Covid has been an interesting experiment on many levels to happen to human health. I wanted to give you my perspective on how I feel like it has validated many of my own understandings on how our immune system functions.
One of the things that has been particularly frustrating about Covid and then Long Covid is that often patients will have very dissimilar symptom pictures which is confusing. In medical school we learn all of the hallmarks of the basic illness that we know. Take the flu or Influenza, for example, we know that this often begins with a higher fever that lasts around 9 or 10 days, spiking in the afternoon, loss of appetite and cold/hot flushes.
With Covid-19, as a provider I saw all sorts of different presentations and these were different in different patients. The symptoms have also been different with each new wave of Covid. Early on in the pandemic, several of my patients had purely gastrointestinal symptoms with diarrhea that looked almost like a gastrointenstinal flu. Or the virus would focus on the lungs and patients would describe a feeling like they had the sensation of weight like a heavy rock sitting on their sternum for months afterwards. Subsequent Covid surges, though not quite as severe as the first two years, would still prove dissimilar in its presentation in particular patients.
Long Covid is equally dissimilar with some patients experiencing mild fatigue and brain fog all the way to complete disability with syncope, extreme heart palpitations, inability to tolerate stress, and environmental shifts such as with temperature.
Our immune system can only hold onto so many insults to it at one time.
All of the brain research we have done has shown that we cannot keep up with more than about six things at a time. Once we have a seventh item thrown into things then the juggling becomes more difficult and we start to forget things or simply not be able to follow tasks as closely. We are good multi-taskers, but only up to a certain point. This makes sense, of course, as we are not computers that may have unlimited memory and capability of synthesizing large amounts of information.¹
The brain, our central nervous system and the immune system are intimately interlinked and work together to protect us from external threats. I believe that the immune system, like the brain, are similar in that the immune system can only juggle monitoring and fighting off so many illnesses at one time. The coronavirus, a new viral entity, took up a larger amount of the immune system’s energy to handle than some of the more traditional illnesses we have been exposed to previously.
Keep in mind that even if you have never gotten the flu as an illness, simply by living in a society with other humans that get the flu, there is some level of passive immunity that happens, simply by an exposure to someone carrying the illness or having been exposed to someone with the illness. So the coronavirus was a completely new entity that we had no passive immunity to.
Seeing the immune system in this light helps us to understand why some people may have gotten more ill than others and why they may have expressed different symptoms than others.
Lets talk about some examples. One of the first things that I noticed in the pandemic was a few New York Times articles about how some people were getting Covid and then rushing to the dentist because they would have a suddenly rotting tooth fall out of their mouth. As I send many patients in my practice to get worked up by a biological dentist to assess for cavitations or hidden infections at the bottom of the roots of teeth, I understood immediately what was happening.
These were patients who had smouldering cavitations and the immune system was able to keep the infections compartmentalized so that the rest of the immune system could carry on and protect the body. Then when they became ill with Covid, the immune system became overwhelmed with a new virus and it pulled its allies from the other areas of the body where it was keeping an infection at bay and sent it to deal with the Covid infection.
Another example is that many of the physicians who treat patients with chronic lyme disease (CLD) reported that their patients were telling them that their lyme symptoms got better, sometimes resolving after they became ill with Covid. I also had several patients, ill with chronic debilitating autoimmune disorders report the same thing. Many patients also reported their chronic illness symptoms get better even after getting the Covid vaccine. So what does this tell us? Again, the Coronavirus trumped the other illnesses in the body and the immune system rushed to take care of Covid.
Keep in mind that this does not mean the original illnesses went away, but the symptoms went away. Similarly, many of my patients became ill with Covid and then had lots of musculoskeletal complaints. One patient in particular said that every single place on her body that was now symptomatic had been an area that had been previously injured. The vaccine did similar things to my patient population. This makes sense because the vaccine is meant to trigger an immune response from the body, and it did just that.
So my take home on these observations from the pandemic is that our immune system is not infinite. The more exposures we have to illnesses as well as to toxins such as mold, heavy metals, and other industrial pollutants which need to be processed by the immune system, the more chance we have of becoming chronically ill. Chronic illness is really the moment where the straw breaks the camel’s back.
The immune system can no longer keep everything under control.
Covid for many patients who were healthy before then become ill became this moment. Cancer is the same for other patients - this is their breaking point where the immune system can no longer keep all of the issues under control.
Long Covid, at this point, by many, has been correlated with the expression of latent or hidden Epstein Barr Viral or other stealth viral infections. Patients may have been exposed previously, but their immune systems were working well enough to keep the infection from becoming symptomatic. This is why it is difficult to know who will develop Long Covid. Sometimes people who have been chronically ill actually felt better, and others who felt perfectly fine were suddenly bedridden. Not all of us know how many infections on a daily basis our immune system is holding back from becoming a symptomatic infection. Also - none of us knows how many environmental exposures we have been exposed to which tells us even more about the immune system burden on our bodies.
So in the end I believe it is important to address the following:
Are our detox pathways working well? There are many ways to look at this both genetically and through blood work.
Do we have chronic infections that our immune system is able to fight off currently but will potentially not able to fight off in the future? There may be many ways to look at this in blood work as well. This will tell us what we may need to address. Getting to the bottom of chronic inflammation and hidden infections is key to understanding how much of our immune system is already burdened and is also key to preventing chronic illness in our future.
Do we have an environmental toxin burden that is also being processed through our immune system? This can be looked at through many labs in the functional medicine world.
All of this is key to understanding where we stand with our immune system burden. How can we address hidden factors that will affect how our immune system dam breaks?
This is what the future of medicine really is, I believe - catching our body burden before it becomes chronic.
Please consider scheduling in a time to discuss your health and to ensure that your immune system is less burdened by what we are confronting on a daily basis in our environment of stressors, infections, and environmental pollutants.
References:
1. The Myth of Multitasking — (neuroleadership.com)