Immune Breakdown: Why COVID-19 Affects Patients In Many Different Ways

We already know that COVID-19 affects people with pre-existing conditions but what about the seemingly young and healthy people who fall gravely ill? What can acupuncture and Chinese Medicine teach us about protecting ourselves and the wider population from ever falling into this category?

COVID-19 is considered an External invasion of Damp Pestilent Qi. Chinese medicine describe outside invaders as External Pathogens, and then assign patterns of disease to them. External Pathogenic Factors, or EPFs, can be from the weather, in terms of heatstroke, hypothermia or other cold invasions, the amount and quality of food we eat, viruses, things like chemicals in cosmetics, plastics and cleaning supplies, heavy metals in air pollution, glyphosate found in pesticides on our food, and last but not least, parasites.

An Internal Pathogenic Factor would be stress, anxiety, and our emotional/mental well being and health separated into Fear, Fright, Anger, Joy (or mania), Worry, or Grief. Stress affects our gut permeability day to day which over time, breaks down our wei/defensive qi within the lining of our gut. If this happens over a prolonged period of time with an IPF that changes who we are and how we interact with the world, or is a side effect of an EPF, we become more susceptible to sickness, illness, and disease.

If we have a perforated gut lining, these pathogens can enter into our body's bloodstream and spread all around the body, binding to fat cells, lodging themselves in our bowels, joints, brain, and blood. Often what develops from these micro-attacks on animal cell tissue is a sugar bacterial chain called a Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) - an exotoxin which damages outside tissues and manifests in higher qualities in a patient who has kidney disease, heart failure, or cirrosis of the liver.

Too much of these exotoxins create a higher pH in the cell environment as a whole (more toxins means higher inflammation). This can create a very challenging environment for the body to respond to an illness like COVID-19. It depends on environmental factors and extreme weather patterns, illnesses, colds, and other parts of the medical history endured from childhood to adulthood. How much exposure to these EPFs (External Pathogenic Factors) will determine their health prognosis?

If the person has a long history of many things attacking the immune system, or their immune system is battling multiple of these factors systemically already, and they have a poor diet filled with inflammatory foods and they are stressed to the max, this creates hormone imbalance and immune system malfunctioning

Preexisting exposure to one or more or all of these toxins or whose wei qi is overloaded, have a biology in which COVID-19 would affect them more in certain ways. The organ system from where their greatest pathogenic factor lies will be the most affected. Food quality is also a central cornerstone and concern in Chinese Medicine and will determine the severity and duration of the virus. The reason why is the intestinal tract is seen as a major player in our biological defenses because what we eat is External in nature. The gut has built in defensive layer of qi - its lining - for this sake. Someone’s medical history as well as their nutrition from the soil, water, and air of their environment is why we have such variance with a viral expression in someone in different parts of the country and world.

Chinese Medicine looks at COVID-19 as Damp Qi Pestilence EPF.

For example an individual with a previous exposure to Epstein-Barr virus (a.k.a. “Mono”) would have a remnant virus material dormant in their joints or organs. Another virus invading the damaged tissues more easily, could allow the Mono to resurface and express again causing higher fever, joint pain, and the vascular issues that high fever coopt.

Compounds/pesticides/chemicals get eliminated by our Liver hormones through our blood. But if the gut barrier is impeded, more foreign bodies get recirculated from the leaky gut into the blood and the hormones are too deficient to bind to and eliminate these toxins and chemicals. Foreign materials which are bound to hormones and cannot be eliminated through the Liver and Kidneys form plaque and the thickening of blood vessel walls.

Those with more systemic Blood Heat/inflammation of multiple organ tissue (read: leaky gut) would more easily develop clots in the vascular system. The blood heat cooks and coagulates in the blood stream, causing Blood Stagnation.

More clots, more stagnation, equals a systemic problem of ischemia (stroke), as has been reported. 75% of the .9% stroke cases overall in New York State were patients already on blood thinners. If the vessels are lodged with plaque cells bound to foreign compounds it can't eliminate through defecation or urination, COVID will more likely affect circulation.

Foreign bodies in the blood stream that cannot be eliminated predisposes people to heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, anemia, infertility, and other as well as precursor/milder forms of illness such as insomnia, headaches, joint pain, bloating, and mood disorders, creates susceptibility for COVID-19.

Western scientific method cannot test for or know how a pesticide, dairy hormone, or petroleum fumes affect an individual. First they would have to create a study over the duration of an individual’s lifetime with control factors within a larger group of the population with their known environmental factors. Depending on the food and food quality available, the stress level, and medical history, there would be great discrepancies among the population.

Nutrition is not part of the education or rhetoric of healing in any American medical school whereas nutrition is the cornerstone to immune function in Chinese Medicine. Rarely do doctor’s 'prove' or say any certain whole food or herb will full of fact heal certain conditions — this is because of legal implications concerning health and because of the FDA and agricultural and pharmaceutical markets set for profit off the sick.

It is doubtful environmental factors will be looked at the same way for some time until there is a way to find population trends are consistent like water contamination in Flint, Michigan, or respiratory and multiple other autoimmune issues disproportionately affecting disadvantaged black residents living in proximity to the most contaminated bogs on large hog farms in North Carolina.

Even if 5G cell technology were not the alleged factor in COVID-19s spread from Wuhan, China, it still begs the true question of how environmental pathogens are playing a role here for this disease to so easily take over. This brings me to wonder whether the death rate has less to do with the virus being deadly and more to do with how badly we have treated our environment, and how we have less control in an industrialized capitalist world.

Cleaning and oxidizing the blood from leaky gut, dislodging chemicals and pesticides, eliminating damp turbid fluids, reducing systemic inflammation in blood vessels and joint tissue, improving the gut lining, as well as moving qi and blood out of the limbic lower cortex of the brain to the parasympathetic pre-frontal cortex of empathy, and logic in the brain, are ALL things that acupuncture and Chinese Nutritional Therapy does very effectively.

Acupuncture, fitness, good nutrition, good sleep, all work harmoniously to prevent disease, disease progression, and further supports the body's defenses in the daily toll our environments have on our system, predisposing us to a worse or worser case of COVID-19 than we’d ever like to see.

And in the interim of this disease, as we quarantine, a lot of us have taken to stress eating, indulging in poor diets or are experiencing inconsistent eating patterns because work/home life has been disrupted and we are stressed. Headaches from substance use, chemicals, poor sleep are also a factor. Joint pain, lower back pain, bloating, GI issues also relate to leaky gut and our nutrition. This is a perfect time to heal these things here in the office.

Book your appointment now to get first choice and take care of the health issue you've been ignoring or struggling to deal with during this pandemic and in these stressful times of national crisis.