Long COVID, Microclots, and Circulation with Dr. Thomas Levy

Riordan Clinic [00:00:00]:
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Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:00:56]:
Well, welcome everybody. Hello everyone. I’m Dr. Ron Hunninghake and we’re having a very wonderful broadcast today. Dr. Thomas Levy has joined us once again and the Real Health Podcast, you know, is never going to be the same if, if Dr. Levy’s not available. So Dr. Tom, thank you so much for coming on and I know you are as excited as I am to talk about this whole thing about, and I’m going to just use our title that we mentioned was the genesis and resolution of Long COVID. Long COVID has been such an incredible mystery for so many people, uh, not only just a mystery, but they can’t get over it. That’s why it’s called Long COVID. And thanks to you and your experience worldwide travel, you’ve come across, uh, a procedure that may be helping us understand what Long COVID really is and also helping us help our patients get over it. But tell me a little bit about this discovery in terms of, uh, the genesis of Long COVID.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:02:06]:
Well, sure. I think it’s good to start with the genesis of Long COVID. Long COVID, meaning chronic COVID, uh, et cetera, is that a limited number of people after they get a bad case of COVID never really completely get over it. And just stay chronically ill afterwards. And a very large number of people, as it turns out now, unfortunately, but unavoidably, the truth I’m afraid is that a very large number of people with the chronic COVID or long COVID wiped out fatigue, brain fog, et cetera, symptoms that go on indefinitely are due to the fact that they had one or more of the COVID shots, also called vaccinations. Although I don’t think that’s a good term for that injection. And the thing is, is this brings us to the etiology. This brings us to the reason a very limited number of people who get COVID cannot eliminate what’s called the spike protein part of the COVID pathogen out of their system. And the spike protein is highly toxic, attacks virtually all the tissues in the body because they found it at autopsy studies in literally every tissue. And But in the case of the people who have been vaccinated, it’s still, I don’t think properly realizes that the quote injection or vaccination is designed to give you spike protein, hopefully, or supposedly with the idea that you’ll form an immune reaction and knock out the spike protein, knock out the COVID But that just not has turned out to be the case. People don’t get over the long COVID. Instead, they keep the spike protein because something else nasty about the spike protein is it replicates. How horrible is it to have a toxin in your body that you just can’t neutralize one time and get rid of, but continues to regenerate itself? Can you imagine getting a, a big dose of mercury, but have that mercury continue to reproduce itself day after day?

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:04:10]:
So this is why, this is why people get into long COVID and can’t get out of it. They—

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:04:15]:
Exactly.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:04:15]:
Yeah. It’s one thing if you, if you ingest something toxic or there’s a heavy metal or there’s something, your body has mechanisms to clear that. And after a while you get over the virus, you get over the infection. But what you’re saying here is that the actual trigger replicates itself and continues to cause the long COVID symptoms, chronic illness.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:04:38]:
And probably the sickest people, ’cause they’re not all in the same box or category, are those that have not only what’s called persistent spike protein, a, a continuing presence of the spike protein, but they have it in their blood. Really, everybody that has long COVID has persistent spike protein in the cells or in the extracellular space, not necessarily inside the blood, but the ones who have it inside the blood activate the blood clotting mechanism. And for anybody who’s sort of kept up on the studies on long COVID is this sort of thing is your biggest causes of death are clotting incidents, pulmonary emboli, clots to the brain, clots to the heart, and many other things that microclots will cause and make worsen, but not necessarily be a primary cause of death. And I’m sure you’re, I know you’re aware of the fact that this basic persistent spike protein, highly toxic, highly toxic, is causing now an enormous explosion of what’s called turbo cancers. So, so many of these patients are now getting very rapid onset, rapid developing cancers, and often in areas that are not typical for the statistically large number of cancers that we see now. They’re in unusual spots. Evolving rapidly. And so all of this comes under the aegis of really, as best we can tell, maybe future research will tell us something different, but right now it appears that all of these patients, those that never got vaccinated, but mostly those who have got vaccinated, have this continuing presence, self-replicating presence of spike protein in the body. And until we find a way, we have found a way, to get rid of that, that’s the problem and that’s the goal.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:06:34]:
And we’ve seen in the Journal of Medical Virology that it’s not just clots, it’s microclots and these things called NETs, these neutrophil traps. Tell me a little bit about that and how does that play into the deviousness of this disease?

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:06:54]:
Well, I think they all play a role in causing and accelerating the blood clotting in the, inside the, inside the circulatory system. And I think this is something we’ve talked about before too, is when you take a step back and you look at the etiology of all diseases, all diseases have what’s called increased oxidative stress. And the things that Aside directly from toxins that promote oxidative stress are decreased blood flow. Okay. And decreased oxygenation of the blood flow. So if you have microclots, you’re not getting good, what’s called capillary perfusion. So the organs aren’t getting all the blood supply that they need. And when they don’t, they go into an acidotic state and a hypoxemic state. And that directly promotes the oxidative stress that is all disease. And if it’s already in a, in an organ, that’s already had a lot of oxidative stress from something else, then you throw that on top of it and you really have a bad situation. And what we found then, and what Dr. Fabrice Lau in Switzerland first discovered about going on 3 years, a little better than 2 and a half, going on 3 years now, is that, and he actually did expanded on the work of several other pioneers who had just done an ultraviolet treatment of the blood, and some other people who had done just a hyperoxygenation of the blood, and then somebody else who did the two of them together but didn’t anticoagulate the blood. He took all of that and put together the technique that we’re now using at the Riordan Clinic, and which he has already used with enormous benefit in— and let me say this clearly, okay? I don’t like to exaggerate, but I don’t like to understate either. This is curing long COVID and this is taking the hypercoagulable state, which is measurable by a test called D-dimer and normalizing the D-dimer test at the same time it’s normalizing the clinical picture with the patients. And I think you’ve already had, I know you’ve already had some several patients like this who have responded dramatically. So we’re already replicating the experience that Dr. Fabrice Lau has done in Switzerland.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:09:17]:
So we’re not just having people say, I feel better. We’re seeing that that improvement in their clinical picture is correlated with a decrease in the, in the D-dimer that would otherwise be persistent over long periods of time in these patients.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:09:33]:
Right. And let me say, for people who have never heard the term D-dimer before, the D-dimer quite simply is a measure of blood clots breaking down. In other words, it measures the blood breakdown products of blood clots. And obviously if you’re making more blood clots, the equilibrium in your body is gonna have you breaking down more blood clots too. So even though it’s not directly measuring clotting, it is really measuring and indicating to you, you have a hypercoagulable state because you’re continually having more of these breakdown products in the blood. And It’s never desirable. All the studies show that elevated D-dimers— there’s a few other disease states that are associated with, but for the most part, you are clotting your blood too rapidly if you have an elevated D-dimer. And let me say this, because it’s important for people to realize this, is chronic COVID, long COVID, with what’s called the persistent spike protein, is the great mimicker. Okay. It can cause literally any symptom or any clinical syndrome. So if you’re being treated by your doctor in whatever your problems are, aren’t getting better and you can’t get back to, let’s say, completely normal, whatever that will be for you, you should have a D-dimer test because this test should never be abnormal. And if it is elevated, It needs to be brought to attention. And there are a few other things that elevate the D-dimer other than persistent spike protein, but it’s far and away the most common reason right now. Certain cancers cause it. Actually, pregnancy can sometimes cause it, certain situations. Of course, that’s self-limited. And they even sort of get away with telling advanced age is being elevated, which I don’t buy. I mean, they’re just trying to keep old people from feeling abnormal. But the bottom line is, in my opinion, if your D-dimer is elevated, you have an increased chance of clotting your blood and you should take whatever measures you can to lessen that, remedy that, or eliminate that.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:11:45]:
So just stepping back here, what’s been so difficult about long COVID is that it shows up in so many different ways. It can be headaches, it can be muscle aches, it can be fatigue. It can be gut problems, digestive problems. And what you’re saying is the microcirculation, depending upon where it’s being blocked in the individual, is how the manifestation of this common denominator is manifesting in that particular person. But, but in everyone, the D-dimer might be a clue as to the mechanism for why this is happening.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:12:26]:
As we touched upon earlier, you can have a normal D-dimer and have long COVID. Okay. Because it’s the D, it’s the spike protein in the blood activating the receptors lining the blood that causes the increased clotting. You might be clear of spike protein in your blood, but you still have it in the extracellular space inside the cell. And in some cases, uh, incorporated, sad to say, into the DNA. So all of these things, and I, you know, I gotta say too, ’cause people might be wondering, we’ll go into the procedure, we’ve got a lot of hypotheses as to what’s going on with this test and why people are getting better. And the honest answer is we don’t know, but it’s not causing any problems. It’s making blood tests get better. It’s making people feel better. It’s eliminating years of symptoms. So, uh, I’m not one to not use the test just because I don’t think I intellectually fully appreciate everything that it does.

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Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:14:31]:
Well, it’s also called hematogenous oxidation or oxidative therapy, and so obviously that means we’re doing something with the blood, we’re using an oxidative type approach, and it’s breaking, theoretically, it’s breaking up these solidified microclots that’s clogging up the microcirculation and causing symptoms of all the, all this diffuse various nature. So, so I’m assuming what we think is happening is the ultraviolet light is somehow starting a chain reaction response to where once you start to break up some of these clots, the body then starts to break up more and more because what we see is that the D-dimer will temporarily rise after the patient has the procedure. And then over the next couple of weeks, it’s coming back down and it’ll eventually go down to a lower state than what it was. And then the patient is reporting significant improvement in their symptoms.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:15:37]:
And that— excuse me— that highlights an important point, which is the procedure, the irradiation with ultraviolet light, the oxidation of the blood going back and forth, back and forth. We’ll talk about it in a moment. Causes something to happen in the blood so that abnormal proteins break up because that’s why your D-dimer goes up is because all of a sudden now you’ve done something that’s starting to break down the clots that had previously formed. And presumably by the same mechanism, this is what starts chopping up and eliminating the spike protein because the blood clots and the spike protein, they’re both proteins. And this initiates a reaction. And I, I wish I could sound intelligent and be more precise as to what it does, but it initiates a reaction that actively breaks down abnormal protein presences, which is the spike protein and which is the clots that have already formed in the blood. And that’s why, as you just pointed out, don’t panic if you have a, if you’re a patient or you’re a healthcare provider and you have a patient where you treat them and then a day or two later or a week later, the D-dimer has gone up 2, 3, 4, 5 times. That’s a good sign. That means you’re finally stopping the abnormal blood clotting, clearing it up. And nearly all the time that comes right back down, usually to normal, but if it doesn’t, then repeat treatments are in order. Dr. Fabrice Lau’s experience was that nearly all of his patients completely resolved with one treatment, but many required, no, not many, a few required two, and a rare individual required three. Okay, so, and he usually chased it until the D-dimer completely went to normal. Now, another puzzling point is that a lot of patients, when you’re trying to figure out what’s going on, feel fantastic right after the procedure. Okay. So that defies, again, a little bit of logical explanation because it is much easier to see how it can trigger mechanisms that later on trigger an immune response that comes in and mops things up. So there are probably multiple mechanisms taking place. Is all I can say. And, and it’s important too that, and as you can, as you can go over, it’s a simple procedure and doesn’t take up a lot of the patient’s time. Right.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:18:09]:
And what we’ve done here at the Riordan Clinic is we’ve added something that we’re very familiar with, which is high-dose intravenous vitamin C, because when you’re breaking up these microclots, I’m sure you’re creating oxidative stress in the, in the, in the aftermath of that. And having the vitamin C available to kind of mop up, uh, free radicals and whatnot, the one-two punch seems to be very effective for our patients. And so we have a number of patients that are coming in with specifically, uh, kind of a long-haul COVID syndrome. But there are patients coming in that have been just chronically tired. They, they didn’t know, they didn’t have any, they didn’t think they had long-haul COVID. So with it, sometimes it’s a little hard to document that for sure. But we do know that patients that are chronically ill, this has been effective for them in terms of helping them turn a corner so that they start to get back to their normal way of being.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:19:09]:
And let’s emphasize something at this point in time, Dr. Hunninghake, is that ultraviolet light irradiation of the blood is a very old technique. It’s been used with great success over 100 years in resolving different infectious diseases, polio, hepatitis, many different viral syndromes. And many complementary doctors, orthomolecular doctors, have ultraviolet machines. And so don’t think that just ’cause you have an ultraviolet machine, it’s that simple to do this procedure. Why do I say that? Well, as it turns out, and I think you already have this experience yourself, the Riordan Clinic, excuse me, had a ultraviolet machine with many wavelengths in it. And you would use this for long-haul COVID patients and they would feel better, but they wouldn’t resolve. Okay. Well, the machine that Dr. Lau has, and we now have at the Riordan Clinic, has one wavelength. For those who are technical, it’s 254 nanometers. But the point is, is it’s just this wavelength that’s being Initiated. I like to use the example of a multivitamin, multimineral. A multivitamin, multimineral has a lot of different things in it, but not much of anything. A multi-wave ultraviolet spectrum has a lot of different wavelengths, but not much of any wavelength. And as it turns out, either by luck or intention, this particular wavelength has been enormously productive and successful with the spike protein and the COVID-related processes. So that combined with the fact that nobody else is doing this, what Dr. Lau would do is he’d take 50 cc of blood, put some sodium citrate in it to anticoagulate it, which is something his predecessors didn’t do. Take 50 cc of oxygen, not ozone, but oxygen, and another 50 cc are connected with a tube. Put the tube inside the ultraviolet light machine. And as Dr. Lau said, ping-pong the blood and the oxygen back and forth for 3 minutes. And as you’ve seen, and we’ve all seen, the blood gets super bright red, gets very, very bubbly, micro bubbles. Now, don’t panic. These are not air bubbles. These are micro oxygen bubbles. So you’re not gonna, if a few of these bubbles get back when you take the final product and re-inject the blood, which is, which is the end of the procedure. If some bubbles get in, no harm done. And so this is the procedure and it’s been enormously effective. Now, the other thing I wanna mention too, and you were just alluding to this, is that we just said that it appears we not might not know the mechanism, but it appears that this procedure, for lack of a better phrase, is a mop-up procedure for microclots. Whether it’s caused by spike protein or part of another evolving disease condition, which is very common in all diseases, sluggish or impaired microcirculation, this is a fantastic treatment for, guess what, anything.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:22:24]:
Anything.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:22:25]:
Yeah, everything is going to benefit from a loss of abnormal microclots and a better perfusion and increased blood flow. So we think Dr. Lau has been doing this now on many different patients. I’m not saying he, he cures all of his patients like he cures the long COVID, but he all gets them several notches better than they ever got before on all the other things. So we’re talking about the chronic disease patients, the cancer patients, the Alzheimer’s patients, any type of disease process you can imagine, this improves blood flow and it’s going to give you a better treatment and a better long-term prognosis for your patients.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:23:05]:
Yeah, many of the patients that are calling in now are specifically long-haul, uh, post-COVID patients. But what you’re saying is that because of the dynamics of how this works, uh, as we age, just aging alone, our microcirculation may be getting shall we say, micro-plugged at different levels. And perhaps this would be a methodology for improving the microcirculation in anyone who’s not feeling their best.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:23:35]:
And let me say this. I don’t want people to think I’m contradicting myself. As I said, we really don’t understand what’s going on. But what we do understand is that when the D-dimer shoots up, that means you’re breaking down blood clots. We may not know the mechanism about how that happens, But for the, the, the only thing D-dimer measures is broken down products of blood clots. So when you do this on somebody with long COVID or with something else and the D-dimer goes up, you’re doing something really good because you’re breaking up abnormally located situated blood clots. So that’s why we make the leap, if you will, to say there’s no reason to believe this is not good for everything. And so far there’s absolutely zero toxicity or downside. You had mentioned the IV vitamin C, which is what the Riordan Clinic is doing, shall we say, to bring things up a notch. It doesn’t interfere with the procedure. The procedure’s done as is the way Dr. Lau designed it in Switzerland. But when you’re breaking down blood clots, you’re breaking down abnormal spike protein. Those are all toxins. Toxins cause oxidation, which is disease. And as we’ve known with the Riordan Clinic for a long time, giving anybody intravenous vitamin C causes an immediate neutralization of those toxins. And nearly everybody who is, let’s say, not feeling that well when they come in after their IV vitamin C, they feel very well. So it’s always good to have the patients feeling better when they leave the clinic, right?

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:25:14]:
So it’s, it’s really fascinating for me to think that this is a therapy of, of light. It’s, it’s a therapy of vitamin C. It’s a therapy of oxygen, light, vitamin C, and oxygen. Those are the main constituents of this therapy. Well, intuitively, they have in common health. Life, life, it depends upon these 3 things. And, and you’ve made it very clear that vitamin C at the molecular level, it’s the smallest of all the nutrients and it gets in everywhere. So in addition to breaking up the, the, the jam, shall we say, the logjam at the micro level, we’re also opening up and, and helping neutralize oxidative stress within the tissues. So it’s a really wonderful one-two punch that’s extremely safe. And we do have a— the patients are being seen by our doctors. We are having them do lab work ahead of time, including D-dimer plus other tests to evaluate the safety. And then we’re doing careful follow-up because we want to document over the long haul what this is doing to help all these patients who have been stuck for so long.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:26:32]:
And let me say this, I mean, you know, I’m a consultant of the clinic. You’re the medical director of the clinic. We wanna see the clinic have a lot of patients that do well, but make no doubt about it, we wanna see as many docs and institutions get a machine and start doing this as possible because of the effects that we just talked about, because of the fact that the literature now shows that there’s probably 350 million people at a minimum with long COVID around the world and 20 to 25 million in the United States alone. So the reading clinic’s not gonna be treating those numbers anytime soon. Yeah. I don’t believe so. And you know, down the road we have information sources where we can give people the information they need specifically, most specifically the physicians, the docs and the treatment providers because we have patients And us, we have patients, we have individuals who are using this device who aren’t medical doctors, but they’re healthcare practitioners. And that’s how simple and easy and non-complicated and non-toxic procedure it is. It doesn’t involve hospitalization, it doesn’t involve spending additional time at the clinic after the procedure’s done. Very simple, very safe, very clean. And, and we want to also, what we are doing at the Riordan Clinic, maybe not being done anywhere else. Is I think we’re going to be expanding the knowledge of the blood clotting system and its relationship to disease and the role that this procedure plays in breaking down blood clots.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:28:08]:
We’re tracking these patients pretty closely. It’ll be leading up to a full-blown research project as well. But in the, in the meantime, the first The first priority was to learn how to do it, to set it up so that our nursing staff felt comfortable with it and our medical staff. And now we’ve had, I think, at least 30 or 40 patients go through, and it’s, it’s very smooth. And I, I encourage everyone to think about it, especially if they’re stuck with the possibility of long COVID. You know, the interesting thing about it is you can’t— it’s not clear. I mean, I think there are now pretty clear, uh, ways to make that diagnosis. But for a lot of people, it’s just a vague sense of, I am not well. And what can you do to improve how you’re, how you’re functioning? Well, get your microcirculation working better, and I can guarantee you things are going to be better.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:29:08]:
This is a circulation upgrade.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:29:10]:
Yes, sir. Well, Dr. Levy, once again, thank you. Uh, you were Johnny on the spot to make this observation almost 3 years ago with your trip to us to, uh, Switzerland. And you’ve been a strong proponent, and we’ve gotten the ball rolling here at the Riordan Clinic. And we hope other clinics around the world will look into this as a way of helping the, the millions, the hundreds of millions of people that are still struggling.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:29:38]:
I might add, you have a mentoring process in the past that you’ve used for usually physicians that want to come in and look at how the IV vitamin C and all the procedures are done. This is on top of that. So a lot of people, even though it’s a separate procedure, nothing is simple until you’ve done it, right? That’s right. That’s right.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:29:56]:
Yeah.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:29:57]:
We’ll be offering to us to a limited degree, a mentoring program for anybody, any doc that wants to take the time to come learn it hands-on, see how it’s done and see the overall philosophy of the clinic, which is really important. And I think distinguishes the clinic above all the others. Yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:30:14]:
Dr. Riordan started the Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning. That’s what this is. It’s at the microcirculation level. We’re helping the body function better.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:30:26]:
No question.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:30:27]:
Dr. Levy, thank you so much for filling us in and for your pioneering work in this area.

Thomas Levy, MD, JD [00:30:35]:
My placer. That’s my pleasure in Spanish because I am in Colombia. All right. Thank you, sir.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:30:39]:
Thanks. Bye.

Riordan Clinic [00:30:44]:
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