"Pandemic Mood Disorder" and Other Updates in Coronavirus News

Is this a thing?

I think so. I just now made up this term to describe what I'm seeing in my office these days. Back in September I proposed some ideas about post-recovery syndromes from actually having COVID-19. So far I have not seen very many people with physical problems after having COVID-19. The few I have seen seem to be doing mostly ok, but it's still early, since some have yet to return for a follow up visit. 

This doesn't surprise me too much: Most folks don't think of alternative medicine to treat the sequel of a brand new disease. So stay tuned. I suspect I'll have more to say in the coming months.

What I am seeing a lot are cases of people who are ordinarily not depressed or especially anxious, suddenly displaying signs and symptoms of clinical depression and anxiety disorders. I'm seeing behavior and conduct disorders in kids who have been kept from other kids as their parents aim to protect the family from coronavirus infection. 

I have been giving remedies for these disturbance, but not in all cases. This is because sometimes a basic "psychological hygiene" approach will address the problem. Lately I've been "prescribing" play dates for kids, establishing safer bubbles of friends and neighbors for respite and interaction, and even exercise as means of relieving the indefinite sense of pointlessness and boredom that have become a part of daily life for so many.

Remedies can heal a lot of problems, or at least help heal them, but some things are a matter of the environment. No matter how many great remedies a person takes, if he continues to smoke cigarettes, there's going to be some ongoing harm that can cause or aggravate disease. I can give a smoker Bryonia for a cough, but the cough will only improve a bit if the patient keeps engaging in the behavior that aggravated a cough in the first place!

I can give remedies for fatigue and weight problems, but if the person never engages in exercise and good nutrition, those remedies are only going to take him so far. Environment--both exterior and interior to the person--matters. The pandemic has created an environment of what I call an "ongoing toxic exposure" for many people. It's important to find ways to address our usual human needs. These don't change. We can be creative about how to address them, but that creativity can only go so far when we consider how human beings are wired and constructed.

For example, no number of Zoom play-dates will substitute for the need children have to physically and freely interact with their peers. Development just won't be the same if contact with other kids their own age is 2-dimenstional and structured through remote electronic contact. We end up with a choice: Am I more worried about a virus? Or the long term effects on my child's development of prolonged and indefinite lockdown?

I don't have a ready answer for that. Parents and people facing adult isolation have to navigate this for themselves. I can give developmental and psychiatric advice, but I can't resolve people's personal feelings, anxieties, and hopes with their moral or ethical mindsets. But I can at least specify the terms of the problem. We've been very focused on control of viral spread, but that is not the only thing at issue, and I thought that today I would share what I am seeing as a way to make the matter of choosing more understandable.

"Are you getting the vaccine?"

Homeopaths are kind of famous for rejecting immunization, and many view vaccines as a definite hazard to a person's health. Those of you who know me know that I do not.

Vaccines work, mostly. In a way they are themselves "homeopathic" in a sense (or technically, "isopathic") in that you're giving something that would in its natural state--a virus, bacteria--cause the disease we're trying to prevent. The published side effect profiles are generally pretty mild and catastrophic adverse events are rare. In homeopathic medical school we were presented with the idea that sometimes contact with a vaccine may lead to subtle or major health changes not on the published lists of side effects. 

I find this plausible, and is also a statistical explanation for research that has failed to find specific diseases linked to specific vaccines, such as the lack of a statistical link between MMR vaccine and autism. In this way, even if MMR use isn't likely to lead to a higher risk of autism specifically (that we have proven), the proposal that any vaccines may lead to an increased risk any disease hasn't been studied. So we don't know.

So this leads some people to decide, "that risk, however small, isn't for me." They don't immunize. Others decide, "that risk is small enough, and the risk I feel for the actual disease the vaccine prevents is large enough, that I'm going to immunize." As we see: it's still a matter of choosing among different risks. It's no way to run a public health program, but it is a way to view one's own health, or the health of one's children one is responsible for.

I have covered the whole conversation about this in general elsewhere. Here I'll focus it on a possible coronavirus vaccine.

"Are going to get the vaccine?" My answer to this has been "I probably won't be first in line." I could be. As a health care worker, I'll certainly qualify. Why won't I be? If you go to my "Research" page on my website, you'll see I was involved with nearly three dozen drug trials in my time doing HIV medicine. One thing I learned from that and from my 30+ years in this business observing patients is that in post-marketing trials--that is, the observations we can make of people getting a product after it is licensed and in general use--is that numbers matter. Sometimes it takes a few hundred thousand uses to see weird side effects emerge. 

Ok, but that means such side effects are statistically unlikely. Good. But I kind of want to know what those rare events are before I complete my personal "risk-to-benefit" equation. Most of the time vaccines don't seem to hurt people. There are  times when the risk might be greater or lesser. As an example, a flu shot usually isn't a big deal, but I have observed that for people with systems in a delicate balance, or when they're on a new remedy for chronic conditions, it might be best to hold off on a vaccine for the moment, until their health is more stable.

It's a myth that little things are completely harmless. It is a law of Nature that anything added to a system will change that system in some way. It is also a law of Nature that you can never be sure that such a change will be trivial. Sometimes it isn't. We're all a bit different!

So will I get the vaccine? Maybe. But I think I'll sit back and observe the roll out for a while before I decide.

So in the meantime stay well, be peaceful, and do the best you can.

Happy Thanksgiving!

"I haven't felt well since..." Post-recovery Syndromes: Tales of Lyme and COVID

When a person gets an infectious illness under normal circumstances their immune system will assure a full recovery. However some diseases leave what seems like a more or less permanent mark on those who suffer from them.

Many times I have talked with patients who tell me, "I've never felt quite well since…" And this could be anything from a parasite infection to a sexually transmitted disease to Lyme or any of a host of other conditions. More often than not these people have been treated with the appropriate antibiotics or other drugs, perhaps by another medical provider. Nevertheless, they have constellations of symptoms that troubled them for months or years to come.

I have not been terribly surprised to learn that COVID-19 has caused this problem for some people recovering from it. Broadly speaking we observe two categories of this post recovery syndrome. The first is persisting symptoms after the disease itself is resolved, and the second is persisting symptoms in patients who required hospitalization, or even treatment in an intensive care unit, for very severe disease: basically, treating the side effects or after-effects of the regular medical treatment.

Lyme disease is an example of this. Many people who present to me with complaints of long-standing Lyme have been treated with antibiotics, often on more than one occasion, and sometimes they've been practically bathed in antibiotics, often administered intravenously. One common interpretation of this failure to improve after treatment is that the germ is still being harbored somewhere in the body. This is true in selected circumstances, but a number of research studies have shown that it's not generally true. Indeed the high levels of antibiotic treatment that some of these patients receive should barely leave any bacteria in the body alive, including the microbiome! That's all those good bacteria in the gut that not only help us digest our food, but also play a significant role in our overall health and well-being.

After all those antibiotics it's no wonder people feel terrible, ever afterward!

There is an interesting line of research, and I've written about this in my blog elsewhere, that suggests that a number of infectious diseases can cause derangements in immunity, and it may be these derangements that are responsible for the wide variety and persistent nature of symptoms in people who never quite get over certain infections. In Lyme disease, I and many others call this post Lyme treatment syndrome. Recently we've begun to see a similar phenomenon with COVID-19. 

How does one begin to treat something like this? Well in classical homeopathy we would approach this like we would approach any case: interview the patient, examine him, and tried to determine which homeopathic remedy would cause this particular set of symptoms in a healthy test subject. "Like cures like." I have written elsewhere about the homeopathic treatment of COVID-19 during the acute illness, and noted that because of the potency of this infectious agent, most people will be treatable with one of a handful of remedies. However in post treatment syndromes or post recovery syndromes we universally find that the individual experience of these events leads us to great individuality in remedy selection.

So while treating an acute case of coronavirus might involve Sulfur, or Gelsemium, or Eupatorium, or one of a few other remedies, treating a chronic post recovery case could lead us to almost any remedy. This is also true in Lyme disease, and in any of a number of other infectious events such as food poisoning, pneumonia, STDs, and others. It usually is not true of the flu, or the common cold. The thing that ties these together is that post recovery syndrome is often the result of something that can have severe consequences, cause lasting inflammation, and is often in need of treatment from antibiotics or other drugs.

And they tend to be diseases that are potentially deadly.

I expect at some point I will be seeing some of these cases of people who had COVID-19 and have never been right since. In the meantime I've had the opportunity to treat some acute cases, and the nice thing about that is that people seem to recover without any further problem. The key is reaching people early in the course of the disease.

But in the event I don't see them when they're early in the course of things, I'm glad I have a tool that I can use to help them when the troubles just won't go away.

Be well!

The "Epidemiologic Triangle" and Coronavirus

The epidemiologic triangle is a teaching device to help students think about the elements of infectious disease. The triangle on the left below, is the basic requirement for an epidemic. The one on the right is an example of how changing one part of the triangle can change the course of a potential epidemic and make it less likely, or at least less harmful to the populace.

This image is from Popular Mechanics, a science magazine online, and in it they discuss how the use of masks, physical distancing, isolation, disinfection--all things we've been asked to do--can create a less hospitable environment for the novel coronavirus, and thus "flatten the curve." That is, reduce the number of infections enough so that things don't climb off the charts and overwhelm our medical services.

Our new friend. Artwork: Billboard.com

This is Epidemiology 101. How strong is the germ? What's it do, and whom does it do it to? What sort of environment can it do that in? This model can be abstractly applied to various other health issues, such as tobacco smoking, obesity, and so forth, but here I'm going to limit its use to our new friend The Novel Coronavirus. 

In an article on Fivethirtyeight.com, Maggie Koerth discusses how "Every Decision Is A Risk. Every Risk Is A Decision." As we now emerge from our homes, we're trying to the calculate risk of everyday activities. Koerth details how much is controversial in risk estimation, and how we're learning from the science that is still evolving. But there are things we can estimate generally. I include the link for my readers to check out, because she also writes well about how individuals engage in such calculations.

For example, being at a gathering, outdoors, with maybe eight people you know well, and it's a sunny day...even if no one's wearing a mask, the risk is probably much lower than, say, going to a bar where you're shoulder to shoulder with any number of friends and strangers. 

That's pretty straightforward, and it's intuitive. For some people, though, both prospects are equally "terrifying." What should be an easily guessed risk-difference actually has no difference to some people. Everything is equally (and possibly, maximally) risky. This is important, because as a society our own personal psychology becomes averaged into a kind of public mood. Individual estimates--whether scientifically valid or not--all go into our collective social estimation of risk, and that in turn further adjusts how we end up behaving socially. Each of us feeds that mood, and in turn the mood feeds back onto our behavior, which in turn feeds that mood and so on.

But it's not a cycle, more like a spiral. The process keeps changing with millions of individual adjustments that then alter the next moment in the cycle. This leads me to what was for me the most validating thing about Koerth's article: we're adapting. There may be a terrific vaccine around the corner. We may achieve herd immunity one day--either of these changing the host from "susceptible" to "non-susceptible." Or we may never find a decent, safe vaccine (I, for one, will not be lining up for the "first batch" of whatever soup that is--I've been personally involved in too many drug research studies!), and herd immunity may be years away.

Doesn't matter. I already see signs that people are, individually, beginning to adjust their personal risk calculus in terms that favor other things. How long can I go without visiting my elder parents? How long can my kid miss school? How long can I spin my wheels while my business withers? How long can I put off elective surgery? College? Other plans?

Eventually most of us will begin to reframe risk in broader terms that balance out other needs in our lives. This was true in the Flu Pandemic of 1918-19, and nothing about people has changed so much that this will not be the case today. It will be.

What Else Does the Triangle Tell Us?

Let me pivot to something that may give us a glimpse into this near-future: Host susceptibility. 

When I was working with HIV patients earlier in my career, it certainly looked as if that virus was really deadly. The ravages of AIDS make COVID-19 look like a wimp. Yeah, COVID kills some, but AIDS killed everybody.

Or so we thought. 

Turns out that once we had some drugs available, and we had some time to collect ourselves after losing so many bright lights (sons, daughters, Freddie Mercury, Robert Mapplethorpe, Arthur Ashe, Elizabeth Glaser...) to HIV, and after we had better technology to just understand a germ that was so much more novel than today's coronavirus, we learned that HIV was also subject to the Rule of the Triangle. HIV was not universally virulent and hosts were not universally susceptible.

It turns out that a small-ish fraction of people have genetic mutations in their immune systems that are mostly benign. These mutations may make them a little more prone to get pneumonia or the flu, but they make it really hard for HIV to get into people's immune cells. People who have both mutations (CCR5 and CXCR4) basically can't get HIV. This feature has even been turned to advantage in HIV drugs like Fuzeon. 

I began to wonder about this a few months ago. Basically the thinking has been that all humans are susceptible to COVID. This has led to the belief among many that "If I get exposed to even one viral particle I might die." This is wrong for two reasons.

First, there's dose. We don't actually know what the "dose" of virus is that can lead to a full-blown infection. This is related partly to another aspect of our triangle: virulence. Because humans (and other creatures) are equipped with protective barriers (skin, mucus, little white blood cells that live in tissues), it usually takes more than one little tiny viral particle to get infected. This is being studied, but it's early yet, so we don't have a good sense of how much or how little virus it takes to bring on disease. There are articles out there on this, but the fact is, we just really don't know yet, because there are too many factors to to make study of this easy, and because the studies themselves are very technically difficult.

Second, there's susceptibility. This is a bit easier to guess at, and with time it will become easier to know, because the same approaches we used to study HIV can give us insights into who is more, or less, susceptible to COVID.

We come into the world with trillions of T-helper cells. These cells are by dint of evolution programmed with detectors for thousands of potential infections that live on Earth. When we're exposed to one of these diseases, a subset of T-cells programmed with that pattern begins to genetically transform themselves into even better detectors for that infection that then go after the infection with a vengeance. This is why it takes 7-10 days to get over a cold: it took your T-cells that long to read the new cold virus (they change often), make genetic adjustments, and then to bring in the rest of the players that come rushing in to rid the body of the infection. 

Could it be that some of us are just better genetically equipped than others to resist cornonavirus? I found an article recently that suggested that this is the case. I include a link here because readers might find it as interesting as I did. It basically reminded me that Nature works in mysterious ways...but it still adheres to rules. In this not-yet-peer reviewed article from a research team in Sweden, we learn that maybe antibodies--whether from prior infection or a vaccine we have yet to invent--may be less important than something we're already carrying around inside us, the valiant T-cell! 

Maybe some will find this reassuring. I do. In the flurry of "information" flooding our TVs, radios, Facebook feeds, and phones, I find it comforting to know that Nature still follows rules, and if we pay attention to those rules, perhaps we'll be able to better understand and apply our own personal risk calculations with less anxiety.

As always,

Be well!