About this course
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Before you can appreciate the protocols needed to substantially reduce your chances of getting infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus ("severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2"), or the COVID-19 diseases it can cause ("coronavirus disease 2019"), it’s helpful to understand how your immune system works normally, and how this virus can completely disrupt it.
There are three lessons in Protocol 1:
The intent behind Protocol 1 is to give you a sense of how damaging a SARS-CoV-2 infection can be (Lessons 1 and 2), thereby providing sufficient incentives to do the preventative measures outlined in Lesson 3.
When viruses enter our bodies, they find a cell and inject it with their genetic material. This allows them to take control of the cell and multiply.
To battle this, the body's immune system must destroy infected cells. When the body first encounters a new viral infection, it deploys T cells, which find and kill infected cells. If the infection continues, the body then deploys B cells, which create antibodies that can better attack infected cells.
Even after the infection has passed, antibodies remain in the body to help the body fight off future infection. How long these antibodies last in the body varies, ranging from days to a lifetime.
Any virus that can make people sick has at least one good trick for evading the immune system. For SARS-CoV-2 the trick is early stealth. This virus can delay the launch of the innate immune system, and inhibit the production of interferons—those molecules that initially block, or “interfere” with viral replication.
This delay creates a brief time window in which the virus can replicate unnoticed before the immune system recognizes it as a foreign pathogen alarm and kicks into action.
Those delays can cascade; meaning, if the innate branch of the immune system is slow to mobilize, the adaptive branch will also lag. What then can wind up happening is that the immune response is caught in a continuous loop of activation and inhibition.
The result of this immune system cascade is that the normal, initial inflammatory phase is overstimulated. This is dangerous if it leads to hyperinflammation because it can damage critical organs. The lungs, the heart and other organs can't withstand a severe inflammatory response for too long.
During this pandemic, the best thing you can do is to not test your immune system against this virus.
Don’t get infected!
We’re going to cover the six ways you can avoid getting infected with SARS-CoV-2, and thereby potentially suffer through any Covid-driven disease
No matter how young and healthy you are, take the precautions needed to avoid getting infected.
We’re going to cover the six ways you can avoid getting infected with SARS-CoV-2, and thereby potentially suffer through any Covid-driven disease:
Protocol 2 is about building your basic capacity to avoid infection, or if you do get infected, to be relatively asymptomatic.
We’re going to call this foundational support. It’s built by various lifestyle factors, such as those dealing with stress reduction, sleep, nutrition and nutraceuticals, which is a fancy term for vitamins, minerals, herbs, medicinal mushrooms, etc.
The objective of Protocol 2 is to reduce your vulnerability to infection and illness by:
Some lessons in this Protocol will refer to these documents, which you can print for convenient access:
In our review of the immune system, you learned that inflammation can be a double-edged sword. Inflammation naturally happens when something that’s not us, like a pathogen, gets into our body, like an infection.
What we want to do is to reduce or eliminate factors that drive excess inflammation, or inflammation that has no value, as well as related dysregulatory impacts on immune function.
To do this, the smart thing to do first is to address your baseline level of systemic inflammation.
What we want to do is reduce or eliminate factors that drive excess inflammation, or inflammation that has no value, as well as related dysregulatory impacts on immune function. For this to happen, the first thing to address our baseline level of systemic inflammation.
This short lesson covers how a mindfulness practice can reveal the source of your stress and thereby reduce it; and the ability that three herbal adaptogens have on reducing stress.
Our focus is on how stress impacts your immune system. Once that’s clear, the next step is to become mindful of what generates your stress. This you need to know in order to let it go.
Improvements in diet are strongly associated with reductions in inflammation. If you want to enhance your immunity to COVID-19, what you eat needs to be a primary focus.
We're going to focus on:
Regular exercise clearly enhances immune regulation.
But, to decrease baseline inflammation, the right exercise intensity is critical. If you do too little exercise at low intensity, there’s little to no impact on baseline, or systemic, inflammation.
If you do too much exercise at high intensity, you can actually lower your resistance to infection and inhibit a regulated, balanced immune response.
Let's find the right balance.
The nutraceuticals I’m going to review can support a well-functioning immune system, and many of them play dual roles in immunology, in that they can support immune surveillance, while also reducing inflammation.
This purpose of this lesson is to give you an appreciation of how a master antioxidant that your body makes not only fights free radicals, but also helps improve immune system modulation, so that it doesn’t have an excessive inflammatory reaction to SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease.
Your risk of getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then getting very sick from COVID-19 illness can get substantially higher if you have a number of pre-existing conditions, referred to as “comorbidities” or if you’re older than 50.
We will address comorbidities first, and then discuss how and why Covid gets more and more nasty as we get older.
Whereas Protocol 2 was about a proactive plan to keep you from getting infected, Protocol 3 is about what to do if you get infected and experience symptoms.
We will learn to identify the severity of symptoms, and the necessary steps to stop the progression of infection and resulting illness.
There are three steps you can take to take to minimize infection:
Some lessons in this Protocol will refer to these documents, which you can print for convenient access:
In the last lesson, we covered how to self-assess whether or not you have symptoms of viral infection. In this lesson, we turn to three tools that can provide more of an objective evaluation.
When one part of the immune system doesn't work properly, or at all, there's a downstream effect. A metaphor we can use is dominos. The domino effect occurs when the first responders of the innate immune system are compromised by SARS-CoV-2:
As you'll see, you want to support natural killer cells and Type-1 helper cells, while at the same time minimizing the potential for Type-2 helper cell overreaction to Covid.
We covered a bit about how SARS-CoV-2 can mess up your immune system in Protocol 1. Now it's time to go deeper into this topic so you to appreciate why I recommend the nutraceuticals covered in the next lesson.
A metaphor we can use is dominos. I’ll explain the domino effect that occurs when the first responders of the innate immune system are compromised by SARS-CoV-2.
This protocol begins with describing the symptoms associated with hyperinflammation (Lesson 14) and ends with suggested nutraceuticals that have effective anti-inflammatory properties (Lesson 15).
If you're over 50 and/or have the comorbidities reviewed in Lesson 10, as a precautionary measure you may elect to add the nutraceuticals covered in lesson 16 as soon as you or your doctor determine that you’re symptomatic.
Some lessons in this Protocol will refer to these documents, which you can print for convenient access:
Way back in Lesson 2 you learned in general terms about how SARS-CoV-2 can confound the normal immune response to a viral infection. Now in Lesson 14 we will dive deeper into two immune system molecules that can be largely responsible for escalating hyperinflammation: NLRP3 inflammasome and Nuclear factor kappa ?. These are the key targets for inhibiting excessive inflammation.
This gets pretty wonky. I wrestled with including it, but decided to do so because this lesson underscores how hyerinflammatory this virus can be, and sets the stage for the nutraceuticals discussed in Lesson 15 that may offer anti-viral and anti-inflammatory support.
Lesson 15 covers nutraceuticals that may help reduce the hyperinflammatory reaction that Covid can cause through its disruption of your immune system, as covered in Lessons 2 and 14.
If you have any of the comorbidities discussed in Lesson 10 or are over 50 years of age, it might be wise to take some or all of these nutraceuticals prior to experiencing Covid-related symptoms described in the COVID-19 Symptoms Guide. This is especially true if you engage in behaviors that might increase your risk of infection.
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