What If Another COVID-Level Event Hit Tomorrow?

Hi, I’m DrJ. Welcome back to the Cash Practice Solution podcast, and I have a question for you. What if we have to deal with something like COVID all over again?

Welcome to the Cash Practice Solution podcast. I am your host, DrJ This week, we’re talking about Covid killers in cash practice. Which is a source of tremendous joy for me because, despite the heartache that Covid caused, an amazing number of opportunities arose that allowed doctors to be heroic, to rise up and do great things for patients when they didn’t have any other resources but doctors in a cash practice.

That’s right. They were the ones who stepped up and provided the care. Some Doctors who were not in cash practices also stepped up, and some of them got just taken out. They got removed from their positions. They got fired from their jobs. They couldn’t continue. Some of them survived, but there were very few. So today we’re going to look at Covid killing from our own unique cash practice perspective.

So, what should we do for our patients if they may have an acute Covid infection? I mean, they came to you for care, right? So what should we do? I mean, this is not like a regular sore throat or a common sinus infection. I mean, what should we do?

We don’t really need to be nervous about it.

They need to be cared for, and that’s what you do. The important part is you want to find out exactly what they need, right? You don’t want to follow your regular path. This is not like a regular old ear infection, right? If somebody comes in with swimmer’s ear, there’s not much disclosure or consent. It’s pretty simple. Hey, you got a swimmer’s ear. I’m gonna give you some drops, and we’ll see you in a week. If it’s not all better.

If you suspect a Covid infection, you have a completely different pathway. Right? Now, we have a different landscape. You’re not going to do what you normally do if you think the patient has an infection of any kind; this is a special case. So number one, you do a great physical.

There are certain things that you do just because you’re good at what you do, and you’ve done it for so long, you just kind of sail through it. You know, you’re going to look at that ear,  and sure enough, it is a swimmer’s ear. Unless it’s not!.

On this one, you want to do a very thorough exam. Both ears, sinuses, throat, glandular, chest, all of it. Make sure you do the entire upper respiratory exam at a minimum. If you suspect COVID, inspect the gut. We’ll get into that a little bit. It’s a big part of it. Do a great physical.

Never miss the pulse ox. You know that pulse ox monitor is like  $28 bucks now at Amazon, maybe less, but they’re cheap. They’re almost free. You should have one in each room. If you have 2 or 3 rooms, at least one in each room.  It helps rule out the simple stuff. You might have a patient who surprises you.

Maybe you don’t know them really well. You just haven’t been paying attention. And their pulse ox runs chronically at 89, and that’s their life. They’ve compensated. They run a low O2 saturation. That’s them. You know, they’re fine. They’re good. They’re breathing fine. They’re not struggling. It’s good. But you document it, and you pay attention. So you do a rule out the simple stuff.

Now, COVID is not like every other infection that’s like the flu. The flu is kind of high fever, muscle aches and feeling miserable. You know what it is. It’s the flu. It kind of stays the same. COVID shifts around. It’s a shapeshifter symptomatically.

Not only do its symptoms change, but so do the names.

Right. So this summer, I think it was Nimbus, and this fall, now it’s called Stratus, which is XFG. So they’re being creative with names, which I appreciate because it’s kind of fun, but it actually is very accurate.

Because of the nature of the symptoms, they shift and kind of flow together. Stratus and Nimbus are the two kinds of summer and fall clouds. Both have that razor blade throat or really severe throat pain. And it’s described like when you swallow, when you feel like your throat’s cut up with razor blades. As much as that was talked about, I didn’t see that much in practice. I saw that about half the time.

Fatigue, this one, this fall, man. The fatigue thing is impressive. Back with Omicron and earlier Covid strains, severe fatigue was really common early on. And then it became a lot less of a problem. Now it seems to be back. The cough didn’t seem to be as bad. The nasal congestion seems to be a little less of a problem. The loss of taste and smell is much less of a problem. It does happen. The claim from the “expert” higher-ups is that fevers are very common. And muscle aches.

I don’t really see so much of that. So that’s a little bit of a confounder with the flu, right? You might think maybe the guy’s got the flu. And sure, maybe he does. In fact, looking back at the COVID days over the last five years, we do see that many COVID patients (at least, they were called COVID patients) actually had the flu.

On retrospective analysis, they had the flu. They had a fever and muscle aches. They had flu symptoms, but an inaccurate PCR test showed they had Covid as well, and they preferred the Covid diagnosis and used that instead. But anyway, it’s not a big deal as it is now. Right now, fever, muscle aches, not as big a deal. Now that it doesn’t trick you as often as it used to.

So sneezing is a big deal. Really weird. Almost like an allergy to cedar or something. Sneezing, sneezing, sneezing – a ton of it.

And this is kind of the new thing that I think sets the latest Covid apart from the previous, and almost might be the red herring that causes people to say, yeah, I don’t know if it’s a big problem.

Digestive symptoms like nausea and diarrhea, especially. And it can last for a week or two. It’s claimed to be less common, but I see that at least half the patients I’m seeing have bad diarrhea. Don’t delay treatment while you wait for lab testing. One, it’s frequently inaccurate. And patients are going to get worsening symptoms. They’re going to dehydrate.

They’re going to get all this stuff that goes with bad diarrhea and GI bugs, not swallowing because of the sore throat, fatigue, and not getting up and drinking and eating. So, start basic treatment. What is that? What is basic treatment? Well, if we learned this back in 2019, we didn’t know anything about it until then. In 2020, we started to figure it out and by ‘21

I think everybody who was conscious and alert had this somewhere on a note, somewhere, either on their desk or stuck to a wall somewhere.

First step is Zithromax 500mg three times a day for a full-size adult, a little less. for a little person. That is because it has a very low inflammatory response. It’s a static drug, not a bactericidal drug. It stops reproduction. It doesn’t blow up the cell. When you blow a cell up, you get this massive inflammatory response, which is what causes Covid patients to wind up in the ICU because they get this inflamed lung and this horrible situation for which steroids are entirely appropriate.

So Zithromax is your antibiotic of choice to prevent secondary or superinfection pneumonia, and Motrin for fever or the symptomatic management of fever.

Motrin is a great drug, a couple of hundred milligram tablets, 2 or 3 of them 2 or 3 times a day, for a really high fever. Adults with a 102-degree fever feel miserable. Adults with a high fever will love you and thank you for the rest of their lives for putting them out of their misery. With Motrin!

With a response to that alone, it’s simple. And then aspirin. One of the problems that we’ve seen now is that a Covid infection, even without immunization, can cause spike protein clots and 325mg of aspirin once a day can be very helpful.

If you do that for 30 days, you’re in the clear with clots. You don’t have to worry about it.

Also, if you have some familiarity or comfort with natural medicine. I love nattokinase. I love serrapeptase. There’s another called Lumbrokinase. There’s a whole bunch of really good naturally occurring, “blood-thinning” agents. Nattokinase is great because it’s part of the spike protein detox protocols now being used to help patients recovering from a previous COVID-19 injection or infection.

Then, and this is kind of the holy grail of viral treatment across the board, is zinc. Zinc is what your body uses to basically kill viral illnesses. And it does that by opening a cell, getting it into the cell, and then putting it into the system, destroying the virus. It can only do that if it has a proper ionophore. That means an agent that carries zinc and delivers it to the cell. We’ll talk about it in a minute.

And, a little pro tip, a lozenge of zinc, about 5 or 10mg a real light, real low dose. But they’re a great way to tell if you have too much zinc on board. Sometimes it’s not convenient to test or you don’t want to test, or patients don’t want to pay to test, you give them a zinc lozenge. If it tastes like they’re sucking on a nail or aluminum foil, they have too much zinc, and you can back down. So that’s a good little pro tip.

Vitamin D has been shown to be probably the single most important nutrient to track in a Covid infection to prevent hospitalization and a terrifying visit to the intensive care unit. So if you take enough 10,000 units a day, all of the days that you’re infected, and at least for 30 days, you’ll stay up in that 80 to 100 range that keeps you safe.

Higher ranges above 50 seem protective against ICU admission. Why is that the number? I don’t know, I just know that’s what the data shows, and that’s great.

Then, finally, the ultimate anti-infectious vitamin of all time, vitamin C, is our best friend. It’s a 1000mg dose twice a day for 30 days. How do you know a 1000mg dose?

Pro tip: The size of my pinky tip is about the size of a one-gram capsule. So a capsule that size is about a gram. So if patients are asking you on the phone, ” Hey doc, what’s that rule about the size of your pinky tip?” then you’ll know. So that’s really easy. So everybody, if you suspect they have an infection of any kind, C, D, zinc.

Easy. Then you can do the specific anti-COVID agents. You got the Zithromax on board and now you’re coming to the specific anti-COVID agent.

Specifically, these are the things that cause people to get into all sorts of trouble with state medical boards. Ivermectin is an incredibly safe drug.

It’s been used for decades without a problem until the COVID spectacle became a thing. Proper dosing is somewhere between a half a milligram to a milligram per kilogram, split in half, twice a day. So for me, a 60mg split would be 30mg twice a day. And that’s the full active infection dose.

You can take it for three, 4 or 5 days. You can take it a little longer, but it typically isn’t needed for more than 5 days.

Now this is where COVID is set apart from every other infection, every other treatment plan and every other modality. This is where you tell your patient (partner), “I know that ivermectin is safe.”

If you’re not sure, study the toxicity data. Make sure you’re comfortable with the facts. Make sure you can look your patient in the eye and say, I know this is safe, and I know you’re going to be fine with this. And I know from personal bedside experience that when you treat a patient with real COVID with ivermectin, they get better.

And I don’t want to over exaggerate, but pretty much overnight, 24 hours, 48 hours later, they’re better. They might not be all the way better, but they’re better, and they’re on the mend. I’ve had very sick, very old patients with very severe preexisting illness start on ivermectin, and the next day they’re better.

And then you do what every good doctor does when you have a patient who’s sick, who has a possible, worsening outcome, and they have an illness that affects the respiratory tract: you give them instructions about going to the ER. Let them know that if they have trouble breathing, they should go to the ER. Do not be afraid to go to the ER; they will properly treat you and get you the oxygen you need. Things are different now than they were five years ago. People are more aware. I don’t think everything will necessarily be handled perfectly, but you’re way better off getting oxygen support when you need it than not getting it.

This is so easy to do, right? It just requires a conversation with your patient. Where you listen to their story, and you hear what they have to say. What do they want? Most people just want to feel better. They also want to know that you care enough about them, that you’re going to keep them safe.

I went to California over Thanksgiving with my son, for the Thanksgiving celebration and I had to deal with a bunch of his friends and their parents, great people, but they don’t know me personally, so that the trust level is not there, that I have here in my local community, where what I say is gold because I’ve been here for 30 or 40 years, so I have a high trust level.

You need to build that level of trust, so your patient understands you well enough to take your advice and run with it. You need to do that.

Then you need to have them sign any consents you feel are necessary, since you’re treating something that’s uniquely controversial. You know, somebody might not like the idea of ivermectin; they might have a question about it in the future.

Make sure that the patient consented to it. Your availability to the patient is critical to your entire community. The sense of well-being, the sense of peace. And, just really, when a healthcare professional like you is in the mix, their entire life smooths out because you’re there for them when they really need you.

The community of physicians and NPs, all of us, kind of blew it in COVID in a lot of ways, because we didn’t take care of the patient as well as we could have. There were a lot of reasons for that. I’m not blaming anyone. I’m certainly not going to take credit for successfully treating Covid patients. But, because we were in an independent cash practice, we could. We weren’t in an institutional practice where we were forbidden to help. We stayed open the whole time. We could do it. And you know why? Because we were a cash practice. Of course.

That’s your advantage. You can take care of patients in every situation. The only thing that’s stopping you is you.

So you can decide.

Next time we get together, we’re going to look into other ways cash practices can be liberated to provide critical support for diseases like cancer. Terrifying. So many tears have been shed in this office over that diagnosis, and so many tears of joy have followed, because of the results and the care patients have received. Chronic infections like EBV, Lyme disease and heart disease and just all the things that, you know, that they’re tough.

And they’re not simple answers. They require your intentional care. So thanks for tuning in to the Cash Practice Solution podcast. I’m DrJ I’m here to remind you that a fulfilling cash practice really is within your reach, and we can help you get there. If you want to optimize your current cash practice or start a new cash practice on the right foot.

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Disclaimer: This article is intended for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical or legal advice. Clinicians should follow current evidence-based guidelines, regulatory requirements, and individual patient circumstances when making treatment decisions.