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Dr. Michał Chudzik believes that the epidemic ruthlessly showed our health neglect. A sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, lack of sleep, and excess stress made many people very seriously ill after being infected with the coronavirus. How does lifestyle affect the course of COVID-19? What is wrong for convalescents? What are the new treatments for postovid complications?
- The doctor explains that the lack of rest, stress, and bad habits have a destructive effect on our immunity, and this means that even healthy people can suffer from COVID-19.
- – I am tempted to say that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that catches people who live unhealthy and they usually get sick – says the expert
- Read the first part of the conversation with dr. Chudzik is HERE
- More about COVID-19 can be found on the TvoiLokony home page
Paulina Wójtowicz, MedTvoiLokony: You are a specialist in lifestyle medicine. This is a relatively new field of medicine that studies the relationship between our ailments and diseases and the way we live. How much does the lifestyle we lead have on the risk of developing the disease and the course of COVID-19?
Dr. Michał Chudzik: Research shows this in an extraordinary way: all lifestyle factors have a huge impact on our health.
I am tempted to say that SARS-CoV-2 is such a virus that catches people who live unhealthy and they usually get sick. We’ve known for a long time that you need to eat well, get enough sleep, don’t stress, don’t work a lot, play sports, but in COVID-19 it comes out mercilessly.
Above all, lack of sleep, working at night, going to bed late, and lack of regeneration are destructive. From the point of view of academic medicine, we know that the lack of melatonin, sleep, that is, rebuilding the immune system, disrupts the work of the entire body. But the scale of the epidemic is turning this little problem into a mega-problem, and a social one at that.
We carry out tests on people who have been healthy so far, have not had any treatment for anything, and it turns out that every third has hyperglycemia, 40 percent. hyperlipidemia. And yet high sugar levels are chronic inflammation for the body. In a situation where the body is exhausted from the fight against this constant inflammation, when it becomes infected with coronavirus, it does not have the strength to fight.
At the clinic, we try to rehabilitate these patients, but we transfer the majority of our efforts to prophylaxis. We advise patients on what in which areas of life can be improved, because this virus will not disappear and other viral infections will not disappear. Immunity, understood in the system of infection, combined with cancer or civilization diseases, are universal values that will stay with us for more than a year or two of pandemics. Our clinic will be transforming from a typical covid clinic to a lifestyle medicine clinic.
internist, cardiologist, currently specializing in geriatrics. Lifestyle and anti-aging medicine specialist. Assistant professor at the Medical University of Lodz. Initiator and coordinator of the stop-covid program.
The situation around us is not conducive to reducing tensions.
This is true, but it is important to work on it not only during a pandemic, but all your life. We doctors can prescribe a pill for most diseases, but you have to build your health yourself.
At the clinic, you propose innovative methods of postcovid rehabilitation, including blue light therapy and the mitochondrial method. What are they and what are their effects?
We use them in patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. Mitochondrial therapy is a unique and very promising method, used so far mainly by competitive athletes for quick regeneration. It is based on breathing air with different oxygen content, high and low. It is as if we entered 3-4 thousand. m above sea level, where there is little oxygen, and then they came back down. What for? So that, with less oxygen, the body mobilizes the mitochondria, which produce energy in our cells, to produce more of it. During such a 40-minute therapy, we sort of transport four or five sick people to these several thousand meters, and then we bring them to sea level.
What’s the effect?
A faster recovery time is achieved, also in the dishes. Because it must be remembered that thrombotic complications can be both severe, requiring hospitalization, and pulmonary embolism, which affects as much as 25%. patients with COVID-19, as well as less visible, occurring in very tiny vessels, often muscles. If there is hypoxia in the muscle cells, the cell weakens and you need to stimulate these mitochondria, energy products in the cell to work more intensively.
And that other method?
It’s exposure to blue light. So far, it has been used mainly by dermatologists to treat atopic dermatitis, i.e. diseases that are rooted in immunity disorders that may result from chronic stress. This is a unique program carried out by prof. Joanna Narbutt, National Dermatology Consultant. The idea was that patients who have skin lesions, but most of all experience hair loss after COVID-19 – this is a very large group of women – and experience chronic stress with these rays, should radiate these tensions while alleviating the skin problem.
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How long do such therapies last?
The blue light method is a cycle of about six to eight irradiations of 40 minutes, and mitochondrial therapy is five to 10 cycles, also 40 minutes each. If we had the time and the opportunity to go to the mountains for two weeks and climb these several thousand meters every day and then descend several times, it would also give us a sense of rebuilding our strength. But we have neither the time, nor the possibilities, nor the money for that. Here we get a similar effect lying on the bed. Unfortunately, there will not be many of these treatments, because this part of the program is not financed by the National Health Fund. Therefore, these innovative methods are only a supplement to traditional therapies carried out by specialists – psychologists, dermatologists and physiotherapists.
Infection statistics are still a cause for concern, but at the same time, the rate of vaccination is increasing day by day. The first predictions about the expected date of herd immunity and return to normality appear. Do you think we are winning the fight against the coronavirus?
Winning against the coronavirus must be considered in terms of reducing hospitalizations and deaths. This is our main goal. At the moment, the ball is more on our side than on the side of the Ministry of Health. I believe that in a month’s time, access to vaccines will be universal, there will be no queues.
Therefore, it depends on our attitude whether we will end this pandemic or not. Here are my biggest symptoms that a particular attitude of many people can cause us to fail to get the right vaccination percentage. The group of unvaccinated people will be so large that the virus will have nowhere to live and where to mutate. At the same time, one has to accept that in the system of non-hospital infections, the coronavirus will remain with us, perhaps with the consequences of potential complications that we are talking about. That is why such regional post-covid aid centers should be established all over the country, because they will be needed for many, many years.
However, I hope that they will only function in the treatment of minor complications and rapid rehabilitation and physiotherapy of patients, and not severe complications after the course of COVID-19.
Information about the «STOP-COVID» program can be found on the website www.stop-covid.pl.
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