HISTORY

Are there boys who don’t like jokes about poop? I haven’t met them, and I wasn’t one of them. When I was a kid, we had Dr Seuss books, but Everybody Poops by Justine Avery had yet to be written. Honestly, I feel silly using the word poop, but I’m trying to keep this Substack at least PG rated.

Poop was the word my stepfather Em instructed me to use. He landed in my life when I was eleven years old. Em was short for Embury. He was Embury T Jones, Jr, the only son of an engineer and inventor. He was a big man, 6’2”, 260 lbs of muscle, with a voice that carried the entire bass section of the men and boys choir of Christ Church Episcopal Church in Hartford, CT.

Em was a corporate headhunter, and a former computer scientist from when computers occupied entire buildings and used punch cards for programming. He was a Captain in the US Naval Reserve, who bounced a quarter on my bed to test whether I had tucked the corners tightly. He was, well, a Captain. If you didn’t like the way he ran his ship, you could walk the gangplank. He didn’t like swearing. We didn’t agree about what constituted swearing.

By fourth grade I was singing in the St James Episcopal Church boys choir in West Hartford, CT. Thus, Em and I would come to share a love of sacred choral music. The church choir was where I learned to swear, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, shoplift, and kiss girls. Not necessarily in that order, but all in the same year.

I shouldn’t blame all my vices on the boys choir. Swearing came naturally to me. I’ve always been small, so I made up for it with expletives. My elementary classmates from Cuba and Puerto Rico were more than happy to teach me swear words in Spanish. Enough to get cuffed by Mrs Rodriguez our Spanish teacher.

In prescience of the tumultuous relationship we would have, Em rescued my petulance tuckus years before he became my stepfather. St James choirs joined Christ Church Cathedral choirs for a special performance of …who knows what? I don’t remember the music. What I remember is that when the choirmaster from Em’s church saw me sticking my tongue out at the junior high hotty I had my heart on, he grabbed me by the scruff and tossed me in the stairwell. Ouch! Em came into the stairwell a few minutes later and made sure I was okay. I was just a tad humiliated, but otherwise figured all is fair in love and war.

So, swearing. There are so many words for human excrement. None are quite as definitive and satisfying as s**t. The French have merde. The Brits have shite. Under the house rules of Captain Jones, poop was permissible, crap was not, s**t definitely not. There would be consequences. A battle of wills ensued. Ultimately I walked the plank, and went to live with my Nana and Pop pop in another state. My grandparents thought they were going to enjoy their golden years in peace and instead ended up raising a teenager.

Pop pop was more my speed. A former US Marine who fought in Okinawa. He was a gentleman and had good manners, but he also knew his way around some serious vernacular. Heck, even my Nana would drop a s**t bomb now and again. In his later years Pop pop was bald on top with a horseshoe of hair. He ran a service station for forty-five years, and was happy to be under the hood of a car tinkering. Except that on more than one occasion he would bang his exposed scalp on the propped hood of said car, which would lead directly to a Pop pop classic: GOD…DAMN, goddamn, goddamn!

Pop pop’s objection to profanity was more about timing. Not a big deal to say s**t, but do we have to talk about it at dinner? Well, if you were me you did. Another battle of wills ensued, although better matched, as we were both Marsland men after all. An enlisted man couldn’t exercise too much probity.

RECENT HISTORY

My comfort level with expletives is a perfectly valid reason why I ended up working in the Emergency Department (ED). The floor nurses were really just too proper, and had a bit too much value judgement going on, perpetually. The ED was the realm of hoodlums, prisoners, homeless, drug users, and working folks in medical crisis. Do you think that patients with 10 out of 10 flank pain from kidney stones are focused on keeping their conversation Disney-appropriate? No. By the time I landed in a level 1 trauma center, it was generally a non-stop s**t show. F-bombs were de rigeur.

Fortunately for me and my patients, my familiarity and comfort level with s**t was more than vowel and consonant deep. Ask any nurse what her/his/their hot button body fluid is and you’ll get some interesting conversation going. I worked with a nurse, who shall remain named Chicken Nugget (you know who you are), and she has this super power of turning off her sense of smell when she starts a shift in the ED. She was impervious to s**t.

I’m not so lucky as Chicken Nugget, but my Kryptonite is sputum. One time when I was still sporting a crew cut, I was in an isolation room doing tracheostomy suctioning. The patient coughed a huge, green, sticky sputum clump that skidded across my scalp, slowly settling in for a landing. I could only finish the job I started as the goo slowly sank into my hair. So, sputum, no thanks. But vomit, urine, blood, sweat, tears, and s**t, no problem.

In fact, I’m so relaxed around s**t, that I developed a reputation for being a masterful disimpactor. I just made up that word, but that’s what I was good at. May you never have need of fecal disimpaction, but if the occasion did arise, you for sure want someone who brings plenty of lubrication, a sturdy constitution, a gentle and kind manner, patience, and long fingers. That’s me. When you’re the one experiencing a disimpaction, it’s very intense, but when it’s done well, you are very, very appreciative. No joke, I once had a grateful patient’s wife force a wad of hundred dollar bills down my scrub top after I got him unplugged. It’s a shame that I was a serf of New York State and couldn’t legally accept the tip. This is all to say that s**t happens, the ED is often a s**t storm, and a satisfying s**t is one of the elusive pleasures of a well-lived life. Now let’s talk about how to keep things moving.

PRESENT

As promised in my last Substack, I’m going to cover supplements and medications which are harmful in general, but specifically problematic in patients experiencing post-acute sequelae of Covid (PASC) and Covid vaccine injury. Last week I wrote about aluminum containing medications. This week I’d like to discuss polyethylene glycol or PEG.

Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is a petroleum-derivative compound that is made from ethylene glycol (ethane-1,2-diol), the main ingredient in antifreeze. PEG can be found in a number of other products, including skin creams and personal lubricants, and as a food additive for anti-foaming purposes. PEG may be familiar to you by its brand name MiraLAX. This is pure PEG crystals, sold over-the-counter, and marketed as a laxative. In 2019, the MiraLAX brand generated about 29.7 percent of laxative/stimulant liquid/powder/oil sales in the United States. Sales of laxatives in 2023 topped $1.5 billion annually, and apparently there is a shortage.

How does MiraLAX work? It is classified as an osmotic laxative. This means that it works by drawing water into the colon. The water softens the stool and may naturally stimulate the colon to contract. These actions help ease bowel movements.

If you have been using PEG for years, you are probably wondering what the fuss is about? This is a great example of the difference between the pre- and post- Covidian world. You know the song “The Old Gray Mare”? She ain’t what she used to be. These bodies we are living in are changed, with innumerable pathologies and complications to confound us.

The PEG story goes back to an important decision made by the Covid mRNA vaccine manufacturers. PEG-modification (pegylation) conjugates PEG with the lipid nanoparticles (LNP) in the shots. It coats the surface of the LNPs reducing opsonization, aggregation, and improving mRNA delivery to the target cells. Translated, it helps the LNP glide past our immune system surveillance and through the phospholipid membranes of our cells. This action enables longer circulation of nanoparticles. However, there is now evidence that PEG causes immunogenic responses when conjugated (PEGylated) with other materials such as proteins and nanocarriers. See studies here and here. It has been estimated that up to 25% of people who received a Covid shot have developed antibodies to PEG.

If we have learned anything from the censorship of HCQ, IVM and other repurposed drugs which could effectively treat Covid, we should bear in mind that the scientific literature on occurrence of PEG antibodies is compromised. When you read a study which minimizes this, i.e. concludes that PEGylation in the Covid shots is safe and effective, make sure to also read the conflicts of interest declared.

What happens when a person develops antibodies to PEG? If you are allergic to something, and you ingest a sizable quantity of it on a daily basis, it is going to make you sick. Signs of a new allergy to PEG include pruritus (itching), tingling, flushing, urticaria (raised, red welts on your skin), angioedema (facial swelling), hypotension, and bronchospasm.

Spike protein destabilizes mast cells provoking mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) in many PASC and vax patients. When mast cells are unstable, they are frequently releasing histamine. Whereas white blood cells have a lifespan of about a week, mast cells last 2-4 years. We’ll be dealing with this dynamic for some time to come. In the context of MCAS, PEG antibodies mean that PEG-containing products have the potential to trigger anaphylaxis or hypersensitivity reactions in some people. In the most extreme of cases, a new PEG allergy has created enormous obstacles to treatment as there are many beauty care products, medications and even foods containing PEG. I have found this to be the case with more than six patients under my care. One patient would experience severe anxiety, tachycardia, flushing, and dizziness from the tiny amount of PEG in a dose of the anti-histamine Pepcid/Famotidine. My experience is that when patients wean off MiraLAX, there is a significant improvement in their global symptom burden.

Products containing Polyethylene Glycol

Medications using Polyethylene Glycol

Foods containing Polyethylene Glycol (See these WHO 2021 food additive details)

• Emulsifiers, stabilizers and sweeteners

• Chewing gum

• Food supplements

• Water-based sports, energy and electrolyte drinks

• Surface treated fresh fruit

What now? Laxatives are habit forming. If you have come to rely upon MiraLAX/PEG to have regular bowel movements, it would be unwise to stop abruptly, even if you are slowly poisoning yourself. If you develop a small bowel obstruction and need emergency surgery, you haven’t gained any ground. A more strategic response is to wean yourself over several weeks and replace the MiraLAX/PEG with safer alternatives. My favorite supplement in this case is OxyPowder, a combination of ozone-oxygenated magnesium and citric acid. I also like to use Garden of Life Prebiotic fiber which you mix with water and drink. Metamucil is readily available in most grocery stores and pharmacies. Prunes are an old standby.

We also need a longer-term plan to get off the laxative train, but keep things moving. Regular bowel movements require three components: hydration, dietary fiber, and mobility. Just like a three-legged stool, if you take away one of those three components, it isn’t stable. Hydration can be the easiest part. More than twenty-five years ago, a college classmate of mine changed my life with some simple advice. It was Mohit Bali, an introverted computer major who was observant if not elegant in his delivery. He told me that every morning when I wake up, I should drink a big mason jar of water right away. He explained that this was a basic teaching of Ayurvedic medicine for more than 3,000 years, and would help me lead a long and healthy life.

What Mohit didn’t share, but which I later learned, is that every human being wakes up dehydrated. Our body spends the time we are asleep engaging in cellular repair, burning fuel, making waste, using up oxygen and water. What we do instead of hydrate upon waking? We drink coffee. Yes, it stimulates our bowels, but the caffeine is a diuretic, which makes us pee and dehydrates us further, so that we start the day deeper in the hole. If you must drink coffee, then have at it, but drink a 32 oz of water first thing and you’ll thank yourself for it. The water will also stimulate you to have a marvelous BM.

Mobility is the next challenge, especially if we have the fatigue and post-exertional malaise of PASC and vaccine injury. Simply put, moving your body stimulates gastrointestinal motility. Move your body less, and waste will take longer to pass through you, permitting more of the moisture to be reabsorbed by your intestinal walls, creating bigger and drier stool.

Obtaining dietary fiber is as easy or hard as you choose to make it. You can use the options I mentioned above, but food is best. There are two kinds of fiber: soluble and insoluble. Soluble fiber gives stools bulk. Foods that are good sources of soluble fiber include apples, bananas, barley, oats, and beans. Insoluble fiber helps speed up the transit of food in the digestive tract and helps prevent constipation. Good sources of insoluble fiber include whole grains, most vegetables, wheat bran, and legumes. Foods that have fiber contain both soluble and insoluble fibers.

Diametrically opposed to fibrous foods are processed foods. White rice, white flour, refined pasta, and sugar have the effect of gumming up the works. Minimizing these aspects of your diet, and maximizing whole foods will produce long-term health benefits and more regular BMs.

Water, movement and fiber. Drink water early and often. Happy trails to you.

P.S. I have no financial interest in the products which I recommend, such as OxyPowder, Garden of Life Prebiotic Powder, or Metamucil.

History

I had at least four fathers. My biological father, my stepfather, my paternal grandfather, and the father of my best friend in high school. Only the last of these is still alive. One thing which each of them had in common was a facility with explanations about the world around us and how things work. Instead of facility, I thought to use the word alacrity, but my Pop pop could be grumpy when I asked him the meaning or spelling of a word. “There’s a very big dictionary on the book shelf at the end of the hall Scotty.” Yes, I knew that. It was the one that each of my siblings, cousins and myself would take turns sitting on at the dining room table during holidays growing up. “But you’re right here Pop pop, and you explain it so well.” That would usually get a look up from his Travis McGee novel and over the rims of his glasses, then an answer. Yes!

Because my dad had the first shift in this province of fathers, his patient explanations overshadow all others. Why is the sky blue? What makes wind? Are cats smarter than dogs? Why do dogs eat cat poop? (seriously, that made me doubt that dogs are smarter than cats) Do girls ever fart? Do all fish have teeth? (the movie Piranha had come out) How does Santa get down the Chimney? If God created the world, who created God? How does a lightbulb work? Why do you use a radar detector? That’s just for starters. Clearly he had his work cut out for him.

I marveled that he knew so much about so many things. As an adult, I remember my dad and think that it would be fair to say he was a Renaissance man. He played tennis and volleyball, and took up martial arts before his death. He built a passive solar house, restored a Model A Ford coupe with a rumble seat, had a beautiful garden, and was a decent cook by his third marriage. He was a successful salesman, an introvert who taught himself to be socially engaging, and was well-respected by his colleagues. He knew things, things that mattered. He had the answers to my questions, and on the rare occasion that he didn’t, he didn’t fake it.

Recent Past

One of my favorite novelists is Barbara Kingsolver. The last book I read by her was Demon Copperhead which is a story of life and love in the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. A line early in the novel has stuck with me as I have struggled to master this novel medical realm of Covid. “If you care, you’ll learn one thing from another. Anybody knows a sheepdog from a beagle, or a Whopper from a Big Mac.”

In the emergency setting, knowing one thing from another can make a big difference in the how the day goes for the patient in your care. Was that Morphine (MS04) or Mag Sulfate (MgS04) which caused you to stop breathing? Before I hang your blood, are you Bill Jones (DOB 6/24/59) or Bill Jones (DOB 6/23/59)? Did that telemetry monitor just show you brushing your teeth, or did you enter a potentially fatal dysrhythmia of ventricular fibrillation? You know, things that matter.

I have a decent understanding of how drugs work, at what doses, through what mechanisms of action, and with what side effects. It helped to spend nearly a decade on the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca. But I still relied heavily upon the expertise of my pharmacy colleagues while working in the Emergency Department (ED). When I started work in the trauma center at Upstate, this reliance grew, both because there were expert clinical pharmacists stationed in the ED itself, and because they actively participated in bedside care. During care of a trauma patient, it was Rob or Greg who was right behind me at the bedside, mixing drugs, passing syringes, reminding the team when the next dose of Epinephrine was due. They mixed the drips which made intubation work, hearts keep beating, blood pressure supply vital organs.

In this complex environment, I outsourced some of my learning. When the Covid vaccines were being rolled out, it was our pharmacist Greg to whom I turned. He had spent twelve hours watching expert testimony about the vaccines. I remember in the med room he assured me that the technology was at least a decade old, that they were safe, and he had done his homework in order to answer questions from colleagues like me. That was enough for me, because this was the guy who had my back when the chips were down, every damn time.

Present

I don’t outsource many of my questions anymore. Since I received two bad batch shots in January of 2021, I do my homework. In fact, I’ve read more studies in the last three years than the previous thirty. At this point, my study and clinical practice have propelled me into the position of trying to teach you.

The longer we are in practice at the Leading Edge Clinic, the more I encounter patients who still have almost both feet still in the land of conventional medicine. They still trust their PCP, their Cardiologist, their Gastroenterologist. The people who advised them to get the shots. They have been through the ringer, and haven’t been getting any answers. They are talking to me because their friend, family, neighbor, co-worker referred them. All they know is that they were told I might be able to help them.

This is a weak position from which to question the guidance of the trusted medical professionals in their lives. One way in which I approach this is by offering a framework. I suggest that when they next speak with their practitioner, they ask them this: “Sir/madam, can you please help me understand what is spikopathy, the pathologies it causes in long-haul and vaccine injury, and what you know about how to evaluate and treat those injuries?” I suggest that when that doctor/NP/PA gives them a blank stare, they remember it. You figure that into your calculations about whether their evaluation, testing, diagnosis and treatment is based upon reality.

The same practitioners may also tell you “We just don’t know much about long-haul and vaccine injury, and it will be years before we understand it and can effectively treat it.” My response is that today, not tomorrow or years from now, there is a graduate level course in long-haul and vaccine injury available at no cost. It is the eighty-two (and growing) part series by Dr Syed Mobeen, known as Dr Been. It is the Long Story Short series from the FLCCC Alliance. Any layperson or practitioner who watches and learns from that series will acquire knowledge that currently evades 99.9% of the practitioners in the United States, if not the world.

Along those lines, a patient recently told me that we need to share a list of medications that people experiencing spikopathy shouldn’t take. She was right. This is a start. In upcoming Substacks I will cover proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs), statins, and polyethylene glycol (PEG). In this Substack I’ll start with aluminum-containing over-the-counter and prescription medications. Examples are Maalox, Mylanta, Pepto-Bismol, Carafate or Sucralfate.

What are these products supposed to do? Aluminum hydroxide (Maalox, Mylanta) is a basic inorganic salt that acts by neutralizing hydrochloric acid in gastric secretions. Aluminum hydroxide is slowly solubilized in the stomach and reacts with hydrochloric acid to form aluminum chloride and water. It also inhibits the action of pepsin by increasing the pH and via adsorption. Bismuth subsalicylate (Pepto-Bismol) consists of trivalent bismuth and salicylate suspended in a mixture of magnesium aluminium silicate clay. The medicine forms a protective coating over the lower part of your esophagus, and partly coats your stomach. This helps protect them from stomach acid. It also has weak antacid properties that may help reduce too much stomach acid.

Sucralfate/Carafate works by forming a barrier or coating over a gastric ulcer. This protects the ulcer from the acid of the stomach, allowing it to heal. More technically, it dissociates in the acid environment of the stomach to its anionic form, which binds to the ulcer base. This creates a protective barrier to pepsin and bile and inhibits the diffusion of gastric acid. Sucralfate also stimulates the gastric secretion of bicarbonate and prostaglandins.

Why use aluminum in these antacids? One word, flocculation. If your house is connected to a municipal sewage system, when you flush the toilet the waste flows to your local sewage treatment plant. It is common practice in the United States to add aluminum powder to the raw sewage in order to make the solid waste settle out of the solution, so that it can be collected and removed. How does that work? Aluminum is what chemists call a cation. It has a +3 charge. The organic waste from your poo has a negative charge. Aluminum binds to the organic waste and this joint venture becomes sludgy. Ergo, flocculation. What happens when you ingest medications which have aluminum? Flocculation, in your blood. Sludging, in…your…blood.

It is not rare that during my first visit with a patient who has post-acute sequelae of Covid (PASC) or vaccine injury they will have one of these medications on their list. Or, as we progress through the visit, it comes out that they take one of these medications, Carafate being the worst. That is the moment when I try to explain to them that we have a bit of work to do just to get to the starting line of healing.

When I assert to you that 100% of the population has microclotting, regardless of vaccination status, the import of what I shared about aluminum gathers weight. For now, I’ll direct your questions about microclotting to Dr Jordan Vaughn’s presentation on Microclotting at the FLCCC Alliance in May 2023. We have lost the controls in this dystopian medical experiment, and we have all been contaminated by spike. On a scale of 0-4, the best we have seen when testing blood for our patients is a 1.5. This was only one patient, and after months of anticoagulation therapy. Dr Vaughn, who I consider the United States national expert on microclotting, after testing thousands of patients, would assert that the best score we see in the general population is microclotting at a level of 1 out of 4.

Some of you are old enough to remember the white stick which your dad or grandad had in the medicine cabinet and would use to stop bleeding from a cut suffered while shaving. I’m old enough that I still have one of these. Safety razors have mostly made this a thing of the past, but that white stick was a styptic pencil. Anhydrous aluminium sulfate is the main ingredient and acts as a vasoconstrictor in order to disable blood flow. The stick is applied directly to the bleeding site and it stings. The high ionic strength promotes flocculation of the blood, and the astringent chemical causes local vasoconstriction. It has 56% aluminum.

If you doubt that the little bit of aluminum in these medications is enough to cause trouble, I’ll give you a couple of examples. One of my unvaccinated patients is a band teacher who was relatively stable. Then he went on a trip to Disney with his students. He took along his travel kit, in which he had a travel deodorant with aluminum, and travel hair gel, with aluminum. During the trip he drank soda out of aluminum cans. After the trip his health deteriorated dramatically. When we had the next visit, he reported symptoms reflective of microclotting: severe headache, vision changes, arm and leg muscle pain, joint pain, GI upset. Shedding was contributing to these changes. When he returned to his non-aluminum deodorant at home, and stopped using his aluminum containing hair gel, he saw improvement in his symptoms.

Another patient is a radiologist who had symptoms reflective of microclotting, with cognitive issues, headache, myalgia and joint pain. With the simple intervention of eliminating his habit of drinking seltzer out of aluminum cans, he achieved a remarkable reduction of his symptoms. Just avoiding this tiny amount of aluminum had enough impact that this trained medical professional could clearly identify the benefit.

Sucralfate/Carafate contains 21% aluminum by weight. A typical regimen of 1 g 4 times/day contains 828 mg of elemental aluminum. I used to love Carafate, and would introduce patients to it by saying it was an old-fashioned drug which was very effective at helping heal peptic ulcer disease or esophagitis. Ironically, the underlying autoimmune dysregulation, antibody response, mast-cell activation, and microclotting from spikopathy can easily lead to heartburn and gastrointestinal dysregulation. Along comes a general practitioner or gastroenterologist and they prescribe Carafate. The result is a catastrophic escalation of microclotting, as each dose of aluminum provokes more and more and more flocculation or sludging in the patient’s blood.

What are your alternatives to these aluminum containing drugs? First and foremost, knowledge. Dr Sherry Rogers recently updated her classic No More Heartburn: The Safe, Effective Way to Prevent and Heal Chronic Gastrointestinal Disorders. Buy it, read it, and act upon it. Take time to chew your food, drink less liquids with your meals, drink less alcohol, eat fewer processed foods, and limit caffeine intake. Try using oral liquid aloe vera, apple cider vinegar, and slippery elm bark to heal your inflamed gut. Eat a healthier diet, and cultivate a more robust microbiome, preferably with cultured foods and liquids rather than proprietary pills and potions promising probiotic nirvana. For the unfortunate with bleeding ulcers, get a juicer, and drink raw cabbage juice. There were two excellent studies from the late 1940s and 1950s which demonstrated this intervention to be a safe and quick way to completely heal ulcer craters. See references here and here.

One thing from another. If you care, you’ll learn.

P.S. This last week I appeared on the Shaun Newman Podcast episode #554. The content of his show has taken a giant turn from focusing on sports to discussing current events in Alberta and Canada. We had a fun and informative visit together. After this podcast was released on Friday December 22, 2023, bad actors hacked Shaun’s website and diverted web traffic to a bogus site in Indonesia. They stole his domain and registered it under GoDaddy. We understand from expert cyber security consultants that the cost of such a job for a talented hacker would be $20-40,000. Somebody, some organization, or some government (Canada?) doesn’t want Shaun broadcasting. My translation is that in the content of our discussion, we are over the target. Don’t let Them win. Please give a listen, and share with others.

PAST

When I was in seventh grade, we moved to the sticks. Our home was across the road from a state game preserve, which was literally swamplands. We had no cable, and the primary source of heat was a big woodstove to which I dedicated many hours, stacking wood, carrying wood inside, starting fires in the morning, and keeping the fire burning during the day. The bus stop after school was a quarter mile from our house down a gravel and oil road. We didn’t have Atari and my parents worked. There was only so much trouble to get into.

The single TV channel we could get carried The Rockford Files with James Garner, and so my slacker afterschool routine was to grab a big mug of Lipton instant tea, a bag of pretzels, and plop down on the worn sofa by the wood stove to watch. I’m really not sure it’s fair to call the sugary mixture tea, as it bears so little resemblance to the real stuff. But I loved the salty sweet yeasty flavors of fake tea and pretzels, and couldn’t get enough of Jim Rockford’s misadventures.

Years before the handsome Tom Selleck played Magnum PI, James Garner won my heart. Magmum PI lived the cushy life in a Hawaiian guest house and rolled in a red Ferrari. Rockford was the cranky antihero who drove 1974-1978 model year Pontiac Firebirds, was a wrongly convicted ex-con, and lived with his dad Rocky in a trailer. He got beat up more often than not.

My favorite scene ever was when Rockford flipped his cigarette into the face of a thug. It was supposed to be a distraction, enabling him to land a punch and escape. Instead, the thug didn’t miss a beat and knocked Rockford off his block. It’s not that I liked seeing my guy get beat up. It’s more that I felt validated, like, “Yeah, you think you’ve got it figured out and it never goes the way you imagined. Blam!”

RECENT PAST

My Nana took tea to the next level. She would brew half a dozen bags of Lipton orange pekoe tea for-ev-er on the stovetop in a gallon pot whose sole duty was tea time. Then she would dump a little can of frozen lemonade in and voila! Iced tea Marsland-style.

In my late twenties I would make fun of my friend Brett and his tea habits. He wouldn’t be caught drinking tea made with a tea bag. In his cupboard were special decorative cans from Kusmi Tea with names like Prince Vladmir. He had a special tea pot which heated water to just the right temperature for a particular tea, AND he had a timer to brew it for a specified time. It all seemed so precious and pretentious, and I figured, well, unless you were English or a metrosexual, a bag of Lipton was adequate.

Fast forward twenty five years and I think that Brett could make fun of me! In the top drawer of my work desk I have a thermometer and a tea strainer. Teabag tea tastes like cardboard to me now, and there is a time and a temperture for all: two minutes for Sencha, three for green, four for black, and five for Pu’er. 160F for green, 170F for Matcha (and a whisk don’t you know), boiling hot for black. And no burned tongue for me, as it won’t pass my lips until it’s cooled to 140F. Rishi Tea, the largest American importer of organic teas became my go-to supplier.

With the pandemic, green tea went beyond yumminess to essential equipment for survival. I was working evenings at SUNY Upstate in the trauma center, and the drive home at 12:30am was 1 1/2 hours of bleak, cold, darkness. I calculated that I could start sipping upon departure and stay awake on the road, then drink a big glass of water upon arrival home and wash out the caffeine. It wasn’t until I joined Pierre at The Leading Edge Clinic and began learning how to fight COVID, then treat post-acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and vaccine injury that I realized how important that green tea had been.

There are multiple studies now which demonstrate how the epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) in green tea blocks spike entry into cells. See studies here, there and everywhere. It turns out that after spending hours providing bedside care to sweating, coughing, distressed acute COVID patients, that green tea was not only keeping me awake on the drive home, it was also blocking spike from taking hold in my body.

PRESENT

All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan, made famous by Jimi Hendrix:

There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief

Business men, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None will level on the line
Nobody offered his word
Hey, hey

No reason to get excited
The thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But, uh, but you and I, we’ve been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin’ falsely now
The hour’s getting late, hey

If you’ve read this far, let me reward your curiosity and tenacity by introducing you to Baobab. After eight months of personal and patients’ use, tracking labs and monitoring clinical effect, I think it is some kind of way out of the confusion, and none too soon.

Baobab is a tree which covers half the continent of Africa. It dates back to biblical times, and was important to tribal people in arid desert regions, because both its hollow core and spongy bark could store water. It is an odd looking tree, which produces a large fruit the size of a football, which has a hard shell. When ripe, the fruit is a dry powder which can be mechanically separated from fiber and seeds. Every single part of the tree is useful to humans and animals alike. The leaves can provide forage for wild animals and livestock, the bark can be made into rope, the wood used for fuel, and the fruit for medicinal purposes. For these reasons it is often referred to as The Tree of Life.

Before there were words for these actions, Baobab fruit was antibiotic, antiviral, antifungal, antipyretic (fever lowering), and poison neutralizing. Tribespeople who hunt with poison tipped arrows and spears will mix Baobab powder with water to apply to the entry wound and neutralize the poison so that they can eat the flesh. Baobob has a pre-biotic fiber which modulates glucose metabolism, thus lowering fasting blood glucose levels. The fiber also creates a welcoming environment for an abundant and diverse population of bifida bacteria in the gut.

Baobab also has EGCG.

Last Spring, Pierre was at a conference in Hawaii and I was covering some of his patients. It was serendipity that I saw the labs come back for a family which had decided to measure the spike antibody for everyone in the household. Mom, college-age daughter and high school-age daughter were unvaccinated, with spike antibody (ab) levels of ~7,000, 3500 and 1500 U/mL respectively. Dad is a physician working in a busy outpatient clinic. He received two Pfizer shots, both from bad batches, and was exposed to ongoing shedding while delivering patient care in a healthcare environment. His spike ab was about 100 U/mL. I was stunned, and understood that this was either a lab error or a very intriguing aberration.

I picked up the phone and called this family, speaking with the mom at length. Dad didn’t take any medications, nor did he take any supplements. In fact, it took about thirty minutes to uncover what he could possibly be doing which would result in such a low spike ab level. Finally she said, “Well, there is this drink he makes every morning and takes to work. It has Baobab powder, and he mixes it with stevia and ginger. He only drinks it during the week, and sips it over the course of the day.” Why Baobab I asked? “It has a lot of vitamin C, and pre-biotics, but I’m not really sure. He’s been drinking it for years.” I thanked her and hung up, then spent the next four hours reading papers about Baobab.

As I read about Baobab’s many qualities, and then learned that it had EGCG, I concluded that the Baobab was somehow connected to this physician’s low spike ab level. He was patient 0. Researchers had considered Baobab to control COVID, but as far as I could tell, hadn’t pursued it further. I pulled $500 out of my piggy bank, messaged twenty patients whose spike ab levels were >25,000 U/mL or relatively high, and made them a proposal. Eat, drink, sip, but one way or the other get 1 Tbsp of Baobab in your body every day for a month, and then let’s recheck your spike ab level.

Within the month the feedback started to roll in, and I had my own experience to contribute. I started drinking the Baobab with my morning vitamins. That didn’t go so well, because I ended up with increased paresthesias (decreased sensation) in my toes and feet. After hearing the same story from three other participants in the pilot study, I suggested that we all sip it over the course of the day, like patient 0. The paresthesias resolved.

When the spike ab results started to come back after a month of Baobab, there was a signal. If patients ate it or drank it, there was a slight change in their levels. But if they sipped it, boy howdy! There were drops in spike ab levels reaching 5,000 U/mL over a month. That was enough for me, and I began guiding patients to sip Baobab, 1 Tbsp in 16oz of water over at least an eight hour period.

More feedback with additional patients revealed a few quirks of the therapy. If someone has severe mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), they may need to go low and slow. Well, just about all of our patients have some level of mast cell activation, so I guided everyone to start with adding only 1/4 teaspoon to 16oz of water and slowly advancing. Initially, some patients (including me) experienced some bloating while sipping Baobab. I’ll attribute this to the recalibration of our microbiomes as we build up the bifida.

Labs in patients who were sipping Baobab showed a declining fasting glucose, similar to what we see when we use Berberine. Patients also report enormous formed brown stools with a clean finish, i.e. no wiping necessary, and a sensation of complete bowel evacuation. Gotta love that.

Then things got interesting. We have been treating patients for microclotting for over a year now, and so some patients were beginning to retest. What I saw was multiple signals that unvaccinated PASC patients who were sipping Baobab dropped their microclotting scores by two points in 2-3 months. For reference, it often takes six months on anticoagulation with Aspirin, Eliquis and Plavix for a PASC or vaccine injured patient to drop his/her/their score one point. It would appear that not only does Baobab block spike entry into cells, but also that it helps break down microclots faster and safely. How?

The likely answer arrived a few weeks ago when I was reading a review article about natural products for antithrombosis. I learned that EGCG acts along the COX-1 pathway, same as Aspirin, to inhibit platelet aggregation and activation. Whereas Aspirin has about a 20% effect, EGCG has about a 90% effect.

Why not just take EGCG then? Well, you could. But any herbalist worth his/her/their salt would explain that when you isolate an active component of a plant-based remedy, you leave behind other components which synergize and ameliorate adverse effects. Given what I have seen clinically over the last eight months, my vote is to stick with green tea and Baobab sipping.

Where do you get Baobab? There are plenty of sources online if you want to shop around, as Baobab is an agricultural product.

How do you mix it? If you can make gravy without lumps, you can mix Baobab. I usually start the day by slowly tapping one Tbsp of Baobab into a cup of water as I stir it with a spoon. I smush out any remaining lumps, and then add this to a thermos with cold water, shaking and sipping every half hour over the course of the day. Every time I talk to a patient about Baobab, I take a sip!

What does it taste like? I would describe Baobab as having a mild citrus flavor. If it doesn’t agree with you, feel free to flavor it like patient 0. A few patients have complained that it has given them heartburn, and there have been others who can’t be bothered with the fuss and muss of mixing/sipping. My position it this: Baobab costs about $20 for a 1 1/2 month supply, blocks spike, breaks down microclots, builds up my bifida, lowers my fasting glucose, doesn’t taste too bad, and helps me have a very satisfying poop every day. Sold!

Baobab sipping is an economical way to combat shedding. My suggestion is to prepare your Baobab sipper before you head into any social interaction. Start sipping ahead of time, sip during the event, and continue sipping afterwards. In effect you are delivering a steady supply of EGCG and whatever synergy we haven’t yet isolated in a lab, which is blocking spike entry into your cells. If you are going to travel, bring the powder with you and once you are through airport security, mix it up at the water fountain and get down to sipping. Our patients and team have been doing this for months, and overall the results have been positive.

Cheers!

P.S. If you have ever seen a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, you can appreciate the power of a groovy soundtrack. My wife and I really enjoyed the updated series of Battlestar Galactica, and I’ll never forget when Jimi Hendrix’s anthem showed up in the narrative. Five main characters keep hearing the song in their head, and end up together in the same rom where they realize they are the Final Five Cylons. Internet wisdom says: “The song’s biblical and mythical connections make it fitting for the show, as it foreshadows destruction and leads to a new world.”

P.S.S. I have no financial stake in any of the products I recommend, including Rishi Tea.

HISTORY

Straight white teeth are a form of social currency. Alternately, crooked, broken and discolored teeth can directly impact one’s ability to attract a mate, land a job, and secure less unequal treatment in society. Common sense may tell you this is true, but there have also been academic studies which prove the point, such as this one from Ontario, Canada.

My Nana and Pop pop, who were my paternal grandparents, took me into their modest home and raised me from my teenage years into adulthood. Nana had buck teeth, which she often referenced in a self-conscious and self-deprecating manner. Pop pop’s teeth were rather crooked, and both of my grandparents had brown tints to their teeth from years of drinking tea. We lived on their Social Security, and a very small monthly check from my father. I’ve never known two people who were more selfless and loving, good to the bone, and sturdy. I give thanks that I tumbled out of my middle class upbringing to live with family who instilled common sense and working class sensibilities in my fanciful head. To them I give credit for the values which have guided me through the valley of the shadow of death as a “plague doctor” during a pandemic.

Nana and Pop pop had three boys. Doug and Bruce were the youngest and middle brothers respectively, and my dad was the oldest. The story was that Pop pop sold his coin collection to help pay for my dad’s first year at Penn State, and there wasn’t money left for braces. As a result my dad had teeth just as crooked as Pop pop’s. I remember his fast work with a toothpick after eating corn-on-the-cob in the summertime. Although his smile was imperfect, it was big, kind-hearted and freely offered in friendship and humor.

In junior high school I still had a gap between my two front teeth. I wasn’t self-conscious about it until some scornful classmates used it to taunt me, and then I realized that this was a thing. Braces soon followed, which were becoming a badge of middle class status. I didn’t follow through with my retainer, and so I have an overbite, again. At eighteen I injured my left upper front tooth, which was replaced with a crown. At a party a few years later, a UPenn dental student pointed out that the enamel of my crown didn’t match the rest of my teeth. I was so surprised by her lack of social graces that I neglected to tell her to bug off to the moon. But, I was reminded again that in the eyes of many people, crooked, stained, mismatched, missing and imperfect teeth leave you lower on the social ladder.

The funny thing is that the older I get, the more I trust people with “bad” teeth. At least I know that they are rubbing up against the gritty truth of our existence, and they are less likely to pretend they are better. They are often capital C Characters, and that is a step up in my book.

RECENT PAST

During nursing school I was working full-time hours, taking full-time classes, up to my gills in rotating credit card debt to pay for classes, and stressed to the breaking point. It’s a testimony to her Taurus tenacity and Catholic kindness that my beloved wife stuck with me through that time.

At some point during those years I developed weeping lesions on both sides of my face. They were each about the size of a pinky finger, below my ears, along my jawline. They were red and angry, weeping straw colored fluid. Trips to my primary doc and the Dermatologist brought prescriptions for potions, lotions and pills, none of which helped. These sores on my face added an exponential layer of stress upon me as I was going through clinical rotations. Although none were so guache as to mention it outright, I could follow the eyes of patients and medical professionals to my bright red racing strips and see the alarm and questions forming in their minds.

It eventually occurred to me to try a homeopathic remedy called Rhus Toxidendron, which is formulated from Poison Ivy. My brain made the connection betwen the open weeping lesions one would experience with a severe case of Poison Ivy. I had lived and worked on a farm in France years before, back when I thought I wanted to be a farmer. The family on this farm had their own pharmacy of remedies, some of which dated back more than a hundred years, made by their grandparents. Within a week of starting Rhus Tox my lesions were gone. It would become one of hundreds of cases in my career where a simple intervention resolved what dozens of practitioners and therapies couldn’t touch.

PRESENT

About three months ago there was a week in which I had three different patients who developed worsening symptoms because they started taking collagen supplements. It wasn’t something I ever recommended, but I understand why they started taking it. Consider whether you have had this experience: you run into an old friend, or get to visit with a family member who you haven’t seen since later 2019. You are looking at them and thinking, “Man, you look terrible! You’re hair is falling out, your skin is pale, wrinkly and sagging. It’s as if you aged a decade in four years.” Mmm hmm. That’s the spike protein for you. It damages collagen, and appearances go to pot.

Collagen is akin to a three dimensional ladder which provides structure and support to our tissue. Spike damages it so that collagen becomes overbuilt and less flexible. Imagine the difference between a normal ladder with a foot between each rung, and a ladder with only an inch between rungs. The second one is nearly useless. It doesn’t need MORE crosslinks from supplemented collagen, it needs to be trimmed back to functionality. As a result of increased collagen crosslinking, skin loses its elasticity and tone, and blood vessels are not as resilient. This is one reason we see iliac venous compression in some patients; there is a perfect storm of endothelial injury, coagulopathy, and decreased flexibility.

It wasn’t so straight forward to figure out that collagen was hurting my patients. I end up feeling like a forensic clinician in a whodunnit story, looking for a clue that doesn’t emerge until the end of an hour-long visit (yes, we often spend up to an hour with our patients during a visit at The Leading Edge Clinic). We’re almost done and the patient tells me that a Naturopath or Chiropractor or helpful “functional” physician recommended collagen for their hair loss/saggy skin/soft nails. “But I didn’t put it on my supplement list, because it’s not really even a supplement.” Um, no. When we pin down the time they started it and when their symptoms started going south, there is consistently temporal association.

If you have been taking collagen for years, the story is even worse. What has changed in our bodies since late 2019 is that 100% of us now have amyloid fibrin microclotting. On a scale of 0-4, the best you will find, even in an unvaccinated patient, is a 1 out of 4. In most of my post-acute sequealae of COVID (PASC) and vaccine injured patients, the score is usually 3 or higher. Personally, I was a 2.5 out of 4, three months into anticoagulation therapy.

What does collagen have to do with clotting? Simply put, collagen stimulates platelet activaton and aggregation. I was reading a paper about natural ways to treat coagulopathy, and realized from one of it’s citations that the scientists were using collagen to provoke clotting. Check this out. On the bottom right of page 55 of the cited paper it says: “Determination of enzyme source of COX-1 and TXAS In our previous reports (Ok et al., 2012), we reported that the amount of TXA2 (determined as TXB2 ) in intact platelets was 4.0 ± 0.1 ng/108 platelets, and this was markedly increased to 356.1 ± 46.9 ng/108 platelets when platelets were stimulated with collagen (10 mg/ml) (Ok et al., 2012).” The bench scientists knew that if they wanted to provoke platelet aggregation and activation, all they had to do was add collagen to the platelets in solution. Yikes! In a post-Covidian world where everyone is microclotting, we don’t want to do things which provoke more clotting.

In a team meeting of our practice a few weeks ago, I reported that I had not yet seen a patient whose microclotting score didn’t improve over time with our treatments. It was the very next day that this track record changed. Six months after therapy with IVM, Aspirin, Plavix and Eliquis, the patient’s microclotting score remained a 3 out of 4. Scratching my head, I reviewed the chart and right there it was under supplements—collagen.

The last two weeks have seen a flurry of collagen conversations. “I felt the best I have since 2022, then two weeks ago I started to tank.” What did you change? Final answer in the last minute of the visit—collagen. Microclot testing shows one partner has a level of 1 out of 4, and the other is a 3.5 out of four. Both are world travelers with tons of shedding exposure. What’s a difference between the two? The latter has been using collagen as a supplement for years. Take home lesson: don’t use collagen.

The question has been raised about whether this means we should avoid bone broth due to its collagen content. The short answer is that I don’t know. I don’t think it’s enough to be problematic, and bone broth is very helpful with intermittent fasting by providing phosphates to rebuild cells, but I honestly just don’t know.

If supplementing collagen isn’t the answer, then what can you do to repair your collagen? One answer is Flavay. Not the knock-off generic versions of pycnogenol, but the real deal, orignating in France and made under several patents since 1948.

Aside from being a Francophile, I love Flavay for how it benefits patients clinically. It is made from French maritime pine bark. In addition to safely inhibiting platelet adhesion to other platelets and blood vessels (safe, because of no increased risk of bleeding), it also modulates nitric oxide producton, inhibits histamine release inside blood vessels, and renews/restores healthy collagen function by trimming overbuilt crosslinking. That is why you’ll see a lovely bikini-clad French woman running down the beach with her beautiful beau and children in the ads for Flavay. It rejuvenates your skin (and blood vessels). Vive le France!

P.S. I have no financial interest in Flavay or any other products which I mention in my Substack. If I do, you’ll be the second to know.

P.S.S. This week the number of subscribers from Minnesota lept ahead of my home state of New York. Hurray for Minnesota!

P.S.S.S. I am honored to be speaking at the third FLCCC Educational Conference, ‘Healthcare Revolution: Restoring the Doctor-Patient Relationship’, taking place February 2-4, 2024 in Phoenix, AZ! I’ll be speaking with my partner Dr Pierre Kory on shedding and also presenting a case study called Complex Syndrome, Complex Management, COVID Vaccine Injury. Looking forward to connecting with you there! You can learn more about the conference here: flccc.net/conference (http://flccc.net/conference)