. And they did not see a difference in the incidence of the flu in those people, but they did notice a significant reduction in the severity of the illness that the people suffered when they were on NAC. So I don't have data. So instead of being on your couch for a week, So instead of being on your couch for a week, you're able to walk around and just feel less sluggish, right? Exactly.

NAC is over-the-counter? Yes. And how do you spell that? N, so that's N, and then a dash, acetyl, A-C. You're asking somebody here to spell this. It's actually marketed under NAC. If you just go and type in N-A-C, you'll have it. N-A-C. Got it. Okay, cool. NAC. N-acetylcysteine.

Take twice daily. Twice daily, 600 milligrams. I wouldn't do it forever, but maybe over a winter season for three or four months while we're in the pandemic. That's probably a wise choice. What else do you recommend? I think zinc is really important too. I would not take more than 40 milligrams of elemental zinc a day because as you increase your zinc intake, you can reduce your copper in your body. And that's not a good thing.

You want to have enough copper. So zinc and copper are kind of like on a seesaw. But if you want to maximize your zinc intake, 40 milligrams of elemental zinc. I say that because when you pick up a zinc supplement, it could be zinc picolinate. It could be zinc sulfate. All of those have a different molecular weight. And so the milligram is just going to be different.

But if the bottle is worth anything to put the pills in, it'll tell you how much elemental zinc is in there. 40 milligrams is the maximum daily dose. Okay. And you're doing all these steps yourself too, right? Oh, yeah. I'm smart because I basically tell my wife what to do and every morning the pills are there, I don't even have to worry about remembering it because if I did, I would not do it. Yeah. You've got to plan and put it out in front of time and make sure you have it all set up to win. Okay. What's next? So this is where it gets a little bit less in terms of time and make sure you have it all set up to win. Okay, what's next?

So this is where it gets a little bit less in terms of evidence. So there is some evidence that zinc can help stop viral replication. The protein that the virus uses inside your cells to make more of those viruses is called replicase. And there is some evidence in vitro data, albeit, that zinc shuts that down. The problem is that when you take zinc, you need to get that zinc inside the cell. And one of the things that has been looked at and has had some promise in Ebola, for instance, and was being studied in this virus is quercetin. Quercetin is a natural product. It's over-the-counter. It's high in concentration in capers,

in onions, in vegetables, roots, basically. And so I don't see a lot of downside with taking quercetin. And so I do that as well. Okay, you'll add that in your daily practice. Yes. And then the last thing, I left the last thing for the end. And that's something that

you're probably like, what are you doing with this? And it's a long story that we can break into. But contrast showers. Oh, yes. You're speaking my language. Yeah. You're speaking my, so hot and cold or cold only. I do hot for five minutes and then I do cold for one minute, and then I do five for hot again, and then one for cold, and then finish it up with three for hot and one for cold. And the one that clued me onto that formula was a Dr. Neil Nedley, who is out of Weimar, California, who's actually done a lot of research

and it actually has a clinic up there called New Start that's doing this sort of stuff and with amazing results. So this isn't clinically tested yet, but you feel like this- Let me tell you the story. Yeah, tell me the story. It's a long story, but- Because we've had Wim Hof on who is a proponent of this and the power of boosting immunity and how he's done these kind of superhuman tests where they've injected him with viruses.

And he's been able to essentially say, no, go away from my body in the cold and through breathing and mindset. So, yeah, I'd love to hear your story on this. So you don't need to be, well, you don't need to be Hoff to do that. You don't need to be, you know, part of the polar bear club. Not to say that there isn't some use for that. So I started to look into the research on this. And one of the areas that really helped my fascination was the 1919 pandemic, 1918 flu pandemic and what happened. So one of the things that you've got to understand about COVID is the timing. Timing is everything.

And really, there are two phases to this disease. And you can really draw the line with COVID is when someone is at home versus when someone is at the hospital. COVID and what's going on with COVID at home is completely a different animal than what's going on in the hospital. And I'll explain. And this has been borne out by research and studies. And I think this is not controversial. This is pretty well understood, is that when somebody is infected with SARS-CoV-2, it suppresses the innate immune system. Now, the innate immune system is part of your immune system that gives you a fever. It sends out these macrophages to kill things that don't look like what it's supposed to look like, as opposed to the adaptive immune system, which is later on,

that's antibodies, that's protein structures, that's T cells, B cells. So what the virus does is it has a strategy where it infects the person, it suppresses the immune system, it allows it to replicate and spread into multiple organs of your body. And then when the adaptive immune system comes on, it now has all of these cells that it has to attack. All of that inflammation, especially in the lung, can put you into pneumonia, get you hospitalized and on a ventilator. And so the strategy should be at the beginning of the virus is to improve, is to substantiate,

is to boost the innate immune system to get rid of the virus before it gets to that phase. But what we're noticing is when people get to the hospital and they have pneumonia, is the immune system is over ramped. It's causing inflammation too much and that's why things like steroids work. That's why things like anti-inflammatories work. And so what we're noticing is when we do randomized controlled trials on remdesivir, which is an antiviral, that's going to work early best. When we look at steroids, we found that that only

worked great at the end. And so the timing is really the key. So when you understand that, you'll understand that one of the tools of the innate immune system is something called interferon. Interferon is a protein and it does exactly as it sounds. It interferes with viral infections. What SARS-CoV-2 does at the very beginning of this is it takes interferon and suppresses it. And it does it in a way because it uses its proteins in a way that it suppresses the body's ability to create interferon, to use interferon. We know that from very well-conducted studies that have shown that people who have innate problems with interferon always seem to have very bad courses with SARS-CoV-2.

People who have mutations with low interferon levels have very bad courses of SARS-CoV-2. So we want to strengthen interferon. Correct. So with that in mind, with that framework in mind, one of the things that I looked into is what did people do prior to 1928? And why do I say 1928? It's because in 1928, we discovered penicillin. And penicillin and the use of penicillin, prior to penicillin, when you went to the hospital, things were very labor intensive. The doctors, the nurses, they would be doing hydrotherapy.

They would be doing all of these treatments that were very, very labor intensive. After 1928 and the production of penicillin and antibiotics and drugs and the FDA and randomized controlled trials, now we were able to control disease by affecting the pathology, so the bacteria. And so a lot of that, what we learned, had gone away. So what was it back in prior to 1928? What was it that we did in these hospitals when the flu pandemic arrived? And so I started to research that. And what I found was something that was really interesting and started to really attract my attention and start to look into it. If you go back, there was a number of hospitals, especially in the northeastern part of the United States, which is where America basically was centered at that time.

There was this rebirth, if you will, among the snake oil experts and the people peddling morphine and arsenic for all of these things that could work. There was this understanding of this rebirth in the late 1800s about natural remedies and about things in terms of nature and fresh air, sunlight, these sorts of things. And these hospitals, they were known as sanitariums. Well, there was one particular fellow, actually a number of them. There was a Dr. Jackson in New York, but more notably, John Harvey Kellogg, who you may recognize that name as starting Kellogg's Corn Flakes and this health food industry back at that time.

He was the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which was the world's largest hospital. And they saw very, very elite patients, people like JCPenney, people like Montgomery Ward, people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart. They would all go to this hospital. They were like the Cleveland Clinic of their time. Exactly, exactly. And these weren't just like things that they were pulling out of a hat.

These things worked. And that's why people went there, because it was the state of the art. So what did they do? They were using hydrothermal therapy. They were heating up the patient. I mean, if you can see pictures of this, it's a hilarious crack up because you'll look down the hospital hallway and you'll see these rooms, these treatment rooms with little holes. And out of these little holes were their heads.

The patient's heads were popping out. And this room was used to heat up the body. It was a hot box. It was a sauna. Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly what they were body. It was a hot box. It was a sauna. Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly what they were doing. And keeping their head cool.

Now, this type of treatment spread and it was well understood. And I think the zenith of this, interestingly, was a guy by the name of Wagner Jurek. He was an Austrian psychiatrist. And he had his insane asylum there in Austria. And there was obviously a lot of people with neurosyphilis. Neurosyphilis is a condition, obviously, where you have syphilis that goes to the brain. It's a type of bacteria. It's an organism. And this was before penicillin. So we couldn't treat it. We could treat malaria, is before penicillin. So we couldn't treat it. We could treat malaria, but we couldn't treat it.

So this guy, Jureg, Wagner Jureg, noticed that when his neurosyphilis patients had fevers, they actually responded and they got better. Their symptoms abated. And so he had this idea, what would happen if I purposefully infected them with malaria. Because malaria gives you really high fevers. And so he did it. And wouldn't you know it, he cured them of their neurosyphilis. No way. And then he treated them. Yeah.

And then he treated them with the known treatment at the time for malaria, cleared the malaria. So he was able to basically cure neurosyphilis by inducing a fever. And for this, he actually won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, ironically, in 1927, the year before penicillin was discovered. So if you look at the 30,000 foot level about where we've come in the United States, and in fact, the world in the last 100 years, we were going down a path of enhancing the body's own way of dealing with the virus or whatever bacteria, whatever it was. The immune system is so incredibly complex. We didn't understand it at the time, but we understand it now.

It has so many ways, so many angles of attacking pathogens that if we are able to just turn on that machine, that machine is going to be, I mean, let's look at it. People who get infected with coronavirus today, more than 80% of them recover on their own because of the immune system. It's only a small amount of people that cannot deal with the infection and they end up in the hospital because we have so many people being infected that it's overwhelming our system. So what happened in 1928 was the discovery of penicillin, the discovery of all these medications, randomized controlled trials, the FDA, that what we've done is since that

time, we've gone down a road where we take a chronic disease, we study it, we know and we do the randomized trials, which is what we should do. And we come up with treatments that treat that. And that works really well until you have a pandemic. And now you have a brand new disease that comes on the scene. It is overwhelming everybody. There's no way we can do the randomized controlled trials fast enough. And so what I became interested in is, is there something that we can do that isn't a pill, that doesn't need to be prescribed,

that doesn't need to have a factory to make, that we can do to already enhance a system that we are already given when we're born to help deal with the disease that's already kind of dealing with it anyway. But if we could just go from 80% to 85, 80 to 90%, that would take care of it. That would have a tremendous impact on taking off the stress from our healthcare system. So that's what I intended to do. So I looked at what were these guys doing at the time of the pandemic? Because here these people are, they know what to do with these diseases. This is the treatments that they're using. What did they do during the pandemic to treat this? And wouldn't you know it, I found the resource and it was amazing.

And I'll stop there to see if there's any questions before I go on because the next part was just mind-blowing. Yeah, what's the resource or what's the research on this? Okay, so there was this guy by the name of Dr. Rubel. Dr. Rubel was the medical director of the sanitarium in Boston. It was the New England Sanitarium. And he said, this is what he said. He said, basically I'm paraphrasing.

He wrote this article in a, it wasn't even a scientific journal. It was a church periodical. These were all Seventh-day Adventist institutions in the northeastern part of the United States that were doing hydrotherapy. Same thing with the Battle Creek Sanitarium. And what he wrote in there is like, the pandemic has offered us this opportunity to really put to the test these type of treatments that we're doing. Let's see if it works. So this is what he did.

He coupled, he got all of the information from about 10 sanitariums in the northeast of the United States, and he pooled the data. And then he went to the army camps, because in the army camps, they had the best, they had the brightest doctors, they had all of the resources. As you remember from 1918, these people from Europe, these soldiers were coming back to the United States. The war had just ended, and they were bringing back, unfortunately with them, the flu. And so as they came back, they made these camps in the United States and they were treating these people. So about 20% of the people in the camps came down with the flu. And when they came down with the flu, again, two components to the disease. The first part was the virus, the viral replication phase. And then pneumonia.

And if they got pneumonia, there's no antibiotics. It was almost like a death sentence because it was about 40% to 50% mortality rate. Okay? Wow. So the key was is you don't want them to get to the pneumonia stage. You want to get this before it gets to the pneumonia stage. And the thinking in the army camps at the time was, what's killing these people?

It must be the fever. It must be the symptoms of the flu. And so aspirin had just come out in 1899, Bayer aspirin. Ironically, it was a German company that came up with aspirin. And so they were giving aspirin to all of these people in the camps. I mean, because aspirin would take away the fever. Aspirin, ironically, the fever is the sign that the innate immune system is doing something, right? You get interferon, fever goes up. And so the very thing that was trying to help these patients, they were getting rid of. They were suppressing it, which was causing them to be more sick.

Exactly. And so at the end of the day, it was about 10, 15% of these patients were coming down with pneumonia, okay? Because they were giving aspirin and all of these sorts of things. Compare that now to what was going on in the sanitariums. So in the sanitariums, they were not doing this. What they were doing, what was the treatment? What was the rational treatment

in the words of Dr. Rubel that they were doing? What was the treatment? What was the rational treatment in the words of? Dr. Rubel that they were doing so as soon as they came down with symptoms, they would isolate them. They would put them in bed They would have them rest They would also expose them several times a day to sunlight sunshine fresh air ventilation was very important And then they would do something called fomentations. And that's the old term for hydrotherapy. Essentially what they would do, practically speaking, is they would get a pot of boiling water. They would put these towels into the pot of boiling water, take it out, wring it out, and they would place it on the bed. The patient would lie on this with a sheet in between so they wouldn't be burned. And then they would place fomentations on top of them, basically creating, if you will, a hot box.

And they would do this for about 20 minutes. When they were done, they would then put cold water on them and rub it. And basically to cause vasoconstriction, we now understand, and lock that heat in. So only about two to 3% of those patients came down with pneumonia. So at the end of the day,

the overall case infectivity of mortality rate was like six percent for the army camps and one percent for these hospitals, these sanitariums. So then I looked at that. I said, that is remarkable. It's not a randomized controlled that. I said, that is remarkable. That here we have, it's not a randomized controlled trial, different populations, different things, but it at least tells me that this has been tried before. I mean, a Nobel Prize has been given on the basis of this type of treatment. And here's something that you don't need a prescription for.

You don't need a test. If you feel bad, you can start this right away. And so as one of my recommendations, going back to the original question, doing contrast showers is a nice way of doing this as a tonic to help prevent and keep your immune system on kind of a sentinel mode looking around. But if you actually come down with it, if I've gotten where I think I might be coming down with something, I will do the hot fomentations and you'll just be sweating there. But after you're done, you feel amazing.

Really? So if you feel like, okay, I'm getting a cold, I'm getting a flu, I'm getting a virus, whatever, something, what would you do from that moment as you started to feel that? You go right into hot, cold showers? Is it the- So the first thing I would do is I would alert my wife.

Yeah, of course. Because it's hard to do it on yourself yeah and and what she'll do is she'll get a a large foot bath and she'll put the hottest water you can tolerate in there and put that on the ground i'll lay down yep and i'll put my feet in there um and that that helps anything that any part of your body that you can do to try to heat it up heat up your core body temperature is important okay so so basically we'll put down a hot towel i'll lay on that keep my feet in there anything up, heat up your core body temperature is important. Okay. So basically, we'll put down a hot towel. I'll lay on that, keep my feet in there. Anything that will increase your core body temperature.

Cover me up with a blanket. So I'll be basically in my own hot box. I'll have a cold towel on my head, cold towel across my carotid arteries here so that my head remains cool and it doesn't know that my body is being heated, but I'm being heated up. And then that's for about 20 minutes. And then that comes off. I get cold water on the feet, cold water on my chest.

And then for just a brief moment, for about 30 seconds, and then I go lay down. And you can do that once, twice a day. And what that will do, and this is not hocus pocus. day and what that will do. And this is not hocus pocus. They have actually done the studies where they will take monocytes, which are responsible for secreting interferon, take monocytes out of, they've done the study where they take them out of people at different temperatures, and then they expose them to bacterial challenge or some sort of foreign challenge. or some sort of foreign challenge. And right when you get to about 39 degrees,

the interferon response goes up tenfold. I mean, it starts to go up, starts to go up, and then right about 39 degrees centigrade, which is maybe 102 degrees Fahrenheit, you get a tenfold increase in interferon response, which is exactly the same substance that we are lacking early on in the course of this disease, COVID-19. Is this something that someone could prevent on a weekly basis where they do hot, cold as well? Or is this just something you do in the shower? It's like, okay, let me do hot, cold for five minutes and help me there. So I do my showers hot, cold,

but that's another point that you bring up because there is a whole society on this planet that does literally this pretty much twice a week, five times a week, and you know who I'm talking about. Yeah, and they don't get sick. Or they say that, you know, I talked to Wim Hof and he's like,

I don't remember the last time I got sick. Yeah, I mean, there's the Finns. There are so many saunas in Finland that if you were to ask every Finnish person to go into a sauna at the same time, there would be enough saunas to do that. Yeah. And then they jump in the cold.

They jump in the cold water. And so if you look at the COVID data in Finland, they outperform just about any other Nordic country next to them in terms of mortality rate, in terms of, I mean, not to say that the Swedes don't do saunas and the Norwegians don't do saunas. They just don't do it as much. And the data is actually a little bit overestimating because a number of people, a lot of people who are in Helsinki that came down with COVID were actually people, immigrants from Africa that had come down. There was a huge problem early on.

Interesting. And that goes back to the vitamin D issue. So here we have people with dark skin coming from Africa who are used to getting the sunlight that they need to stay healthy. And now you're putting them literally at the other extreme of the planet where through the winter, the sun may not even come up. And they are at extreme risk of getting a vitamin D and huge problems in terms of COVID-19. So is steam room and saunas also beneficial in hot tubs or you think just hot, cold showers? I think, you know, it's interesting.

I think all of those things are acceptable. If you look culturally, and I've talked to people from Iran, I've talked to people from Asia, I've talked to people from Africa, in every one of their stories, there's always a grandma that knows when someone gets sick to heat them up. I mean, whether it's using the sand in Iran or using the hot pools, they all seem to have this understanding in their DNA, for lack of a better term. It seems as though we knew this as a society for many years. But because of technological advances and just labor and ease of treatment, we've kind of forgotten it. Right. We're just able to take this pill and that'll make you feel

better. But heating someone up when they start to feel some type of sick for 15, 20 minutes, making the head or the neck cool, heating it up and then putting cold afterwards and then resting sounds like a simple remedy that we could all do naturally. Yeah. And if people are interested in this, a website that I found that's really helpful is a simple one. It's just hydrotherapyathome.com. They have a number of resources that I found that are very helpful, videos to show how to do it. There's another website that I found called hydro4covid.com. That's a number four there, hydro4covid.com, where they actually go through the techniques. And what a lot of these websites have done that have been doing this, because there's been this

sort of background movement all this time for the last hundred years that never fully got rid of hydrotherapy, especially in the physical therapy literature. They use it extensively for people's muscle aches, for people's, you know, when people are recovering from certain diseases. Physical or physiotherapists love to use hydrotherapy because it's been shown to work. It probably works for more than just that. What they did there on those websites is they tried to go back to, you know, what John Harvey Kellogg used in their protocols. You can actually get the book that John Harvey Kellogg wrote. It's about 1,000 pages. And the name of the book is Rational Hydrotherapy. It's available on Google Books. Someone scanned it in. Some poor soul scanned every 1,000 page in there. And you can read it. And these guys were, I mean, they were giants back then.

They were just amazing. Wow. I'm curious. You're exposed to COVID every day, right? I mean, you're exposed to people with COVID every day, essentially, right? Yeah. Have you got COVID yourself? Not that I'm aware of.

You know, I never, if I had symptoms of a virus, it lasted about a day and then went away. So I figured that couldn't have been COVID. But at the same time, one of the things is when I go into the hospital, I've got PPE, there's negative pressure rooms. It's probably if somebody gets COVID at the hospital, almost always it's because of something they did outside the hospital. Really? Yeah. I'm curious, is there a way, do you believe that with all these disciplines that we could do, with all the steps, with all the strategies, you know, all this stuff,

is there a way to prevent it from, and actually, if COVID entered our body, that we could reject it and disintegrate it or just, it would not affect us? Is that possible? It's possible if we had the kind of, I mean, it happens every day. People get COVID every day and their immune system kicks it out. Kills it. Problem, yeah.

The problem is that we have comorbidities. And so if you were to look at it, I mean, there's different populations that have different abilities. We can predict, it's not different abilities. We can predict. It's not a mystery. We can predict plugging in your information, your age, your comorbidities, your weight, your BMI, all of these things. We can kind of predict what your chances are of getting it.

And then if you do get it, what your chances are of dying. What's comorbidities? What's that mean? Comorbidities, other diseases, diabetes, hypertension. If you have other diseases, then the immune system probably won't be able to defend it as well. Yeah, exactly. And so that's why we take a multi-pronged approach. And so one of the biggest, in my opinion, one of the biggest barriers to getting what we need to get done is just perceptions and politics and all of these sorts of things. So if you come to MedCram, which is where we do a lot of the stuff,

you'll never be able to figure out, you know, Kyle and I are sort of the co-founders of MedCram. You wouldn't be able to figure out if I was a Democrat and he was a Republican or vice versa. I mean, that's one of the things that bothers me about this is that we're talking about people's lives, and people's lives, you know, in my opinion, rank at the top. Politics is like a hobby that you might want to do.

But to see what we've done, where we've actually used this pandemic to promote our politics, is just so. And so I talk about masks and say, oh, you talked about masks. You must be a Democrat. But then I talk about masks and say, oh, you talked about masks. You must be a Democrat. But then I talk about natural remedies too. Oh, well, then you must be one of these anti-vaxxers. No, I mean, even a dead clock is right twice a day, right? So, I mean, just go for the truth and speak what the data speaks and let the rest take care of itself.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and make sure to share it. We have another part from this powerful interview with Dr. Roger Shwelt coming very soon. So stay tuned to that. And if this is your first time here, make sure to click that subscribe button over on Apple Podcast right now.

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to get motivational and inspirational messages direct to your phone from me. And I want to leave you with this quote from poet Lee Hunt, who said, The groundwork for all happiness is good health. We have so much going on right now where we are living in uncertainty and a lot of fear at times. And I want to remind you that when you take care of your health first, you can have the confidence throughout your day to know at least you're doing everything you can to protect your mind and your body. And I want to remind you, if no one's told you lately that you are loved,

you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.