TLC Sessions - Living with Long Covid

Dr Raouf (Ron) Gharbo has spent many years treating those with brain injury and autonomic disorders using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) metrics.  Physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist, and Director of Autonomic Rehabilitation at VMU Health, Dr Gharbo this week explains the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, the metrics he uses to diagnose conditions - with Long Covid now bei...

Dr Bhupesh Prusty believes that he has found 'the switch'.  A molecular virologist from the University of Würzburg, Germany, he has turned his work looking at ME/CFS to look at Long Covid, and believes that viral reactivation in both diseases could hold the key.  It’s this viral reactivation that, rather than causing a detectable elevation of something in our blood, is causing a depletio...

In this week's episode we receive no-nonsense, practical advice from Prof. Jack Lambert, a consultant in infectious diseases at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. He has been monitoring long term recovery following COVID-19 since he saw the first patients in Ireland in March 2020.  He has used his knowledge of chronic conditions caused by other infectious diseases - Lyme disease, Ebola, HIV, Hepat...

If you’re looking for an overview of all of the research into Long Covid, this Nature review , undertaken by Patient Led Research Collaborative (PLRC) under the guidance of the cardiologist Dr Eric Topol, is a great place to start.  A collation of the findings from almost 300 biomedical research papers on Long Covid, it sets out the major findings, mechanisms and recommendations that have been res...

Akiko Iwasaki, a Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, with a particular interest in mucosal infection, is making gains in Long Covid research. Her work with Dr David Putrino (interviewed in Episode 47 ) revealed several findings that move us closer to identifying a bio-marker; her work with Michele Monje of Stanford University looked at...

Dr Ziyad Al-Aly is chief of research and development at the Veteran Affairs St. Louis healthcare system and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis.  Direct access to both Long Covid patients and the Veteran Affairs health care records enables Al-Aly to have led some of the most impactful research and studies into Long Covid. From the long term neurological outcomes and the...

Dr Benjamin Natelson, professor of neurology and director of the Pain and Fatigue Study Centre at Mount Sinai, has been studying the mechanisms, effects and management of chronic fatigue for almost half a century.  In this week’s conversation he explains how he has used his knowledge to study and treat those with Long Covid.  The recipient of multiple grants, his interest in the immunological and...

What if there were an activity tracking app designed to monitor and aid recovery from chronic illness, instead of pushing fitness goals?  That is exactly what Long Covid sufferer Harry Leeming conceived with his team at Visible .  Together they have created an activity tracking platform specifically for Long Covid and ME / CFS sufferers to enable them to track and analyse their illness in real tim...

This week, we spoke to Mount Sinai neuroscientist and physical therapist Dr. David Putrino about his latest study on 215 patients.  A collaboration between Mount Sinai and Yale University in the U.S., Putrino worked with immunologist Akiko Iwasaki to see if they could find any ‘ Distinguishing features of Long COVID identified through immune profiling ’.  The study brought to light some potentiall...

Dr David Strain is a titan in the Long Covid research and clinical field.  With the ability to boil down complex medical theory and research into very comprehensible explanations, Dr Strain explains HRV and how we can use it to monitor and potentially manage our symptoms.  He talks us through vagal tone, the impact of vaccines and COVID-19 strains on Long Covid and we ask whether the increased inc...

Amiad Abrahams, a Health Psychologist, the Deputy Lead for North West London's Long Covid Psychology service, understands the effect that the mind and Mindfulness can have on patients with acute and chronic conditions.  Since mid 2020 he has been leading “COMFORT” – a group Mindfulness course offered by St Mary’s Hospital.  In this week’s episode he talks us through the power that the mind ca...

Professor Doug Kell is a systems biologist who has been studying anomalous clotting for many years, and since the pandemic began has turned his knowledge, working alongside Prof. Resia Pretorius, to explore the theory of microclots in Long Covid patients.  In this week's episode Prof. Kell explains to us the way in which these clots form, his theories behind what is occurring, and what are th...

Dr Tae Chung runs the POTS clinic at John Hopkins University.  Approaching this with his two specialties- neuromuscular and physical medicine and rehabilitation - he treats POTS patients, and those with Long Covid POTS, with a combination of functional exercises, alongside blood volume expansion and medication.  In this week's episode he talks to us about his experience,  working with his MDT...

With the established medical system offering few options to treat Long Covid holistically - most sufferers are at best only being offered symptom management - many are turning to alternative therapies.  This week we spoke to Joachim Gerlach, chairman of Vedicinals, who have developed the nutraceutical Vedicinals9 for the treatment of acute and Long Covid.  This nutraceutical, consisting of nine bi...

Dr Eric Feigl-Ding was one of the first public health scientists to raise the alarm as COVID-19 took hold.  Often several steps ahead of the policy-makers, Feigl-Ding shares with us his view that Long Covid looks to be an immuno-compromised state, not dissimilar to that caused by HIV.  Could this explain other current outbreaks - summer flu, monkeypox, Hepatitis?   He believes so.  In this wide-ra...

Dr Bettina Hohberger, an ophthalmologist at Erlangen University with expertise in glaucoma, believes that looking at the eye – an area of the body where the blood vessels are visible – is representative of the rest of the human body.  She has seen that there is a change in blood vessel density in the eye of her patients with Long Covid and believes that this blood vessel density could be part of t...

Lavanya Visvabharathy, a T cell immunologist, has methodically applied her expertise to look at samples from patients at the Long Covid clinic at North Western University in Chicago, to try and establish the mechanism driving the disease.  Her personal experience of Long Covid's effects and the role of autoimmunity - she has both Long Covid and rheumatoid arthritis - combined with the wealth...

The Long Covid space has been abuzz with talk of Tollovid - the dietary supplement that is claimed to act, in much the same way as Paxlovid, on inhibiting 3CL protease.  We wanted to get some clear answers on how this supplement works, the potential benefits, and its safety profile.  We spoke to CEO of Todos Medical, Gerald Commissiong, who has brought this product to market, and Dr Dorit Arad, a...

Dr Stephen Griffin, virologist and member of Independent SAGE, talks us through the workings of antivirals - both in acute COVID-19 and in Long Covid.  He explains what antivirals do - suppressing the virus rather than removing it from our systems - and suggests that the use of one course of individual antivirals might not be the holy grail that Long Covid sufferers are hoping.  We talk viral pers...

Dr Alec Schmaier, a cardiology and vascular specialist, has studied the impact that COVID-19 has on the endothelium.  This week we called on his knowledge of the vascular system and coagulation issues to talk us through the potential role of the endothelium in Long Covid.  We wanted to take a step back and look at why clotting might be playing a role in our Long Covid symptoms, and discuss what dr...

In Long Covid it can be hard to keep up with what we should be eating, not eating, supplementing and changing when it comes to providing our bodies with the correct nutrition to optimise recovery.  This week Professor of Dietetics, Mary Hickson, provides us with some down-to-earth advice about how diet affects and is affected by Long Covid, dispels some myths, suggests some strategies to try and p...

Not only do many Long Covid patients suffer from P.O.T.S or P.O.T.S-like symptoms, but there are a number of similarities between the two conditions and their management.  The cross-over of symptoms - from breathlessness, palpitations, and chest discomfort, to fatigue, pain, brain fog, sleep disturbance and orthostatic intolerance - is remarkable.  So, do we all have POTS?  To shine some light on...

Perry Nickelston believes that focusing on the much overlooked lymphatic system could be what we each need to enable our bodies to heal.  In this week’s episode Nickelston, chiropractor and holistic health coach , talks us through the role of the lymphatic system and explains how it could be what is holding us back from recovering from chronic diseases like Long Covid.  By getting the lymph moving...

There may be a treatment from which a third of women with Long Covid could benefit.  It is not a new drug, it is safe, and it has been proven to work anecdotally.  And yet there are no clinical trials looking at HRT as a potential treatment for the largest cohort of Long Covid sufferers.  In our patriarchal medical system many women are not even being asked about their menstrual cycle or hormones...

A Professor of Medicine in residence at the University of California, San Francisco, Steven Deeks M.D., is an expert on HIV-associated immune dysfunction. Using his 30 years of experience researching viral illness, Deeks has turned his hand to the study of the long term impacts of COVID-19 on our immune systems.  The parallels that he draws between HIV and Long Covid are startling.  Studying a com...