Health Q&A - Long Covid and Vertigo

It's Peter. Just wanted to jump on to this meeting to go through some questions that have been coming up in the clinic. The one I want to cover first of all today is the issue of long COVID. 

We've had a few people coming in who feel that they've had COVID and are struggling to recover from it. And they're worrying about what's going on in the media about this thing called long COVID. I'll go through the symptoms that are on the NHS website. And some of the things that our clients have been exhibiting and I'll talk through what we did, and the results of that. And I'll give you my opinion at the end as more I think is going on. 

The NHS website is talking about the long term effects of coronavirus.The sort of symptoms that we're talking about are extreme tiredness and fatigue, shortness breath, chest pain, or tightness, brain fog, difficulty, sleeping, heart palpitations, dizziness, pains, and needles, joint pain, tinnitus, and so on.

The trouble is that the fact that we're getting this thing called long COVID being identified means there's an industry developing around it. And then people get labelled as “long COVID sufferers”, and they get all the medication and so on without looking for other potential causes. 

Generally what you find with any infection is it depletes the immune system. And when the immune system is depleted you're going to get issues. So, one way to think about it is if you imagine your body's like a car and it normally does 30 miles per gallon, 

So every 30 miles you put another gallon of petrol in. So when it's under stress with an infection going on, it's using more fuel. So it's only doing 15 miles per gallon, but you're only putting in a gallon every 30 miles. So you can imagine that fuel tank gets lower and lower and lower. And when the fuel tank is low with the immune system, you can get muscle aches, fatigue, joint aching. 

And the other thing that can happen is that generally speaking, a virus or particularly COVID and possibly the reaction to the COVID vaccination will cause inflammation in the body. When you're inflamed, it tends to reduce the strength of the ligaments. So it attacks the weak spots in your spine. So if the top of the neck goes out, particularly if you've got weak spots in your spine and you're coughing a lot, you might put the top of the neck out of line.

That's going to cause headaches, eye problems, tinnitus, things like that. 

If you've rattled your chest around, it's going to affect the movement of the ribs. So if the ribs are out of line, they can't do this movement easily when you're trying to breathe. So you'll get shortness of breath. You can sometimes get pain along here because you get costochonditis. 

Obviously if you've got severe pain, particularly on the left hand side, going down your arm, you need to check that out because there have been cardiac effects seen with these things. So you need to check that out. But what I've found in the clinic is that if you adjust the neck and it sorts out the headaches generally, and then adjusting the ribs or, and to get rid of the shortness of breath and the breathing problems generally, and the chest pain. 

So it's my belief is that there are some people who've had a severe inflammation reaction either to the COVID itself or to the vaccination, and that has caused some organ damage. That needs to be checked carefully.

For the majority of people. I think all that's happening is that you're getting a normal response to an infection, which is the immune system being depleted and the spine and the nervous system being rattled around.

So the answers to the immune system being depleted are to take a really good quality multivitamin that's designed to boost your immune system up. So your normal diet is normally enough because you're putting in a gallon of petrol, every 30 miles. Now you have to double the intake and you don't want to double the intake of food because you'll get all sorts of other problems. So you can just top up with just a week of multivitamins. And that's enough to bring you back up to normal. Then the engine starts working properly and you're back to 30 miles a gallon again. 

Problems with the neck headaches and so on and the chest pain, they're usually easily sorted. So if you're worried about any of those things, , or got any questions about any of that, if you could give me a ring or email me on [email protected] and I'll answer your questions either directly, or next time we do one of these meetings.

Okay. So I hope that's helped with that. The other thing I wanted to cover was there's been a few people asking me about vertigo and balance problems. 

So this tends to happen more with older people I find. You can get a situation where there's a gradual onset of vertigo and balance problems. So what you can have is long term onset brain diseases like Parkinson's and so on. 

But often what is actually happening is you're just getting deterioration in the neck and that's affecting the nerves in the brain stem. So the brain stem nerves will affect the balance centres in the ear area so it's worth looking at that before you worry too much about going down the medication route. Sometimes it's quite easily sorted or, at least , alleviated.

The thing I'd be very careful with though, is if you have sudden onset vertigo, This could be where you have banged your head or had a fall, something like that. And you're suddenly feeling very dizzy. You do need to get that checked medically, maybe with a CT scan or something like that. Because that can be things like a brain bleed, which needs to be dealt with immediately. 

So I hope that has been useful. As I say, I'm going to do these on regular intervals, answering questions that have come up in the clinic and I'm trying to keep it short so it doesn't take too long to watch. 

So what we covered today was vertigo and balance problems and long COVID. Any questions about those or any other issues that come up, even if you're not a client of ours, as I say, just email me on Peter@your spinal health com and I'll answer your questions.