Tag Archive for: COVID

Help for Long-Haulers

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Many people suffer from a myriad of symptoms after contracting a COVID infection. Muscle and mental fatigue seem to be common among these “long-haulers”—more technically called post-viral fatigue syndrome. Based on prior research by the investigators, they randomly selected twelve subjects with long-haul COVID symptoms. Half the subjects took four grams of creatine monohydrate for six months; the control subjects took inulin fiber.

Every measure of energy production in muscle and brain demonstrated improvement. Questionnaires on fatigue and muscular pain matched the improvement in energy production in the tissues that were tested. Did increased energy account for the benefit? While the study was small, mostly due to the complexity of the research methods, it appears that’s a reasonable conclusion, although larger studies should be done.

Creatine is just one of the modalities I’m going to cover in this weekend’s Managing Pain webinar. Pain can be the result of several body systems that are not working properly; the objective is to use a step-by-step approach considering many systems to manage pain. Sign-up today for the live webinar Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Food Science & Nutrition. 2023. 11(11):6899-6908

Cancelled!

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Thank you all for the prayers, good thoughts, and well wishes. I’m going to hang on to them for a while. My surgery was cancelled for this morning; Paula and I didn’t find out until we arrived at the hospital at 7:30 to check in. I was not alone. My surgeon had three surgeries cancelled for today; multiply that by many surgeons times several days, and you get an idea of how many people were disappointed. The surgery will be rescheduled for a date to be determined.

Why was it cancelled on such short notice? Because the hospital was overrun with COVID hospitalizations over the weekend. They have sufficient staff but no beds, even for an outpatient knee replacement surgery such as mine. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but there’s a significant COVID resurgence in Michigan with no end in sight.

I’ll keep doing the prehab and be even better prepared when the knee replacement is rescheduled. I hope the reader who has had her aortic aneurism surgery postponed for the third time lives until her rescheduled surgery.

I looked at the data again since we got home: over 80% of those hospitalized haven’t been vaccinated. Take it from someone who understands the science—get vaccinated. It’s not a guarantee, but it puts the odds in your favor and helps all the people who need hospital beds.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

The Dog Will See You Now

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The Memo title is from Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about canine screening of disease, and I would urge you to listen to it. While the focus is on prostate cancer, the logical question comes up: could dogs be used to screen people for COVID-19? The answer is yes. No one knows for certain whether they can they smell the virus, but they can smell the proteins that are being made when the virus replicates in the body. Maybe it’s the spike protein, maybe a different one, but the tests indicate dogs can smell a person’s mask and identify COVID infections immediately with an accuracy of 83% and higher; some dogs approached 99% accuracy.

Will we see dogs checking folks at the door any time soon? I doubt it, whether for COVID testing or any other type of disease. Why not? Let’s take a look.

The Problem with Dogs

Science has shown that dogs can detect odors down to 1.5 molecules per trillion. They don’t even have to be purebred dogs; mixed breeds can be taught to do it. Therein lies the problem: training. It takes time to train the dogs to be able to distinguish that one unique scent among the hundreds of thousands they may encounter in an airport, a school, or a place of business.

They also get tired, not physically but mentally. They’re still dogs that want to run, jump, and play. They love to work, but they’re not like an inanimate testing device that accepts samples and tests them all day long without needing to be fed and given bathroom breaks. Dogs get fatigued, and that means they could make mistakes.

Those are just details that can be worked out. Dogs can screen up to 250 people in an hour at an estimated cost (including their handlers) of about $2 per person. Compare that with a PCR test for COVID-19 that can cost $200 per person. The real problem lies with humans.

The Healthcare Complex

It would be easy to criticize the medical community for not wanting to endorse this unconventional approach to medicine. The papers I read thought it was impractical to train dogs to do such screenings.

What they would rather do is develop an artificial neural nose that could do the job instead. One big problem with that: they have no clue what the dogs actually detect when they perform the screening. They admit that “clinical diagnostic techniques, artificial intelligence, and molecular analysis remain difficult due to the significant divide between these disciplines.” It could take years to come up with such an artificial nose, and then you’d need humans to manufacture, operate, and maintain those devices; I don’t even want to think what the costs would be. Dogs are already being trained that can be ready in a couple of months.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to why the healthcare complex is resistant to pursuing the canine screening solutions. But I suspect health insurance companies and other organizations such as school districts that actually pay the bills will pay a lot of attention to the difference in price as well as the timeline.

The Bottom Line

If I could train a dog to identify a vitamin or mineral deficiency by sniffing the breath, the urine, or feces of humans, I wouldn’t waste time—I’d do it right now. It’s not a threat to what I do; it would be a powerful tool to use to help people address their nutritional deficiencies perhaps before they manifest in disease.

Do we want to get kids back in school? I’d love to know a dog was testing Riley and all his classmates, teachers, and staff every day before they walk in the building. Getting the subjects to not play with the testing equipment would probably be the biggest hurdle, but we’ve been teaching Riley to recognize dogs that are working and not to bother them. Yes, we’d need a lot of dogs, but we can get that done if we’re really committed.

Let’s hope the healthcare complex realizes they already have the noses they need to get the job done, and all the bearers of those noses want is to play with a ball as a reward for their hard work. I’ll say it again: it’s time to let the dogs out.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. J Travel Med. 2020 Dec 23;27(8):taaa131. doi: 10.1093/jtm/taaa131.
2. PLoS One. 2021.16(2):e0245530. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.02455