Colds, flus, covid, mpox, bird flu, and whatever else they’re cooking up in the labs these days. They begin with an infection in your upper respiratory tract (URTI), your sinuses, mouth and throat. Rarely do these create problems until they “mature,” moving into the lower tract, the lungs. Every year, 35-90,000 die from these seasonal illnesses, but no one dies from a head cold, even if it’s flu or covid. The cause of death is often bacterial pneumonia as a consequence of the URTI.
Updating an article I wrote in 2021, these tips may help you avoid or combat a wide variety of viral and bacterial infections. The key is to make you stronger than the bugs that want to attack you and give you powerful weapons to shut them down. As always, proper diet, exercise, and adequate sleep, as well as optimizing your gut microbiome are critical to an effective immune system. But even the best of us will catch the occasional bug and sometimes we just get run down from stress or other factors, giving those bugs an easier target.
I’ve previously written that Vitamin D status is a major factor in the severity of covid infections (www.fittrimimmortal.com/blog/top-tip-for-surviving-covid ) with serum levels of 25(OH)D > 60ng/mL making you nearly bulletproof and levels less than 20 putting you at significant risk. The same is true of cancer, heart disease and many other modern illnesses, where high levels of Vitamin D in your system give a strong line of defense. To this we can add nutrients Vitamins A, C and zinc for their known antiviral properties. Recent studies have shown Quercetin to be highly effective as well. Combining all of these in your daily regimen during cold and flu season is a no brainer and a lot less expensive than a hospital visit.
As an update to the earlier article, I want to stress the importance of supplementing A along with D, easily done by simply switching from any previous D supplements to cod liver oil, thankfully now available in capsule form. Cod liver oil is rich in both A and D. The importance of balancing A and D is both that they compete, so a surplus of one can result in a deficiency of the other, as well as the need to balance copper metabolism, which is dependent on vitamin A, with zinc and iron, as these three minerals sort of compete as well. Compete isn’t the right word, but it's an easy way to understand it.
I’ve talked about HCQ and IVM, but those are difficult to come by these days and my personal preference is to avoid all medicines unless absolutely necessary, because they virtually all can have undesirable effects. That said, HCQ and IVM have as good a safety profile as any medicine, prescription or OTC and there is a significant body of evidence demonstrating that both have efficacy against covid.
For combatting URTIs and thus preventing them from becoming problematic, an amazing and inexpensive strategy that you can use at home is nebulizing hydrogen peroxide along with specially formulated iodine. You may recall that iodine was a much sought after and hard to find prophylactic after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It is protective in many ways, particularly for the thyroid. A special formulation, Lugol’s solution, is made specifically for nebulized inhalation, available in 2% or 5% strength. You can also use povidone iodine, typically a 10% concentration designed for topical use, but which can be nebulized as well.
Hydrogen peroxide is a powerful oxygenator and shows significant antiviral and antibacterial properties as well. While many believe the key to health is antioxidants, this is a misunderstanding of human physiology. As should be obvious, oxygen is essential for the entire animal kingdom, so how could it be toxic? Radical oxygen species (ROS) can be harmful in excess, but also act as signaling molecules to trigger beneficial processes. What is needed is a redox balance. Redox (reduction-oxidation) is a process of electron exchange, which is an energy transfer. Oxidation is the loss of electrons, while reduction is the gain of electrons. It is an ongoing reciprocal process.
During illness and many injuries, oxygen supply to tissues is reduced. Specifically, with respiratory infections, your oxygen supply is severely reduced and with the SARS-CoV-2 virus there can also be a deleterious effect on your blood’s oxygen carrying capacity. My friend and personal physician, Dr. Robert Rowen of Santa Rosa, uses a special IV ozone process which generates a noticeable and nearly immediate improvement in energy levels, and the benefits are dramatic if your redox status is out of balance. If everything else fails to keep you healthy, I’d recommend him, or any local practitioner in your area that provides ozone or hyperbaric oxygen therapies, but these are costly and generally not covered by insurance.
You can buy a good tabletop nebulizer (not the cheap battery-operated units) for $75-125. Here’s how it’s done, and note the use of saline, NOT distilled water. The salt is important, critical, in fact. Both the saline and the Lugol’s iodine are difficult to find in drugstores in my area, but easily available on line. Here’s the formula:
Using any small to moderate sized brown-glass bottle, like an empty vitamin bottle, mix one part USP grade 3% hydrogen peroxide with 9 parts normal saline (0.9%) to yield 0.3% peroxide. I have previously suggested dilution to 0.1%, but I now recommend a stronger solution. If this is not well tolerated, you can try diluting further, but I’ve found that most can handle 0.3% or even stronger, and why not bring out the bigger hammer first? Stronger is better, in terms of killing the virus, but it can also cause minor, temporary irritation for some. This mixture should be good for 3 months. Do not add the iodine until you’re ready to use it. Put the peroxide-saline mix into your nebulizer and then add 3-4 drops of the Lugol’s 2%, 1-2 drops of Lugol’s 5%, or a single drop of povidone 10%. As with the peroxide concentration, more is better, although too much can cause irritation; nothing serious, just a brief period of discomfort. Nebulize several times each day until your symptoms subside.
In a pinch, let’s say you’re travelling, or you just don’t have a nebulizer handy, you can buy saline nasal spray (make sure it’s just saline and not any sort of medication). Pop the spray nozzle out and dump out a few tablespoons of the solution and replace it with 3% peroxide and then add 10-20 drops of iodine. Replace the nozzle and spray this up into your nose several times, inhaling deeply so that some gets to your throat. Repeat this every 15-20 minutes initially, then every few hours until you feel better.
Asthma or allergy sufferers may find this helpful on bad days, as it should make you feel better, but it works best against toxic bacteria or viruses. It’s dirt cheap and there’s no harm in using it prophylactically, perhaps once or twice a week during cold and flu season, or if you’ve been around anyone who showed symptoms. At the first sign of any respiratory infection, nebulize several times daily until symptoms abate.
Your nebulizer instructions will tell you to carefully sanitize the unit if another person will be using it, but if your household is visited by the flu or even covid, the nebulizer won’t spread the illness because the peroxide and iodine will kill it, and if you live, work or otherwise associate together, you’ll be exposed to each other’s germs anyway. You can save time by just giving it a rinse between users and a more thorough cleaning before putting it away. Also, if your clan is ill, you save a lot of time and isopropyl alcohol, the recommended cleaning agent. If you do clean it between users, make sure the alcohol is completely evaporated before the next use.
My personal experience is that two or even three people can nebulize concurrently. Take a deep “hit,” and then pass it to the next person while holding your breath. If you inhale deeply over 4-7 seconds, alternating three through the nose and one by mouth (which will go deeper into the lungs) and then hold it for 20 seconds, one or two other people can use it and then pass it back to you. This process should be repeated every few hours, until symptoms improve. And again, especially if you all have the same symptoms, there’s literally no danger in sharing the device.
This is powerful stuff, and if done at the very first sign of illness, it can ameliorate and sometimes prevent severe symptoms, and you may find yourself feeling significantly better in one or two days.
If you don’t catch it right away and it gets into your lungs, it will take a bit longer to shake and there may be a period of reduced energy because you may not be processing oxygen as efficiently as usual. I suggest nebulizing a bit of glutathione after the flu or cold symptoms have abated so that you’re done with the peroxide and iodine process. Theranaturals L-Gluthione Plus (theranaturals.com) is an instant dissolving powdered glutathione that nebulizes quite well. Another suggestion for your lungs is below.
While you have the hydrogen peroxide, here’s a bit of trivia I bet you didn’t know: The most common infections do not happen in the sinus, the lungs or the stomach, but in the mouth. And gum infections are a direct pathway for inflammation of the heart and the brain. So, rinse your mouth with a small squirt of your 3% peroxide (not the dilute solution for nebulizing) probably best right before brushing, as you aren’t likely to enjoy the taste, but in a pinch, rinsing with peroxide is more important than brushing, as it impacts more than just your teeth!
To put a cherry on that sundae, my wife has a great herbal tea remedy that could be beneficial both during a bout of cold or flu as well as afterwards. It consists of sage, mullein, coltsfoot, plantain, anise, sckullcap, elderberry, Siberian ginseng and calendula. If you can’t find these at your local health food or vitamin shop, you can always order them from Amazon.
Hers: sage, mullein, coltsfoot, plantain, anise, sckullcap, elderberry, Siberian ginseng and calendula.
Go to health store, get 1/4 cup each and then you have enough to make lot of tea. Get a big pot like a gallon of water and tablespoon of each and get to boil but don't keep it boiling just once it get boiling turn it off. Let steep half an hour. Get a large jug and cover with cheesecloth or old short to strain and pour tea into it. Refrigerator. But drink a cup first with real honey and slice of lemon squeezed. Then a couple times a day just pour a cup from fridge jug and microwave, honey lemon...
If your town lacks a good herb shop, you can find these on Amazon.