Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 87 // 4 Years Later: How did COVID change our health?

Transcript

87 // 4 Years Later: How did COVID change our health? · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

• 0:00
  Four years ago, it was March of 2020. And when I say March of 2020 or spring
• 0:04
  of 2020, what do you immediately think of? You probably think of COVID, right?
• 0:09
  March of 2020 is when the world changed and not necessarily for the good.
• 0:14
  And that's what we're gonna talk about today.
• 0:15
  There's a lot of things we can talk about as far as the past four years.
• 0:18
  But specifically, since this is the Health with Hashimoto's podcast,
• 0:22
  we're gonna talk about your health and I will apply it to simple,
• 0:27
  sustainable things that you can do going forward. We cannot change the past four years.
• 0:31
  But what we can do is we can learn from them. We can look at what other people
• 0:35
  learned, and we can apply the wisdom, anything that we can glean from these
• 0:41
  last four years into our own lives so that we can have a healthier 2024,
• 0:46
  2025 and going forward. word.
• 0:48
  We're not going to stay stuck in what happened.
• 0:51
  We're not going to have a victim mindset of all of this nasty stuff happened, right?
• 0:56
  We don't want to stay there. If you stay there as a victim, it impacts your health.
• 1:00
  And this podcast is all about helping you have a healthier you,
• 1:05
  all of you, body, mind, spirit, diet, environment.
• 1:09
  It all comes together to make the whole you and you as a whole need to be healthier.
• 1:15
  So before I dive in, first, let me welcome you to the podcast.
• 1:18
  My name is Esther. I am a registered nurse. I'm a holistic health educator.
• 1:23
  I have four boys, a whole bunch of chickens. The roosters are crowing again,
• 1:26
  so maybe you'll hear them, maybe not.
• 1:28
  And I live out in the country where we did not have a lot of.
• 1:34
  Restrictions. You know, nobody told me I couldn't go out my front door because
• 1:38
  I live out in the country. My nearest neighbor is about a quarter mile away.
• 1:42
  It's wonderful out here. What was your experience like though?
• 1:46
  I remember back in February of 2020, I was still teaching English to Chinese kids.
• 1:54
  It was with a company and that's what it does is it helps Chinese kids and kids
• 1:59
  kids from other parts of the world, but primarily China.
• 2:02
  It helped them learn better English because then they can use that and get,
• 2:07
  you know, better jobs and stuff in the future.
• 2:09
  I loved my job. I loved interacting with these kids across Zoom every single,
• 2:15
  well, as frequently as I scheduled it. And I really got to know some of the families.
• 2:19
  And so I was very aware of COVID when it started because it was impacting China first.
• 2:25
  And so I would talk to the moms after class and just ask them,
• 2:30
  you know, how are you doing and what's going on?
• 2:33
  So I was very aware. No one has started coming to the United States.
• 2:36
  Again, I was aware, but I was aware not just as an observer, right?
• 2:42
  After working for 17 years in the emergency department, I have experienced these
• 2:46
  pandemics before and and contagious things.
• 2:50
  I have been in facilities where we had to ask people about international travel
• 2:54
  and we needed to know how to suit up for Ebola when there was an increase in
• 2:59
  Ebola in different parts of the world.
• 3:00
  We had been trained on that. I had been through some pandemics about SARS before.
• 3:07
  And of course, SARS-CoV-19, is that what COVID actually is? It's a SARS virus.
• 3:14
  And so So this was not unfamiliar to me.
• 3:17
  Also, at this time, I had gone every single winter on Facebook or on my blog.
• 3:24
  I did not have a podcast at that time. I had gone every single winter and done
• 3:29
  a respiratory health, like cold and flu season webinar.
• 3:35
  Or it started out actually as a Facebook post. And I told my friends and my
• 3:40
  followers how they can stay healthy during cold and flu season.
• 3:44
  And I had done a ton of research into it. And I had looked at,
• 3:47
  you know, the flu or the influenza vaccine, and is it effective?
• 3:52
  Or are there other things that you can do that are more effective than the influenza vaccine?
• 3:57
  And not just, you know, based on stories, but based on facts and data,
• 4:02
  because that's who I am. I will dig into the facts and the data.
• 4:04
  I want to know the truth, not just opinion. It's not just hype, not just media.
• 4:09
  So that was where I was coming from when all of this started.
• 4:13
  And when it started to hit the national news, I went live on Facebook.
• 4:18
  You can still probably find it. And I told people about what they can do for their health.
• 4:23
  What I did not know at that time, what nobody knew, or most of us did not know
• 4:29
  at that time, is what I said would not be allowed to be said for the next two or three years.
• 4:36
  What I said on that Facebook Live is get out in nature, lower your stress,
• 4:42
  increase your vitamin D, increase your pre and your probiotics.
• 4:46
  I said things like that because we already knew that they worked for respiratory viruses.
• 4:53
  We already knew that when your vitamin vitamin D levels were increased,
• 4:58
  then it worked as well, if not better than the influenza vaccine.
• 5:04
  They don't tell you that, right? They just say, here, get your flu shot.
• 5:07
  They don't say, check your vitamin D level.
• 5:09
  Well, I said that on that Facebook Live. I said, make sure you're getting enough vitamin D.
• 5:15
  I also talked about the importance of pre and probiotics. Now, this is retrospect.
• 5:20
  I have not watched that video lately, but I know I for sure talked about probiotics,
• 5:25
  because I had been talking about that for years by that point,
• 5:30
  because another research study
• 5:31
  showed that probiotics were just as effective, if not more effective,
• 5:37
  than the influenza vaccine at helping prevent respiratory viruses.
• 5:43
  And, you know, that's a naughty word in health education.
• 5:48
  You're not supposed to say something prevents anything, because that word
• 5:52
  prevent is kind of owned by the pharmaceutical industry
• 5:55
  and per government regulations you're not allowed to
• 5:58
  use it if you look at any vitamins or herbs
• 6:01
  or anything natural it always says this has not been evaluated by the FDA it
• 6:05
  does not we do not make claims to prevent cure or diagnose any diseases right
• 6:11
  I have that on my website if you go to healthwithhashimoto.com You will see
• 6:16
  that disclaimer because we're not allowed to say prevent.
• 6:19
  But when I look at the research, I could tell, I could read off the conclusion
• 6:25
  of the research that said probiotics worked as well, if not better than probiotics.
• 6:31
  The vaccine to prevent influenza. So I had already been using very careful language
• 6:38
  and I'm sure in that video I was very careful.
• 6:41
  My video did not get taken down as far as I know. Like I said,
• 6:43
  I did not go back and watch it lately, but I know I was talking about these things.
• 6:48
  I was also talking about stress because when you increase your stress,
• 6:52
  you are more susceptible to anything.
• 6:54
  When you have increased stress, your inflammation is going to go up,
• 6:58
  your defenses are going to go down.
• 7:01
  And we've talked a lot about stress on this podcast.
• 7:05
  I have many episodes about it. And I have episodes specifically about different types of stress.
• 7:10
  Just a few of the episodes, episode seven, I talked about stress overall.
• 7:14
  Episode eight, I gave you some tips. Episode 24, I talk about the adrenal glands.
• 7:19
  And 34, 35, 35 was about how you can de-stress using art.
• 7:24
  Episode 40 is about spiritual stress there's
• 7:28
  a lot of episodes that i have about stress
• 7:31
  because it's a huge part of our
• 7:35
  lives right now and increased stress causes problems especially if you have
• 7:39
  autoimmune problems like hashimoto's we need to lower our stress levels so i
• 7:44
  said that all at the beginning of covid and then what happened over the last
• 7:48
  four years i'm sure you you have so many stories that you could tell me of your experience.
• 7:53
  What happened during those, you know, first two weeks to slow the spread?
• 7:58
  And I say that in air quotes, because there's a lot of politics that goes around that.
• 8:02
  And including the person who initially pushed it, said we have like written
• 8:07
  documentation, where I don't remember if it's a he or she, but they said.
• 8:13
  During this two weeks, I'm going to look for data because I want to extend this
• 8:17
  two weeks, which makes me so sad because some of the things that have come out
• 8:21
  of COVID are division and loneliness.
• 8:26
  Now, division started very quickly as people had different ideas of what was going to be the best.
• 8:33
  In retrospect, almost every single person can look at those lockdowns and say, we did damage.
• 8:40
  Kids in school, they have gone back there.
• 8:43
  They have regressed so much. Kids just coming into preschool and kindergarten,
• 8:48
  they are a year or two behind where their peers would be.
• 8:53
  In fact, some countries have lowered their developmental milestones because
• 8:58
  kids are not hitting it. We're having problems with speech because of the masks.
• 9:03
  Kids weren't looking at people. They could not observe your face when you were saying things.
• 9:07
  So we're having more speech problems. We're having more reading problems.
• 9:10
  We're having more behavioral issues because kids weren't learning how to function.
• 9:14
  There was an increase in abuse because kids were stuck at home in sometimes unsafe situations.
• 9:22
  We took them out of schools where teachers are mandatory reporters and teachers were calling in.
• 9:29
  Teachers are always telling social services when something's going on.
• 9:34
  And some social workers said that the scariest part of the lockdowns was that those calls stopped.
• 9:41
  They no longer knew what kids were in trouble.
• 9:44
  There are so many different things that happened because of the lockdown,
• 9:48
  but division is one of them.
• 9:50
  And division is a type of stressor because you are, you're butting heads against
• 9:57
  somebody, whether it's somebody that you know, or whether it's somebody online.
• 10:01
  There are families that have been broken apart. There are friendships that have
• 10:04
  been broken apart because of what happened after COVID, because of the polarization
• 10:09
  of how people felt about different things.
• 10:13
  But also the lockdowns caused loneliness.
• 10:16
  Now, loneliness is now recognized as a huge health risk factor.
• 10:23
  And that is not something that I knew, like going through nursing school.
• 10:27
  And even later, when I went back to school to get my holistic health education,
• 10:31
  I did not know about loneliness, or at least this deeply.
• 10:35
  But now we know that loneliness is so bad for your health. Are you connected to a community?
• 10:42
  I want you to pause and think about that right now. Do you have people who you can reach out to?
• 10:47
  Do you have people who know what you're going through, who you can share the
• 10:51
  highs and the lows of the day?
• 10:53
  Or are you with people where you say, how are you? Fine.
• 10:57
  How are you? Fine. Like that conversation that's It's not really a conversation.
• 11:00
  It's just words that we say. It's a ritual, but it doesn't mean anything.
• 11:04
  Are you in a community that's deeper than that? Do you have a support system?
• 11:10
  If not, I encourage you to look for a support system to find some friends.
• 11:14
  Now, not online friends. I love my online friends. I have many online friends.
• 11:19
  Some of them are my best friends. One of my best friends, actually two of my
• 11:23
  best friends, I met online.
• 11:25
  One of them I have never met in person. We've talked on FaceTime and Zoom,
• 11:29
  but I have never met her in person.
• 11:32
  The other friend I have met in person a couple of times. But again,
• 11:36
  we talk mostly online. We live multiple states away.
• 11:39
  So I'm not saying that online friendships cannot work, but I'm saying you need
• 11:43
  an in real life personal community, you know, IRL, in real life, you need that.
• 11:50
  And that's one thing that COVID took away from us was those real life community gatherings.
• 11:56
  Libraries shut down. I know that my small library, they have so many opportunities
• 12:01
  for people to get together.
• 12:02
  They have puzzle nights. They have, I think it's pie and puzzle nights.
• 12:05
  They have game nights. They have teen activities, youth activities.
• 12:10
  They have times where the kids go for story hour.
• 12:14
  And I remember when I took my kids to the library for story hour,
• 12:17
  then the moms would get together and say hi.
• 12:19
  It was a place to gather and build community.
• 12:23
  COVID also shut down churches. Some of them never reopened.
• 12:26
  I talked to a friend just this week who we were talking about this episode and
• 12:31
  she was sharing her experience.
• 12:33
  Her church never reopened. Now, I have a lot of very strong feelings when churches
• 12:38
  could not be open and yet they could have the Super Bowl.
• 12:41
  Like, that doesn't make any sense in my head. We couldn't have classrooms open
• 12:45
  and yet they can have professional sports.
• 12:47
  It doesn't make any sense. You cannot make it make sense.
• 12:50
  It just, it's a power and a money thing and it victimized a lot of people,
• 12:56
  kids and people of faith.
• 12:58
  I feel really sad that churches shut down.
• 13:01
  People lost community. So if you're looking for a community,
• 13:05
  those are the places to go.
• 13:06
  Look for a church, look for a library that has programs, look for gatherings in your community.
• 13:14
  Maybe you want to learn how to knit and you can find a knitting group.
• 13:18
  Maybe you want to play chess and you're going to go find a chess club.
• 13:22
  There's a lot of different ways to get involved and
• 13:25
  build community but we want to get over
• 13:28
  loneliness and the loneliness if you're
• 13:31
  stuck in that spot you might have to work and it might be uncomfortable at first
• 13:35
  I am such an introvert I would be happy to stay in my home 24 7 and it's a good
• 13:42
  thing that I am plugged into the community because I don't think I would seek
• 13:46
  that out I am am very plugged in.
• 13:48
  I'm plugged in with my church. I help lead Sunday school and the Wednesday night kids.
• 13:53
  I'm on a school board. I'm on a board at the church.
• 13:56
  You know, I'm plugged in in a lot of areas, which is good because going out
• 14:01
  and meeting people is not my natural inclination.
• 14:04
  I feel like a lot of the extroverts, if you're an extrovert listening to this,
• 14:08
  you probably have connection.
• 14:10
  If you're an introvert, you might not. You might have lost that during COVID
• 14:14
  and hopefully you're building back up.
• 14:16
  And I hope you are because some things that happen when you're lonely is it impacts your sleep.
• 14:21
  Your sleep quality goes down. And if you've been listening to the podcast for
• 14:26
  a while, we have talked about sleep before, because it's when you're sleeping
• 14:30
  that your body is healing, and it's restoring, it's renewing.
• 14:33
  In order to have a well-functioning immune system, which is what you absolutely
• 14:38
  are seeking if you have an autoimmune condition, then you need good sleep.
• 14:42
  I have at least three different episodes devoted specifically to sleep,
• 14:46
  and those are episode 23, which is how your sleep can be a trigger for Hashimoto's,
• 14:51
  I have episode 31, which is improving your sleep one simple step at a time.
• 14:56
  And then episode 81 was part of my root cause series.
• 15:00
  And that is all about sleep again as a root cause. So episodes 23, 31, and 81.
• 15:07
  But we need good sleep. And when you're lonely, your sleep quality decreases.
• 15:12
  Another thing that happens when you're lonely is your existing chronic health symptoms get worse.
• 15:19
  Nobody wants that, right? right? You're already dealing with loneliness.
• 15:22
  You don't need more symptoms on top of it. But unfortunately,
• 15:25
  when we have chronic health problems, our symptoms increase when we're lonely.
• 15:31
  Loneliness also contributes to increased systemic inflammation.
• 15:35
  That means inflammation, not just like on your thumb. If you hit your thumb
• 15:39
  with a hammer, you're of course going to have inflammation at that site, right?
• 15:42
  No, systemic inflammation is when it's all over your body.
• 15:45
  And when you're more inflamed when you have
• 15:48
  more inflammation your immune system goes
• 15:51
  a little more bit more haywire and what's the
• 15:54
  medical term for an immune system that's gone haywire autoimmune
• 15:58
  is when your immune system is attacking yourself because it gets confused so
• 16:02
  we do not want to increase our systemic inflammation we want to lower that and
• 16:07
  loneliness increases our inflammation Another thing that loneliness does is
• 16:12
  it increases the perception of stress.
• 16:15
  Now, I could not find in the literature that it actually increases stress,
• 16:18
  although I would say that if you're looking at stress from a spiritual perspective
• 16:22
  and an emotional perspective and a mental perspective, then yes.
• 16:26
  But what I was reading had more of a, they were looking at the health effects on the physical body.
• 16:33
  And they did say that loneliness increases the perception of stress.
• 16:38
  And again, so many episodes about stress.
• 16:41
  So loneliness came out of the past four years. And like I said, also division.
• 16:47
  Now, hopefully you can look at your life and you can see how you can get back
• 16:51
  into community if loneliness is still an issue for you.
• 16:54
  And as far as division, hopefully you can build some bridges.
• 16:58
  I don't know if some families and some friendships will ever be like they were
• 17:03
  before, but hopefully some bridges can be built and forgiveness is all for you.
• 17:09
  It doesn't mean that what they did was correct.
• 17:11
  It It doesn't mean that what they did, you're just excusing it.
• 17:14
  It means that you are releasing their hold on you.
• 17:18
  And there's an article I will link down in the show notes about forgiveness
• 17:23
  and the different phases if you're struggling with that.
• 17:26
  Honestly, I don't know if some relationships will ever be good again,
• 17:30
  but at least you can forgive and move on if that is a struggle for you.
• 17:35
  And then back to, oh, there's one other thing that came out of COVID,
• 17:39
  and that is the lack lack of trust or the loss of trust that people now have
• 17:43
  with the medical community in general.
• 17:45
  There's a lot of things that happened over the past four years.
• 17:49
  I never expected to see top industry leaders.
• 17:52
  And when I say industry, I mean like medical leaders, super,
• 17:55
  super, super smart people, published people, people who were the very,
• 18:00
  very top, everybody would go to them for advice and they were shut out of the community.
• 18:05
  They were were blacklisted because
• 18:07
  they said something different than what Fauci said, quite honestly.
• 18:12
  And people lost respect and trust in medical establishment. A lot of doctors
• 18:18
  did say things that were wrong.
• 18:20
  One of the first things that I noticed, red flag for me, immediate red flag,
• 18:26
  was when the vaccine came out
• 18:28
  and people said that you needed the vaccine even if you had COVID. COVID.
• 18:32
  Back from when I first started to go to nursing school, if you had had a contagious
• 18:38
  disease like chickenpox, you could go in and you could get your blood tested
• 18:42
  and see if you had enough. They call it getting a titer.
• 18:45
  And then you would not need a vaccination because what you had was more powerful
• 18:50
  than what they were trying to give you with a vaccination.
• 18:52
  And when people just completely dismissed that, that was a huge red flag for me.
• 18:58
  And the doctors who are not even even allowing for that conversation,
• 19:02
  I lost trust with them. I lost trust with my own colleagues.
• 19:05
  And then also the ugliness that came out of it, the name calling,
• 19:10
  them putting people down if they dared express a different opinion,
• 19:15
  even an opinion backed up with facts.
• 19:18
  It was really hard for most people to see the doctors, the people that we are
• 19:25
  supposed to trust with our health with our lives, honestly, sometimes.
• 19:28
  It was really hard to see them just parodying the propaganda.
• 19:34
  And I'm very sorry if all of this, you're like, wait, what? All of what they said was true.
• 19:39
  It wasn't. And I do have facts for all of this.
• 19:42
  Like I said at the beginning, and like I've said, you know, throughout the 80
• 19:45
  some episodes, I don't go on media and hype.
• 19:48
  I go on research and facts and truth.
• 19:51
  And I will always share that with you. And I think the loss of truth was really hard in COVID.
• 19:58
  But you know what? Those things that I said at the beginning in my first live stream, they rang true.
• 20:04
  We still know that vitamin D is one of the top things that you can do to protect
• 20:10
  yourself from getting COVID and when you have COVID.
• 20:13
  One thing that I learned was that glutathione, which I've talked about before
• 20:18
  on the podcast, it's like, you know, a master detoxifier in your body.
• 20:22
  Well, glutathione, the endogenous stuff that you create, that is even more impactful than vitamin D.
• 20:30
  And one thing that glutathione does is it controls the vitamin D in your body. So it makes sense.
• 20:36
  But when you have more endogenous glutathione, you had better outcomes.
• 20:41
  Glutathione is antiviral, it is anti-inflammatory, and it is an anticoagulant.
• 20:48
  Not like a strong anticoagulant, but it has those properties.
• 20:52
  And what was COVID? It was a virus. So you need an antiviral, right?
• 20:56
  It causes inflammation, so you need an anti-inflammatory, right?
• 21:01
  And COVID, but mostly the vaccine, it causes blood clotting problems,
• 21:06
  right? So glutathione is amazing.
• 21:09
  So make sure that you're increasing your glutathione. You can do that by eating
• 21:12
  specific veggies, like broccoli sprouts are one of the best ways to do it.
• 21:19
  And you can sprout broccoli in a mason jar are on your windowsill.
• 21:23
  It's super easy unless you kill it all the time, which I do.
• 21:25
  Sometimes it works great and sometimes they all die. I don't know.
• 21:29
  If you have any hints, let me know because I love it when they're working well.
• 21:33
  Also, increasing glutathione, you can take herbs that will increase it within your body.
• 21:39
  Glutathione is not something that you can necessarily just take a glutathione pill.
• 21:43
  It's not very bioavailable, meaning it's not available to your body when you take it as a pill.
• 21:49
  So you need to make your own to have the best glutathione.
• 21:52
  And again, we've talked about that on the podcast before.
• 21:56
  Every single day, I take a blend of five herbs and that increases my own glutathione
• 22:01
  production by 300%. Was I taking that during COVID over the past four years?
• 22:07
  Yes. And will I continue taking it? Absolutely.
• 22:11
  Because I want all of those benefits. So,
• 22:14
  Simple, sustainable things going forward. Make sure your vitamin D level is good.
• 22:19
  Make sure you're getting enough foods and herbs that will help your glutathione.
• 22:24
  You know, decrease if you're smoking still or vaping. Stop that.
• 22:28
  You need your lungs to be in good shape so that they can handle whatever is coming.
• 22:32
  Make sure that you're eating fruits and veggies. Make sure you're active.
• 22:35
  All of these things we already knew and we know them still.
• 22:39
  The foundations of health have not changed just because COVID changed the world.
• 22:44
  The foundations of health are still applicable.
• 22:47
  Lower your sleep. No, sorry. Lower your stress. Increase your sleep and increase
• 22:52
  the quality of your sleep.
• 22:54
  Make sure that you're getting enough movement in the day. Make sure you're eating
• 22:57
  enough fruits and veggies, real foods.
• 23:00
  Decrease your processed foods. Get out in the sunlight. Help your vitamin D.
• 23:04
  All of these things, they are foundational and those are the the things that
• 23:08
  we knew about before, and we still know.
• 23:10
  I hope that you do something today to increase your overall health.
• 23:15
  And hey, when you're looking for community, come join our community.
• 23:19
  It is a teeny tiny baby community, and it is on the app.
• 23:23
  And as of right now, it's still not as its own Health with Hashimoto's app on
• 23:29
  the App Store and the Google Play Store, but I do have instructions that you
• 23:32
  can get it down in the show notes.
• 23:34
  I hope you come and join, make a post, say hello, because we really want to build this community.
• 23:39
  Like I said, some of my best friends, I met them online, and we communicate
• 23:43
  all the time because we are supportive of each other.
• 23:46
  And so come over, join the community, and let's build some friendship.
• 23:51
  I will see you on the next episode of Health with Hashimoto's.
• 23:54
  This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.
• 23:58
  Please be sure to discuss any concerns and plans with your trusted health.
• 24:02
  Music.