151 - Dr. Lydia Knutson's Chiropractic Approach to Long Covid

What if a gentle touch could ignite your body's natural healing abilities? Join us as we sit down with Dr. Lydia Knutson, a pioneer in chiropractic care, to uncover the secrets of her Axial Stability Method (ASM) which marries low-force chiropractic techniques with Eastern energy medicine, offering new hope to those suffering from long COVID and other complex conditions, with over 150 long COVID patients benefiting from her method.

We explores the profound connection between the nervous and immune systems in the context of whole-person healing. Dr. Knutson explains how her comprehensive assessments reveal hidden obstacles to recovery. Through detailed case studies, she illustrates the power of supporting the body holistically, advocating for a treatment approach that transcends mere symptom management and nurtures the body's intrinsic blueprint for healing.

We also delve into the promising research surrounding chiropractic care and Long COVID, underscoring the need for innovative, low-risk studies that focus on patient outcomes. Dr. Knutson shares her experiences with patient-funded research, which has shown remarkable reductions in severe symptoms over a series of visits. Tune in to learn how personalized healing goals and a supportive environment can empower individuals on their journey to recovery.

Long COVID overview & research

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For more information about Long Covid Breathing courses & workshops, please check out LongCovidBreathing.com

(music credit - Brock Hewitt, Rule of Life)

Chapters

• 0:00 Chiropractic Approach to Long Covid
• 17:40 Whole Person Healing Approach
• 21:42 Understanding the Body's Blueprint for Healing
• 36:31 Balancing Autonomic Nervous System in Healing
• 51:26 Exploring Personal Healing Goals
• 56:20 Research and Action on Long Covid

Transcript

Jackie Baxter: 0:56

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Long Covid Podcast. I am delighted to be joined today by Dr Lydia Knutson, who is a doctor of chiropractic, and we're going to dive into what that means in just a moment. But, lydia, a very warm welcome to the podcast today. It's wonderful to have you here.

Lydia Knutson: 1:16

Thank you so much. As Jackie said, I'm a doctor of chiropractic, I'm a teacher, a writer, a researcher and I've been side of the river from Boston. For those of you who know the northeast of the United States, lydian Chiropractic is a multi-doctor practice and you know the geographical location lends itself to an extremely educated patient base who ask us really good questions and they're always challenging us to do new things, so that keeps things lively and many new ideas float to the surface of you know how to treat people, how to take on new problems as they arise, new health problems. Over the last few decades, I've developed a new chiropractic technique called axial stability method, which is a bit of a mouthful, but in short, it's ASM. It's a combination of established low force chiropractic techniques put together in a synergistic way.

Lydia Knutson: 2:35

And what really sets us apart, besides the completely low force approach, is that we make extensive use of eastern energy medicine. So we work with the acupuncture, meridian and chakranadi systems. Because we really work with all of these systems. The approach is deeply holistic and flexible really flexible, so with a wide enough scope that in the summer of 2020, I figured out how to adapt it into a long COVID protocol. It took everything I knew to figure that out. As you know, long COVID is a formidable opponent, but in the last four years we've treated well over 150 people with long COVID and or long vax. We approach those two conditions pretty similarly because spike protein is spike protein and nearly everyone has experienced meaningful improvement and many, many have made quite dramatic recoveries.

Jackie Baxter: 3:40

That's amazing and we're going to dive a whole load into what you've actually been doing, in a moment I think, which I'm very excited to hear. Before we sort of go down that rabbit hole, can you say a little bit more about what is chiropractic?

Lydia Knutson: 3:57

I figured you were going to ask that question, so I did a little research. Chiropractic I figured you were going to ask that question, so I did a little research. I decided to go to the National Institute of Health website, which is our government health website, and I found the most amazing, astonishing statement, which was amazing. They said chiropractic is a licensed healthcare profession that emphasizes the body's ability to heal itself. Could not have said that better. And it goes on. Of the adults who use chiropractic care, 85% use it for pain management. So when most people think of chiropractic or a chiropractor, they think of us as low back pain specialists and we certainly treat a lot of pain and a lot of back pain and lots of other kinds of pain. But chiropractic is also great for a really wide range of health issues because we work with a lot of different systems. We work with the autonomic nervous system, the ANS, which many of your wonderful previous guests on this podcast have talked a lot about. The ANS, but just as a little tiny refresher for anybody who hasn't heard those wonderful podcasts, the ANS is a part of the nervous system that regulates automatic functions in the body, so things like heart rate, respiration, sweating, digestion, reproduction and hundreds of other things. So we work with that, all chiropractic works with that, and we also work with the immune system. The immune system and the ans are really two key systems in what we think of as long covid. But, as the website says, in everything we do as doctors we work with the underlying assumption that if you give the body a nudge in the right direction, it can heal itself. And I have a great example of that.

Lydia Knutson: 5:48

A couple of weeks ago we had an 11-month-old baby come in with unrelenting ear infections after months and months of off and on antibiotics and they just simply weren't working. The mom said she had a follow-up appointment scheduled with the pediatrician in a week. Things hadn't improved. They were planning on emergency ear tube surgery. So we had one week to turn this thing around, no pressure or anything. So she came in for three visits and went back to the pediatrician and the doctor found no infection, no fluid at all and no sign of previous infection. And she said whoever did this works miracles. And yes, it was miraculous that this seemingly untreatable condition cleared up in just a week after months and months. And yes, we knew how to help. But the miracle in this is the baby's immune system. The baby's immune system is the miracle worker. We did not treat the ear infection. We supported the baby's immune system to do what it does best. So how does this relate to long COVID? Okay, well, I told you that we have a patient base that pushes us to try new things and won't take no for an answer sometimes.

Lydia Knutson: 7:13

So in the late fall, I think of 2020, long COVID patient number one came through the door. Fall, I think of 2020, long COVID patient number one came through the door. So she was a law student, she was late 30s, not old, not young, and she had been super sick in December of 2019. And she was literally out flat in bed for weeks and weeks, and weeks. So here we are, late summer of 2020. And she got better, but never really got better. She's got crushing fatigue, crushing fatigue and brain fog, so she's having trouble keeping up with classes, which are now, of course, on Zoom and this crushing fatigue. She can't even walk up a flight of stairs, so that's pretty much curtains for someone in law school. So she comes in and she goes.

Lydia Knutson: 8:04

I've been doing some reading and I think I have what they're calling. Well, at that point it was long hollers, long COVID symptoms, long COVID syndrome. And she said I think I have that. Do you think you could help me? And I said I don't know. I think we have a shot at it because of you know, for decades we've been working with the immune system and with my orientation that the body heals itself. Let's give it a go. So she kept coming and she also said if you can't figure it out, I'm just going to keep coming until you do so. I saw her about maybe eight times and the seventh or eighth time she comes bursting through the door she had run up two flights of stairs and she said I'm all better. So I thought my goodness, okay, is this a one off, or can I repeat this with other people who have long COVID? So over the next while I, you know, we saw a bunch more people with long COVID. It became pretty clear that we were making a difference for these people.

Lydia Knutson: 9:19

I want to say something about holistic medicine at this point the level of intervention. Just like with the infant and the ear infections, our level of intervention has far fewer contraindications. We have a very low possibility of harm. So therefore we don't need to wait years and years for research to tell us what long COVID is, or wait for expensive tests and diagnostics for verification of disease. We can just give it a go, and if what we do works, then we know we've figured out a way to support the immune system, that it works. And if it doesn't work, then we adapt and we try something else. So this is true for any patient that comes through the door, and this I think it's really important to keep this in mind when we're thinking about these complex, chronic illnesses, because the lower the possibility of harm, the more freedom there is for the practitioner to try things, and in this trying and in this experimentation we might actually stumble upon something that really, really works.

Lydia Knutson: 10:27

So anyway, after that I thought, oh my God, is it possible that I really figured out this thing that nobody else you know? It's a real head scratcher. So I thought, what do I need to do? So I called up my colleague, dr Stephanie Sullivan, who is the director of chiropractic research at Life University near Atlanta, georgia, and I said Stephanie, help, what do we do? And she said well, we have to do research. So we drew up an IRB, we wrote up a study design and we've done two small studies so far and our patient reported outcomes are eye-popping. I mean eye-popping and really exciting. You know it's preliminary research. It's the first step to prepare to do a larger controlled trial which will give us more information about efficacy.

Lydia Knutson: 11:18

But I want to tell you a little bit about our research. So the data that we collected was mostly through symptom surveys. So patient-reported outcomes Plus we did some physiological data collection, mostly heart rate variability as an indicator of ANS dysfunction. We had a total of 13 patients and two pilots, but these people were really sick. Six of them were out of work entirely or working part-time. A bunch of them were part of the alpha wave and we know how sick those people were.

Lydia Knutson: 11:51

We tracked 40 symptoms. So at that point, you know there was the. You know research was showing that there were sort of these are all the symptoms associated with long COVID and so we decided to take the top 40 hits and we tracked those 40 symptoms. Between these 13 subjects they reported a total of 171 symptoms. That is an enormous number of symptoms. These people you know some of the other guests on your podcast have talked about. You know, when you sit in front of a doctor and you say I have these, you know 21 things, these symptoms, and I think I'm crazy, or they think I'm crazy 171 symptoms among 13 people, and that is other than fatigue. Because everyone had fatigue, we decided, since everyone had, that we would measure it separately and we use two different specific fatigue surveys for that.

Lydia Knutson: 12:52

So what were some of the top symptoms from the list of 40 that our 13 subjects reported? They reported back and joint pain, muscle aches, headaches, dizziness, vision problems. Many of them couldn't look at screens, couldn't do work, brain fog, post-exertional belays, shortness of breath, heart problems, tachycardia, bradycardia they couldn't regulate their heart Loss or distortion of taste and smell, anxiety, sadness. Most of these people were deeply anxious or sad. Was it for the loss of their life? I'm sure. But you know, did this have something to do with long COVID? We would find out.

Lydia Knutson: 13:30

Heat flashes, night sweats, and it goes on and on. I want to say something about these heat flashes because it's not like menopausal, you know, hot flashes. I had a 32 year old man as part of the study who was sweating so badly at night that he would soak towels in ice water and drape himself in these towels for as long as four hours before he was able to get his temperature regulation down to a point where he could actually get to sleep. So these are severe symptoms. So of the 171 symptoms, 67 of them the subjects rated as severe. So certainly that young man would have so severe meaning that on a 10 point scale young man would have so severe meaning that on a 10 point scale they rated the symptom as a five to a 10.

Lydia Knutson: 14:25

We decided to crunch the data and look at because honestly, it's the really severe symptoms that people really care about. I mean, you know, a little forgetfulness or whatever, but out and out brain fog, you know. So we looked at these severe symptoms and we crunched the data Again. We looked at the data in a bunch of different ways, but this was super interesting. So let me talk about the fatigue.

Lydia Knutson: 15:35

One of the surveys that we use was normed to the United States population. In other words, we know how tired the average American is. So how does this group compare to that? So as a cohort, the 13 people started at 80%, the 80th percentile. They're pretty darn tired. By the end of an average of 18 visits they were down to the 32nd percentile, meaning as a group they were less tired than the average American. At the end of the study. They were less tired than the average American at the end of the study and some of these people they started out with bone crushing fatigue. So that's the fatigue. So what happened to these 67 severe symptoms? Also, in an average of 18 visits, there was a 90% reduction in the severity of these symptoms.

Jackie Baxter: 16:21

That's a really impressive number, all of them.

Lydia Knutson: 16:25

It wasn't like we got rid of the back pain but they still were sweating, or the respiratory symptoms improved, but they were still anxious. No, it was all of them, and these are vastly different kinds of symptoms, so they seemed to be yoked. These symptoms seem to be somehow related to each other, even though the presentation and the symptomatology is very, very different, because they all dropped together and these were people, some of whom have been sick for as long as two years. So so you know, this suggests we are not treating the surface symptom, the expression of whatever the problem is. We are not treating, but we're working somewhere near the source of the problem, you know, beyond that particular symptom, and my best explanation is that we are rebalancing the autonomic nervous system and its relationship to the internal organs like the heart and lung, the immune system, the hormonal system and the sensory motor system. I want to say something about the sensory motor system, because you might say what are you doing with that? What is that with long COVID? What are you doing with that? How does that? You know? What is that with long COVID?

Lydia Knutson: 17:41

So, for example, I had a patient recently really pretty bad long COVID and long backs and she said she couldn't walk. First of all she had excruciating back pain so she couldn't sit or walk or stand. But she couldn't walk without holding on to her husband because she couldn't process the visual information. She could only look straight forward. She couldn't turn to the right or left and look at the houses, for instance. So she couldn't process the visual information. And she also said she felt like her legs were mush. She was concerned that she could collapse at any time. So that is the sensory motor system. Anyway, the good news about this wonderful woman is that after a series of visits, she went to her niece's wedding and danced all night in heels, which she was terrified. She wouldn't be able to wear heels because she had been wearing sneakers for three years before she ended up in our office and she actually managed to ditch the sneakers and wear fancy shoes.

Jackie Baxter: 18:45

That's awesome and I think you've really helped in something here, because all of these things are so connected. You know, your nervous system is totally connected to your immune system. One isn't working, the other is not going to be working either. You support one, it's going to help support the other, um, so you know, all these processes in the body are are connected, you know it's it's like this kind of holistic broadband approach, you know, not not necessarily treating individual symptoms, so we're not settled.

Jackie Baxter: 19:21

You know, right, what can we do for the fatigue? We're going to fix the fatigue and then we're going to go and fix the brain fog and then we're going to look at the pain. It's more this, yeah, holistic approach where we're kind of looking at how can we support the body to support itself? Um, because I think you know, when you were saying earlier, when I said, well, what, what is chiropractic? Um, and you and talking about how, you know, the body can heal itself, we have to put it into that environment where it is able to, you know, and that's physically, emotionally, environmentally. You know there's all these different aspects and I think doing one isn't quite enough and that's the sense of of what I get, that that you're kind of working with it's that, yeah, you're not hitting on individual symptoms, you're you're really looking at the whole person absolutely.

Lydia Knutson: 20:13

When you look at 13 people and they have 171 symptoms, there is no way. Well, I guess there is a way figure out which ones are the worst and start kind of whack-a-mole approach, trying to treat the individual symptom. But well, that's not my approach, first of all and second of all, it's not going to be effective. I mean, you just can't. It's whack-a-mole. You hit one and another one pops up and I think that this orientation towards the body healing itself, well, I find it the most interesting and I think it's the most likely way to to get people well. I want to say something about biological systems and this whole business of self-healing. So biological systems, they are self-healing and they are more complex and amazing than we can ever understand. The minute we say we think we understand something, research will show us five years later we were all wrong or that actually we missed this or whatever. So if we just from the outset, acknowledge that this biological system is so complex and amazing, I actually can't. Even I understand some things about it, but there is a higher level of organization that probably I don't understand yet. But what's interesting about these living systems? A living system, whether it's a forest or a large ecosystem, like the ocean or a human body, is that this living system is always trying to maintain itself according to its blueprint. I mean, look at the 11 month old baby with the ear infection. We just removed the impediment to her system and then her immune system just zoomed into action and cleared out the infection. So this kind of self-organization within biological systems, it is not so with non-living systems. So what does that mean? So let's take something like okay, you're in the UK. Let's take the White Cliffs of Dover. So when a chunk of chalk falls into the sea, you don't see that chunk of chalk reorganizing itself and trying to climb back off the cliff. But if you knock a tree over, it will do everything it can to recover and return to its life as a tree. Its tree-ness is built into a blueprint for tree, and this is unique to living systems. So when I approach a patient, the question I humbly ask is not what is wrong or what disease do they have, but what is in the way of this intelligent system getting back to its blueprint, to its fully functioning, vibrant self, like what happened to that baby in a week? So COVID-19, as I said, it is a formidable foe, it's a new virus. I mean not so new anymore, but in the scheme of things it's new. So our immune systems have never seen it. But our immune systems are smart.

Lydia Knutson: 23:36

Many, many people get COVID and completely recover, even quickly, quickly recover and some people end up with long COVID. So what is the breakdown within their intelligent system that's keeping them from recovering? So in the treatment room we ask in what way is this particular person's system stuck and out of balance? So how do we do that? Some of it is what you might expect in any doctor's office, but we take a lot more time. First we have them fill out and take in advance, especially with long covid, because usually their journeys have been very complex and we're not the first place they're going. So we asked them to detail their illness, who they've seen, what treatments, what's been helpful. And, honestly, people have done so many things, some of the mainstream, some of them so wacky I have never even heard of them and I researched them. I want to understand these people's journey, like what have they done? And if anything hasn't been helpful, I really want to know about that. And then we do a very long intake, usually about three hours, and we ask about past injuries. So physical, mental, emotional, spiritual illnesses, all the way back to childhood illnesses, all the way back to childhood and life events. That might give us some information about particular vulnerabilities in this person's healing system. Why are they not getting back to their blueprint?

Lydia Knutson: 25:09

Many people suffering from long COVID, when you dig deep enough, have some history of chronic illness, like they say oh, I got mono in college and I was sick for a year. Or I was treated for Lyme when I was in my 30s and I thought I got better. But you know, I'm feeling really limey these days. Or I used to have fibromyalgia. That pops up a bunch. I used to have fibromyalgia but you know I got all better. But you know this is sure feeling like that. So there's history there. You need to ask. It takes time. People forget about all the things that have happened. Some people's lives have been very long by the time they get to us.

Lydia Knutson: 25:46

You know we see people in their 20s and 30s, but we also see people in their 50s and 60s. So we also do a thorough musculoskeletal and neurological physical exam. We look for neurological deficits or weaknesses, you know, in their nervous system and we also take a really hard look at the muscular system. I mean, we are, we're chiropractors, so you know you can think of us as biomechanics. We do extensive orthopedic muscle tests. We have them stand on one leg tandem gait. You know things like this and what we often find is old musculoskeletal injuries will start popping up and we think they contribute to the dysregulation of the other systems, like the ANS and the immune systems. So you know, we are chiropractors and I think what's a little bit unique, especially with axial stability method and what we do in our office, is that we assess everything. That's why it takes so long. We really assess everything, because we have to see how far has this system shifted off its blueprint Regarding musculoskeletal injury.

Lydia Knutson: 26:57

You know lots of long COVID complaints are actually neuromusculoskeletal and I don't mean just headaches, back and joint pain, but dizziness, sensory overwhelm. You know everything is too fast, too loud, too bright. I got to go lie in a dark room, you know, and recover, a lot of rest is needed and then the rest isn't restorative and they have vision problems. You know many long COVID sufferers can't look at screens, they can't read, they can't whatever. You know those vision problems. Well, that's sensory motor and they have often poor movement.

Lydia Knutson: 27:32

I had a new patient last week who had a really pretty marked movement disorder. In her intake she wrote that she had chronic Lyme and medically diagnosed COVID vaccine injury. So her symptoms were fatigue, pretty bad fatigue, extreme anxiety where her heart rate would just go jumping out of her chest in the most inopportune settings, and a movement disorder that looked a lot like Parkinson's was pretty noticeable. And it all started after her COVID booster in the fall of 2021. In the last three years she has seen 55 different doctors and practitioners on three different continents. She keeps a list and you know I think I'm number 56 and spent untold amounts of money and after all of this she really wasn't much better.

Lydia Knutson: 28:41

And she said that you know, one of the most painful parts of this journey has been having doctors. When she says I have a medically diagnosed COVID vaccine injury and chronic Lyme, that the doctors just glaze over and she can see them starting to retreat or they listen a bit and then they say they can't help her. Well, at least that's honest and that's good. Acknowledge what you, you know, know your scope of practice and what you are able to do. Or worse, and this was the most painful of all is that tell her. It's all in her head, and I think this kind of medical trauma of not being listened to three years into it is one of the greatest harms actually, and so for us to sit and listen, and really listen, until the person has said what they need to say, and then we keep asking more questions, is definitely part of the healing process.

Jackie Baxter: 29:43

I think we can't underestimate how important it is that people feel heard, especially given that so many of them will have been through some of these more traumatic experiences where they have been dismissed. So actually, someone who will sit down and say, okay, tell me about it, I will listen to you and then let's see what we can do. I think that is such a valuable thing and I think you know people working in sort of medical spaces, you know, I think you know can't underestimate that the listening is just the beginning.

Jackie Baxter: 30:22

Yeah, yeah, it's like the least you should be doing, isn't it?

Lydia Knutson: 30:26

It's the least you should be doing so, but we have to find out what are all of the stressors and injuries and insults to this system that may be underlying why they can't heal themselves from long COVID. When I have a patient in front of me, I am thinking about where their ability to heal themselves has broken down. There's actually a useful analogy I think it's useful of the rain barrel.

Lydia Knutson: 31:05

Our bodies deal with stressors really really well. I mean we do. We're a self-healing organism, right? So we deal with stressors really well. We compensate, we adapt and seemingly we bounce back from a lot of things. But with every stressor or compensation right, a compensation is a less efficient solution to a problem and any of those things that hasn't brought us completely back to that original blueprint. It decreases our resilience. Resiliency is what allows you to bounce back from things.

Lydia Knutson: 31:44

So if we think about the water level in a rain barrel, it is as the kind of the level of stressors as we go through life. The rain barrel, I mean it's rising. The water is rising, right. I mean we're getting older, so we may not actually be aware of any of these symptoms. But then something suddenly happens. It might be something seemingly really minor and the water overflows and suddenly it becomes into our consciousness like, oh, you know, I have headaches or my back hurts or I'm getting sick all the time. Wonder why.

Lydia Knutson: 32:16

Covid-19 is not a minor thing, it's an 800-pound gorilla. It cannonballs into our rain barrel and if your water level is low enough and your resilience high enough, maybe you can ride it out and bounce back. But if your rain barrel is close to full, then you can have a massive flood and when that rain barrel overflows, we get a recurrence of old illnesses or an amplification of pre-existing stressors and injuries, like I used to have fibromyalgia. It went away and now I have it back, but it's like a water balloon giving way at its weakest point. That weakest point is different for everyone, depending upon their unique you know constellation of compensations and stressors, which is why long COVID has a million different symptoms, because it depends upon each person's individual water balloon or ring barrel and where it's given you know where it's given way.

Lydia Knutson: 33:19

So for that new patient last week it comes to light that she had a bad case of mono in her early 20s and a terrible case of chickenpox at age 25. She also, as it turns out in the case history, she had chronic Lyme disease and she actually was being treated for actively treated for anaplasmosis In the fall of 2021, she was finishing up a pretty you know a course of antibiotics, which of course, we know sometimes you need antibiotics, but it really does a number on the system and she had just finished, she hadn't really recovered from that, she hadn't rehabbed her gut after the antibiotics and then she gets the COVID booster, so a lot of weak places in her water balloon just gave way.

Jackie Baxter: 34:41

I find this really interesting because you, I had a similar experience. You know, my water barrel was too full, as it turns out, when I got my Covid infection and the water barrel just kind of imploded. And you know, I think a lot of other people will have kind of had a similar experience. They didn't realize their water barrel was full, but it turned out that it was. But there are also quite a lot of people and this comes into where you said, you know, looking at the history, because some people don't realize until you really dig into it but you do get quite a few people saying but no, I mean, I went back through my history and and there wasn't anything. You know my water barrel wasn't full. Why did this still happen to me? Have you got a theory on that is? Is it just that you haven't looked hard enough? And there was stuff there?

Lydia Knutson: 35:30

yeah, I know that there are some people who say, absolutely out of the blue, I had no pre-existing conditions, I was an athlete, 32 years old. Blah, blah, blah, blah and they end up with long COVID. Yes, those people exist and I think they are in the minority. I think that long COVID really does hit the people who are already down and the 32 year olds who come in with long COVID. We actually treat them exactly the same way as the 55 year old woman with you know 25 symptoms, because I think what our treatments are doing I mean, I can't say what our treatments are doing, we haven't done that research but I think fundamentally we are dealing with an imbalance of the autonomic nervous system, so dysautonomia, which many people in this podcast have talked about. Chiropractic is particularly well suited to rebalancing the ANS. We work with it all the time and the vast array of symptoms that are long COVID identified are really all ANS related.

Lydia Knutson: 36:47

The autonomic nervous system has two basic divisions. There's the parasympathetic division, which is the rest, digest, feed, breed, versus the sympathetic division, which is fight, flight, freeze. This is not an on-off system. I like to think of it as like a water tap, so you want a little bit of hot, a little bit of cold. The body is constantly adjusting the water temperature in response to the demands of the changing environment temperature in response to the demands of the changing environment.

Lydia Knutson: 37:31

So if you get too much hot water, like let's take the Parkinsonian movement disorder new patient from last week and her anxiety. She says whenever she goes into a doctor's office her anxiety goes through the roof and her heart starts beating like crazy Because her system goes into something sort of PTSD with her experiences in doctor's offices of not getting the help she needs and so she goes into this fight flight mode. Is that really an appropriate response to that environment? She's not under threat, she's not about to die, she doesn't have to run away from the saber tooth tiger, but her system goes into this intense sympathetic dominance experience.

Jackie Baxter: 38:21

Now don't get me wrong.

Lydia Knutson: 38:23

These are survival systems, so that sympathetic dominance is super necessary in many survival situations. I mean, you step out into the curb, you see a bus coming at you, your heart rate in an instant goes boom, you send blood to your legs and you jump back from the curb. Thank God we have these systems, but an over activation of the sympathetic nervous system, particularly with long COVID sufferers. First of all it's exhausting and then you get stuck in this sympathetic dominance and I know there's some wonderful people doing great work with you know EMDR and cold plunges and breathing, and I know, jackie, you do wonderful work with this and that is a fantastic approach. What we have found with our research and what our long COVID protocol is is it is actually not a practice, it's not something that you need to do every day to retrain your system. It's actually treatment. Right, it's treatment. So you come in for a certain number of visits and we bring the symptom severity down 90%. So what are we actually doing here? First, we say that all long COVID, you've seen one long COVID patient. You've seen one long COVID patient, because the way they have strayed from their own personal blueprint is different in every case. But what I discovered initially with the lawyer was that there seems to be a hierarchy of systems and a sequence in which every body wants to restore order to those systems. This is a way in which all bodies are similar in spite of all the differences, and that our treatment approach is very upstream from these symptoms. So what is this protocol? I'll skip a lot of the chiropractic details. I've created actually a six-day course for chiropractors to learn this protocol.

Lydia Knutson: 40:44

But let me talk about this for a lay person. The first thing we do that seems to be this systems approach for every body is the first thing we do is we work with the parasympathetic division. So we are really focusing on the ANS out of the gate. So the vagus nerve, which is the primary parasympathetic innervation, is a cranial nerve. It comes out of the head down the neck and into the thorax and the abdomen and it innervates almost all of the internal organs. So, with all of these sensory motor difficulties that long COVID sufferers experience, so the fatigue, the vision problems, the dizziness, the sense of disequilibrium, that things are too fast, too loud, too, whatever, that is really a sensory integration issue. So we work with the sensory motor system of the upper cervical spine, which is where the vagus nerve exits. I'm assuming this is what we're doing because of the results that we're getting is that we free up or stimulate or somehow support that parasympathetic division. To get back to business, we basically kind of pump up support of the cool water into the balancing of the hot and cold water and it starts to calm the system down, system down. Then we go on and we work with the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system. The way we work with this is actually very structural, so beautiful.

Lydia Knutson: 42:36

One of your guests said that the sympathetic nervous system is like a string of pearls that go up and down the spine. So well, you think of chiropractors and we're kind of spine specialists, so seems like we should know something about this. And in fact the levels of the spine correspond. We call them spinal, the spine correspond, we call them spinal concordances. They correspond with these specific string of pearls. So different thoracic levels of the spine associate with the different organ systems. These concordances have been talked about for 2000 years.

Lydia Knutson: 43:22

In the acupuncture system they were talked about in the 19th century with osteopathic doctors, and all the way through the 20th century various chiropractic approaches have also come up with ways of dealing with this. So, for instance, the third thoracic level is associated with the lungs and respiration. The first thoracic level and second thoracic level are associated with heart. Thoracic level seven is involved with the spleen, which is very important for the immune system, and on and on. So we have a way of working very specifically with these different thoracic levels and their innervations, sympathetic innervation of the organ systems, and we seem to tonify the system.

Lydia Knutson: 44:22

So you don't want to disable or somehow tamp down the sympathetic system, we need it. But what we do is we tonify it and tonifying means that we give it degrees of freedom so that it can go up and it can go down and not be just stuck in high hot water all the time. So maybe it sounds a little bit like I don't know how do you possibly do this? And in fact you know patients will say how is this possible? I mean, we do absolutely low force treatments so there's no spinal manipulations, it's gentle sequence of touching of the thoracic spine and patients will say they can't believe something that gentle could possibly make such a difference. But we're really stimulating, freeing up or pumping up the parasympathetic division and we are tonifying the sympathetic division and then, like the infant with her ear infection. The body goes oh, I can do this, and it fixes itself, which is how we can get, in 18 visits, a 90% reduction in severe symptoms.

Jackie Baxter: 45:43

I think one of the things that I didn't get at the start I mean, I didn't understand anything at the start, which I think is very common but also kind of understanding how you need all the parts of your nervous system If you didn't have your fight flight response, then actually that would be really bad but it's having a nervous system that is balanced, that's resilient, that's able to move in and out of all of these states when appropriate. So I think this is what's so wonderful about bringing the body back into balance. However you do it, it and you know, and you've developed this protocol that seems to be having really amazing results and is leading you into doing all this fantastic research to kind of learn more about it, I suppose. But yeah, it's the idea of balancing the body, because the body is designed to work.

Lydia Knutson: 46:36

So that rebalancing the autonomic nervous system that we do in our protocol, that rebalancing which in our research there was about, there was a 70% decrease in severe symptoms after this series, this first series, and that was about eight visits. So we have three phases of care and if you have a look at our research there are three phases of care and that first phase of care the improvement was a 70% decrease in all severe symptoms, which I mean that's jaw dropping and how is this possible? But I think it really underscores what a big player in long COVID and other post-viral syndromes the ANS plays. And all the way through this we've been talking about long COVID. I don't really like the word long COVID. I mean it's fine, it's a post-viral syndrome and we happen to know the agent of infection. But I think we can think about this in a much larger umbrella and I'd like that.

Lydia Knutson: 47:51

The COVID community is now starting to, you know, group these syndromes under the larger umbrella of infection-associated chronic illnesses. Umbrella of infection associated chronic illnesses because we know through the biomedical research which is fantastic what they're figuring out that COVID-19 reinvigorates latent herpes viruses, and we have absolutely found that to be true because with the more kind of recalcitrant or, you know, slower to recover along COVID people. We really have to, then, use this same approach with the immune system and the autonomic nervous system. We have to use this approach but instead of focusing on SARS-CoV-2 as the agent, cov-2 as the agent. Look at EBV or CMV or herpes 1, herpes 2, and Lyme, because these are these chronic illnesses that affect the energy systems. And I think that whenever somebody has as a primary complaint fatigue, mecsf, chronic fatigue syndrome, fatigue, we have to think what is happening with that autonomic nervous system. So somehow these viral infections have destabilized the ANS and I think that when that ANS gets stabilized, its incredible influence over the immune system is causing that immune system to not get back to business.

Lydia Knutson: 49:32

Now you could argue the other way, which is to say well, maybe the disruption in the immune system has in fact disrupted the ANS, and I actually think that's true. I think that it's it's a chicken and egg type situation, so you can't just do uh, I mean you can do autonomic nervous system kind of practices to get that back in balance. But I think that that is much more time consuming than actually going after it in a treatment modality where you actually are treating and allowing the body to reorganize itself on several through several different systems the immune system and the autonomic nervous system and that this is true for all of these umbrella IACIs. Regarding, you know like what, what we do in our office and treatments, you know we have had people come and we just do the first series of eight to 10 treatments, that first kind of rebalancing of the ANS, because they've come from out of town for long distances or whatever, and they, you know we just do that. Usually they feel better enough after that that they're like well, I want more, and so they either come back or they stay longer, you know, for a couple of months or something.

Lydia Knutson: 50:44

I'll take as an example the woman who had to hang on to her husband when she went for a walk and couldn't learn turn left or right In working with her. First, of course, we work with this, that sensory motor system of the upper cervical spine, normalizing, processing of sensory data, and she had a lot of improvement. But our second and third phases of care include a more conventional chiropractic approach in which we actually start working with the biomechanical system more specifically and that kind of jelly in her legs and feeling like they'll just, you know, fall out from under her. It really wasn't until we moved into the second and third phases of care, where we actually really work with all of those old neuromusculoskeletal injuries, that we really she was able to dance at her niece's wedding in high heels, high heels being the important bit For her, yes, but do you know what?

Jackie Baxter: 51:49

Joking aside, everyone has their things that are important to them. You know, for some people it might be being able to care for their children, or for being able to exercise, or being able to wear high heels at a wedding. You know, and you can't tell someone what's important to them. That's got to come from them, hasn't it? So it sounds really cool this idea of working with the body. I love that and I think that's very empowering as well. And I think you know when, when you become ill with something like long COVID whether it's long COVID itself, or a vaccine injury or ME-CFS, either before or after COVID, you know whatever you want to call it these conditions you feel very helpless a lot of the time and having something that's making you feel like, okay, I'm helping support my body into a position where actually it can function, whether that's by working with yourself or whatever it is that that person finds it's so important to find something that is starting to help.

Lydia Knutson: 52:53

We always at the beginning of treatment when we were doing that three hour intake. One of the things that we do is we compile a list of benchmarks which has to do with their goals what do they want to be able to do? And sometimes the list is very long and sometimes it's not, but you know, every visit we update. How is that benchmark? How is that doing? Were you able to read today? Were you able to do this? So it feels very respectful of the person and their goals and I think that approaching with that level of respect is also part of the humbleness that their conscious desires, but it's also approaching with humility. This highly intelligent system that actually does know how to heal it just has lost its way. And I want to say something about research and this idea of level of intervention based on level of harm. Level of intervention based on level of harm.

Lydia Knutson: 54:09

I think we need to start asking new questions and I think we need more research focused on actual treatment. I mean, the biomedical research out there is fantastic, you know, learning about reservoirs and endothelial damage and all that is super important. But we need to develop new treatment approaches and research, the ones that are already showing promise and that have such a low low level of possible harm, like those treatment strategies need to be investigated. They need to, you know, to show interest, and showing interest means actually funding them. You know we were able to do our research because grateful patients stepped forward and gave us money and gave us money. Without that I would not be on your show saying we had a 90% reduction in severe symptoms in 18 visits. Research is really really important for understanding the efficacy which you understand we did no control, so it's not about efficacy that will be our next research study but to understand, not what it is we're doing, necessarily, because that is a different kind of research, but at least at least doing outcomes research.

Lydia Knutson: 55:32

Did the person improve? And if so, it seems like this is something people should try because the possibility of harm is so low. So I want to give a shout out to my patients who believed in us and gave us the money for research, and there needs to be more of this and not just my office. And so fantasy of mine would be something like well, let's go to the chiropractic associations and ask them hey, could you survey your members and see whether people are coming up with treatments for long COVID, go to the acupuncture society, go to the manual medicine people find out and then actually seek out those treatments that these people are discovering. That is not how research tends to happen in the United States or even worldwide, and I think that, faced with this extreme global issue, I think it's time yeah, it's got to be about what we can do, and there's a lot that we can do.

Jackie Baxter: 56:41

Lydia, thank you so much. This has been eye-opening for me, so I'm so excited to hear where your research goes next. I will drop all of your links into the show notes so anyone who's wanting to find out more or get in touch with you then they can do that. So yeah, thank you so much.

Lydia Knutson: 56:59

Thank you, jackie, and thank you for all that you are doing for this long COVID community.