185 - Dr Kendal Stewart - When Your Killer T-Cells Need a Vacation

Dr. Kendal Stewart shares his unique perspective on Long Covid through his background as a surgeon with training in functional medicine, neurosurgery, and cell biology. His approach examines the body as an integrated system rather than separating it into isolated specialties.

• Complex conditions like Long Covid require a holistic view of the body as an interconnected system
• Western medicine often silos patients into specialties based on symptoms, missing the bigger picture
• T-cell weakness and microglial activation are key factors in Long Covid symptoms
• The body's inflammation is doing exactly what it's programmed to do—it's not broken
• Northern Europeans have particularly aggressive genetics for inflammation (76%) and often have broken "off switches"
• Peptides like thymusin alpha-1 can help recover exhausted T-cells
• Creating an environment favorable for healing is more effective than treating individual symptoms
• Genetic testing provides a personalized "map" for treatment, focusing only on what's missing
• Many people who recover become healthier than they were before getting sick

Links: 

Dr Stewart's Youtube
Dr Stewart's Instagram
Dr Stewart's website

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

(music credit - Brock Hewitt, Rule of Life)

Chapters

• 1:50 Welcome to Dr. Kendall Stewart
• 5:06 Holistic Medicine vs. Western Approach
• 14:31 Understanding Inflammation and T-Cells
• 23:14 Turning Off Inflammation in the Body
• 31:34 Peptides and Thymus Gland Recovery
• 39:46 Long COVID's Genetic Patterns
• 45:15 Creating the Environment for Healing

Transcript

Jackie Baxter: 0:55

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Long Covid Podcast. I am delighted to be joined today by Dr Kendall Stewart, who is a doctor with a lot of years of experience in working with complex conditions, and we're going to dive into what his particular specialties are and how that relates to these conditions and a whole load more as well, so I'm super excited. A very warm welcome to the podcast today.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 1:28

Thank you so much, jackie. I appreciate that very much. Yeah, my background is kind of complex. I'm actually trained as a surgeon In the United States. I'm ear, nose and throat boarded, but I've also been trained in neurosurgical techniques around the skull base. So I used to open heads for a living.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 1:46

But because I have a background in kind of cell biology, biochemistry, I've always been interested in how we prepare people for surgery, how we get them over it, how we heal them following that, and that has necessarily led into kind of a whole career for me, basically working on objective concepts of how we can recognize what's wrong with somebody, how we can put back into them what's missing and how we can recover them from any of the situations that they seem to get themselves into or are forced into.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 2:23

So, being an ENT, my background is in immunology and allergy, it's in virology.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 2:29

I have a background in also in complex cell biology concepts of healing, because when you cut a hole in the nervous system you got to to heal it back, and so my career has done some funny modulations over the years and I even had some of my colleagues ask me what do I call myself now?

Dr Kendal Stewart: 2:51

And I just tell them I'm a physician, so it's kind of hard to explain. But I'm also known because we basically have opened several genetic labs that tell us specifically, not in genetics of disease but genetics of healing, in a concept we call nutrigenomics, so we know which nutritional elements are not being processed, absorbed, delivered properly in your body, so we're able to put back in what's really missing and not worry about the stuff that's not missing, and so we can use precision medicine to treat the individual as opposed to treating them as a big group of people with vastly different backgrounds and races and genetic ancestry. So that's pretty much what I've been up to and it has been a wonderful ride and I'm certainly not toward the end. I know people ask me when I'm going to retire and I have no plans on it anytime soon.

Jackie Baxter: 3:54

So it sounds like you wear a lot of hats, which is kind of awesome because it gives you a lot of different insights, I would imagine, into what you do. You're not just trained in one thing. That gives you this narrow view of sort of things.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 4:11

So you would describe me probably more as a functional doctor.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 4:14

So I've been involved in functional medicine education for over 20 years.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 4:20

I like to explain it that the problem in the United States now obviously it may be different in the UK, but probably not you go to a doctor who's in the specialty of the symptom you have, and so it's kind of like having a car that's broke and you take it to the shop and the guy says I'm only a carburetor guy, I don't do anything but carburetors, and we checked your carburetor and it's fine. You need to go down the street and find out what's wrong with your car, and that is just not acceptable, because the engine in general works as a whole together. It's not, it's a sum of its parts, not the parts. And so in medicine, unfortunately, we've gotten away from really looking at the body as a holistic, integrated system. And biochemistry-wise I can tell you a funny thing God never does one thing with one thing. He'll take one thing and he'll do hundreds of things with it. And so you kind of got to understand that if we affect a change here, we're going to affect a change somewhere else also.

Jackie Baxter: 5:22

Yeah, and I guess one of the many frustrations of something like long COVID is that you do, you get shuffled into the system. You go and see your ologist whichever particular ologist you get sent to and they say, oh, this particular thing is okay, or maybe we can do this thing, but you need to go and see that other guy to look at your other thing. So then you go to your next ologist and you're getting kind of passed around and around and around, whereas actually what is more useful is someone who can kind of, as you say, kind of holistically, look at the bigger picture, because it's not really that there's one particular thing, it's more this kind of wider, you know, which does vary person to person. But yeah, that kind of very narrow view doesn't generally work so well with these particular conditions, whereas it maybe does for someone who's had a heart attack, for example.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 6:27

So a heart attack is really a very clear mechanical problem. The problem that we have in long COVID, for instance, are these syndromic states is that God always has a backup system in place. So we're going to talk about T cell weakness in long COVID, where we've challenged the T cells, which are the thymic cells that kill things. We've challenged them so hard and there's so much antigen around that what happens is those become weak and then God says well, I can't kill anything anymore, let me just inflame the heck out of the body. So he turns up the other part of the immune system and now you feel sick all day, every day, because inflammation's going crazy in your body. So he turns up the other part of the immune system and now you feel sick all day, every day, because inflammation's going crazy in your body.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 7:04

So what happens is what most people don't understand is the immune system is actually doing what it's supposed to in the condition it's put in. But you can't just cover that up. You've got to put the balance back into place and by putting the balance back into place you ultimately overcome the disease process and come out of the syndrome, whether it's long COVID, whether it's I mean autism, whether it's Alzheimer's, dementia, I mean you can just go down all the syndromic things and they're really not diseases. We don't have a single gene that says this is the disease. What we have is a state where the body is put into a group of symptoms that don't make us feel good overall.

Jackie Baxter: 7:50

Yeah, and I think you know you kind of just touched on one of the other many frustrations of these conditions, which is that they don't look the same for everybody. Which is that they don't look the same for everybody. You know, one person will have, you know, one particular selection of symptoms from their selection box, and then you look at your next person and they've got some of the same ones but a whole lot of other different ones, and they move around. They're not the same, everybody's different. So we go into this kind of like okay, so is these two people got the same illness or is it two different illnesses? And then we try, as you said to start with, we start to pigeonhole too much, I think, whereas it sounds like this more kind of holistic view certainly seems to be what is helping, I think, more people, from what I have experienced, Well, it is because in the United States and I can only comment on that the diagnosis is the most important part, because that's what the insurance pays for.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 8:48

It does not pay for the cure, does not pay for the treatment, necessarily, and so I don't care. When a patient comes to see me, now I don't take insurance. People pay me cash because I have to spend a lot of time educating people. I can't spend five minutes in the room with you and make you understand how we're going to go about things. So what happens is we essentially I don't care what we call it we can say you feel crappy every day and that's your diagnosis, what you're really there for is. You're there for somebody to fix you, and you have to be selfish because you don't go to the doctor just to get a diagnosis. You go to the doctor to get well, and I really think we've kind of lost our way in a lot of the methodologies that typically what I call Western medicine would focus on typically what I call Western medicine would focus on.

Jackie Baxter: 10:26

So this diagnosis, this box ticking or putting people into boxes isn't really that helpful. Actually, what we need to do is look at the person and say, okay, hey, who's shown up today. What are we going to do to help you as a person which very much resonates with me, because you know you've got to meet people- where they are which very much resonates with me, because you know you've got to meet people where they are.

Jackie Baxter: 10:49

So what I suppose would be really interesting? I mean, we've kind of talked around this a little bit. You mentioned T cells and the immune system and inflammation, and these are all big kind of buzzwords that come up a lot. So I suppose, how does what you do intersect with long COVID, with chronic fatigue, with all these kind of complex conditions, and how do you look at that?

Dr Kendal Stewart: 11:13

So I've been teaching genetics now for 15 years to the functional medicine institutes in the world. One of them is called the World Anti-Aging Congress and when you teach doctors, doctors don't want to just have a genetic test, they want to have a methodology. They want to know what to do with the genetic test, and so most of the education we do is using genetics that are giving us the ability to recognize what's problematic with you as an individual. So always remember genetics are precision. They are only about you. Now some people may share your genetics in certain aspects, but what we really want to know is what's going on with you.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 11:54

Now what I've taught those doctors is kind of a methodology of how we go about healing and it actually makes so much common sense that you're going to know it also because it's just a common sense concept. You understand and the problem that we have in most of these syndromic situations. So I classically see people who have seen 15 to 20 doctors show up at my doorstep because somebody sent them and said go see Dr Stewart, and sometimes we have to kind of uneducate them a little bit to get the right education in them and most of the time they've actually not accomplished the very first step of healing. So let me take you through some analogies that I tend to use. I think it'll make it a whole lot easier to understand.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 12:46

So I'm a man, and I'm sure men in Scotland are identical to men in the United States. If I hurt my knee and my knee swells up and the doctor tells me to rest it for two weeks, what's the chance I'm going to sit in a chair for two weeks as a man? Not likely. The answer is no Right. So if I get up and I keep walking on it and it stays swollen, how well is it going to heal?

Jackie Baxter: 13:10

It's not going to heal so fast.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 13:13

So nobody's ever missed that question. I don't tell how ignorant they are, because they will always get that question right, because you can witness the inflammation, because they will always get that question right, because you can witness the inflammation. What people don't understand is in the nervous system we have a group of cells that we call microglia, and microglia are very unique in the body because they are the immune cells of the nervous system, and so when they get turned on, we can not only recognize genetically how aggressively you turn them on, but what's important is we have to be able to turn them back off. So what we have very much found after looking at several thousand people with these neuroimmune syndromes. So if you have brain fog with your long COVID, I can tell you your microglia got turned on. We call that microglial activation. Something turned them on, and it was probably COVID. Now there's other things that can turn them on. You can have infections and, in fact, sometimes just getting sick. You get brain fog too, and some women, when they get their cycle, just because their uterus is inflamed, their brain doesn't work as well, do you understand? So the problem, though, that we have with the nervous system and concepts of brain fog is when inflammation is turned on. If we can't turn that back off, we have no hope of getting past the first step of healing.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 14:41

So by identifying the systems that turn it off, now God has three major systems to turn inflammation off in the body and I'm going to take you through them, you don't have to remember them. There is the JAK-STAT system, which responds to chemical messengers from one cell to the next. The second is called the tumor necrosis factor system. That is a general system that tells us how aggressive your immune system is programmed to be since birth. And then the third is called the toll-like receptor system and that recognizes different types of infections. So we have nine different receptors in that system. One recognizes DNA viruses, one recognizes RNA viruses, one recognizes bacteria of certain types, do you understand? Can gently and safely using things that are not that can be used long-term to help that person accomplish the first step, which is turning off inflammation. Okay, now, in turning off microglia, we have four major things that can turn them off. We have steroids, now that can include testosterone. We have steroids, now that can include testosterone, cortisol, progesterone for women. Vitamin D is a steroid. Most people don't know that, but so we can turn it off with steroids if it's the right system. That works particularly well for the JAK-STAT system.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 16:18

Okay, we actually have an opiate receptor on our immune cells. So when you feel bad, you will do anything you can to make endorphins natural opiates. You will read, you'll look at social media, you'll do something because you're trying to calm the anxiety that goes with that inflammation, and that's great, because those endorphins do calm your nervous system. But guess what they tell the immune system to do? They tell it to rev up. So in this country we use low-dose naltrexone. We take naltrexone, which is an opiate blocker that's used for drug abuse, in high doses and we use a little dinky amount. In fact, instead of 100 milligrams, which we give to a drug addict, we use three milligrams, and that will let us still get our endorphins but turn the immune system down slightly, you understand. Then we have the CB2 receptor, so we have the cannabinoid receptor, which responds to natural cannabinoids, and then we have a really interesting one we've been using a lot of, and that's the thymic receptor.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 17:28

Thymic receptor, so the T cells of your immune system, which you would know as the killer cells. These kill viruses, bacteria, fungus, yeast, cancer, parasites, those cells that T stands for thymic. Okay, and the thymus is a gland that's right here in your neck, it's actually behind your sternum as a adult and in a little child you can actually see it and what happens? That's called the innate immune system. That's the immune system that you're born with from your mom and what happens is that immune system is very aggressive at keeping watch and that's why a lot of babies didn't get really sick from COVID because they had these beautiful T cells. Make sense. Now the problem is we know that system gradually gets weaker and tends to really get to its adult level about the age of 35. So if you look at the COVID data on who had trouble after when they caught COVID, it was usually people over the age of 35. Make sense? Well, we have these wonderful new things called peptides. Have you heard about peptides too much?

Jackie Baxter: 18:40

We've not covered them much. They've been mentioned on and off, so go ahead.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 18:46

Peptides are either pieces. Well, let me tell you the story because I think you'll find it really interesting. In 2008, the Russian Federation of Sciences was asked to cheat on Russian athletes without getting caught, Okay, and what they did was terribly clever. They essentially took our normal hormones, and a normal hormone for us that comes from the pituitary, for instance, will have 10 or 12 different effects. So they chopped them up into little pieces that nobody could measure as a whole and they put them in the athletes so they can enhance whatever they wanted to, and they got away with it till 2018. And then a whistleblower leaked out, took all that data to Australia in 2018. And when we saw it, in many ways we freaked out because it was not only clever for athletes, but we could see these little pieces of our own hormones that could help us recover a lot of people. And that's when peptide therapy started.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 19:45

And what's unique about peptides is a lot of times they are bioidentical. They are exactly the things that you make in your body. Okay, so it turns out that there were two of them discovered from the thymus gland in 1992, thymusin alpha-1 and thymusin beta-4. And these are made by the thymus gland in 1992, thymus and alpha-1, and thymus and beta-4. And these are made by the thymus gland to tell the T cells of the immune system to recover. The problem is is that in this environment of pharmaceuticals, a lot of the research was not done on those things until about 2021, when people were trying to figure out how to recover people with COVID who had all these T cells that were just so worn out because they're fighting this never-ending battle with COVID that it became very inherent that we might, should, use something to help the T cells recover. So thymus and alpha-1 is something we use in our clinic in many, many ways and by recovering the T cells.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 20:54

So T cells are defined by their surface receptors. We have CD4, we have CD8, we have CD56. You would know those as T helper cells, T suppressor cells and also natural killer cells which kill cancer. Okay, so when we had this overwhelming infection with the spike protein additionally that didn't want to leave the body because it got stuck to a receptor that didn't want to leave the body because it got stuck to a receptor, then what happened is our immune cells were so overwhelmed that they just wore themselves out and all we were left to do because we couldn't get rid of it or kill. It was inflame the heck out of the body and that's what caused essentially long COVID. You're sick every day and you're very, very sick. Does that make sense?

Jackie Baxter: 21:46

Yeah.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 21:47

I'm sorry I took you through such a complex concept, but in general always remember that God has a backup system. If one of them fails, he's got something else he can do. The problem is if you can't kill the virus and you know there's so much discussion on what long COVID is Is it retained infection, is it retained spike? I know for sure it's retained spike, meaning that all viruses have a surface protein that recognizes a receptor on a cell, so they know what cell to go to, what cell to go to. So, for instance, influenza recognizes the glutamate receptor called the NMDA receptor, and so it knows which cells to go attack. So for COVID, unfortunately, that was the ACE2 receptor, the blood pressure receptor.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 22:38

And the problem is in virology. Since that spike protein was stuck on that virus artificially, it's very easy to come off. So that means if it floated around and recognized an ACE2 receptor and lodged in there, the virus can be pulled off. But that spike protein will stay in that receptor, kind of like a splinter in your foot, do you understand? And it's going to cause inflammation for a long time until we can at least figure out a way for the body to clear it or we can clear it ourselves, and so really long. Covid is just the body doing its job to the best of its ability. The body doing its job to the best of its ability. But the problem is you feel terrible because you're sick every day for a long period of time, and I don't have to explain that to you.

Jackie Baxter: 23:32

Yeah, and I like this idea of the body doing the right thing, even if it might look like the wrong thing. You know the body trying to protect you, you know doing exactly what it is programmed to do. To me that felt a little bit easier to take than everything is just broken. You know it didn't necessarily fix me, but it did kind of make me a little bit think. You know, it's that idea of okay, I mean, you know you're overreacting and you know that this isn't right and I'm still sick, but it is doing what it thinks is the right thing so I can tell you genetically.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 24:20

So I mean, our lab has done probably 50,000 genetic tests and we have done it from. In fact, we have data from all over the world as standards for us and I can tell you, in particular, in Northern European descent patterns, we have very aggressive genetics for inflammation patterns. We have very aggressive genetics for inflammation. In fact, northern European fair-skinned, fair-eyed, northern European descent people have the most aggressive genetics for inflammation of any racial group we know. Okay, now that does not mean they're not found in every racial group, okay, but in particular, we know that about 76% of Northern European Anglos have aggressive on switches, which means we turn on inflammation more aggressively. And then we also know that up to 60% of Northern European Anglos have at least one of those off switches broken, which means they, once they turn it on depending on the system they turn on they have no ability to turn it back off.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 25:34

So if nobody helps you turn off that inflammation, you're never going to feel right, unless you can recover the body and have the body do it itself, which is ideally my plan. So there are things we can do in the short term to try to make you feel better, but ideally putting the system back in balance without having to use medications is obviously the best. Now you're going to find out. As a chemist, if people ever see me, I love medicines from the 1970s. Do you know why? They came from plants? They're plant derivatives.

Jackie Baxter: 26:13

So more natural based.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 26:16

Right. And then, unfortunately, in this country in 1981, in the United States, they actually said you cannot patent anything that's naturally occurring anymore. So that made all the pharmaceutical companies take all of their new ideas and essentially change them biochemically into an artificial structure so that they could obtain a patent to be able to protect their investment. So you'll see that Dr Stewart loves medicines. I'm one of those very strange doctors that knows where everything came from. I can kind of look at a chemical because, well, I prayed for the gift of chemistry and I did receive it. So I can tell you I can look at a chemical and I can tell you I can see man's hands on it or whether it's comes from a natural source. And you'll just find out my propensity because our I mean we've had literally thousands of years to get used to the, the environment that we've, that we're from. So plant derivatives, although not all of them, are great many of them work very beautifully medicinally for us. Now, the second problem with the nervous system that you have to be aware of is an inherent problem with it, and it really has to do with the brain fog and the cognitive abnormalities that you're going to see in the long COVID, because once the immune system gets into trouble or is inflamed, it does not know how to rest. All it knows how to do is work harder, and the harder you work, the more resources you use. And so part of the inherent problem with the nervous system and I think this is a protective mechanism too if you were in the woods and your brain wasn't working well, you probably shouldn't rest because something's going to come along and eat you. And the second thing that happens is that the microglia, when they have too much inflammation, they also release glutamate, and glutamate's a stimulant, and that's how the brain gets so overstimulated. So the problem is we've got an inflammatory process that is not going away anytime soon or not quickly when it affects the brain. The brain not only gets into inflammation itself, but then starts overworking itself, running out of resources and cannot keep up with its biochemical need, becomes very inaccurate. So why would we be surprised that we cognitively can't function, that we have high emotionality, that we're in a state of anxiety with hyper-awareness? But that's a proper response to what happened. But it's a miserable life to live in.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 29:08

So you almost have to address the immune problem as a separate issue from the neurological. So one of our tricks is we use an old medicine from 1972 called amantadine. One of our tricks is we use an old medicine from 1972 called amantadine. And amantadine was initially made for well. It was made to try to block influenza's effect on the brain and it was made for Parkinson's. And it blocks the glutamate receptor to slow the brain down a little bit. And it's made from star anise, the spice Yep.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 29:45

So the problem that we have is, even if you cleared the immune challenge, if the brain's in its racing method, if I can't slow it down and give it any rest, it's going to have a very difficult time recovering. And that's what's so frustrating about trying to treat this long COVID. Because even if you well, let's say you did a very aggressive method and you did plasmapheresis to remove the spike protein Do you know plasmapheresis? Yeah, so let's say you did therapeutic plasma exchange, removed a large amount of spike, removed a large amount of spike. The problem is, if we don't get the brain to calm itself down and take a little break and relax, good luck getting rid of the cognitive problems. Even though you may have gotten rid of the causation, you still have to heal from the longstanding inflammatory process that really has challenged you and made you sick for so long.

Jackie Baxter: 30:43

I mean, I describe long COVID as kind of whack-a-mole, you know, you hit down one problem and hey, presto, here's another one, and then you sort that out and here's a third one, and you kind of got to address different things, whereas, yeah, you know, putting a Band-aid on something might help in the short term, but it's not going to be a long-term solution.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 31:11

Let me back up and I want to tell you a couple of things that we've found in the long COVID patients genetically that are very blaring when we look at it. Number one we do find that they have problems turning off inflammation in those patients and it's one of those systems I mentioned. The other one they have is called interleukin-5 and they almost always have it. Now interleukin-5 is almost always mutated in patients with long COVID. When I say almost always, that's 95% plus time, always that's 95% plus time, and this is the interleukin that deals with viral infections. So what we've been able to see is that not only do these people have trouble with viral infections of COVID, but this is also the interleukin or the chemical messenger that deals with the herpes family of viruses like Epstein-Barr and cytomegalovirus and varicella zoster, and that's part of my expertise. That was all my research was in the herpes family. So we also then see a lot of secondary viral infections that can also contribute to the chronic fatigue and everything else that goes on.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 32:23

So in general, if you don't get to this inflammation piece and you can't get past it, you've got very little chance of of recovering.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 32:35

I won't say at all, but anytime soon. So we really will focus on that first step a whole lot and we don't have to necessarily spend a lot of money doing it and we certainly will use supplements Sometimes we will use prescription medicines here in the United States but what we've got to accomplish is a calming and a slowing of the system so it's not racing so hard and it is capable of recovering. So it's a very frustrating thing for a physician to treat and that's probably why a lot of doctors don't do it or don't believe in it or just choose to ignore the problem. So what I would encourage you know, everybody listening is you've got to find the right professional to help you, ok, and you've got to have somebody who looks at everything holistically and unfortunately in this scenario, you have to have a very good understanding of not only the nervous system but the immune system also uh, also yeah, and I think what kind of blew my mind when I found out that they play off each other.

Jackie Baxter: 33:50

But everything you know, our body is not however many systems in isolation. Every system in our body is linked to every system in our body. So if your immune system is bollocks, then your nervous system is also bollocks, and and the same the other way around, and the same is true of all other body systems.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 34:09

So you're a holistic woman now.

Jackie Baxter: 34:11

I am indeed.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 34:12

You just defined holistic.

Jackie Baxter: 34:13

yes, but it seems really obvious when you think about it. I suppose you know that the western world is, exists in this siloed system where we have this very narrow view. And you know, certainly in my experience, you know, I'd never really been sick. Um, you know, the worst thing I'd had was tonsillitis, where the doctor gave me a packet of pills and a week later I was fine. So I believed in Western medicine. And then you know, something like long COVID happens and suddenly the whole system comes crashing down like a house of cards and suddenly the system doesn't work so well and it kind of, certainly, for me, has totally changed my perspective on everything.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 35:01

That's actually absolutely correct. Now we've also had, if you're talking about medicinal health, we've had a kind of a. I think it's an outstanding thing We've actually resurrected in the United States a lot of old medicines. That for new purposes. That has been an outstanding exercise for a lot of people. I was, of course, an early adopter because typically I know how medicines work. So using things like ivermectin, using things like hydroxychloroquine, those are very effective at doing multiple things to help us accomplish these types of issues, as long as they're available for you to get your hands on. So you know, I know you're in the UK, so I really don't know much about the access that you can get from the medical system, but I can tell you that we will focus on inflammation control, on inflammation control.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 36:02

The second thing that happens when the nervous system gets into this aggressive function is that it starts to use a lot of energy, and energy is made by glucose. So the mitochondria, which are your batteries, run off of glucose, and the problem in most people that wind up with long COVID is they also have a weakness in what we call autophagy. Autophagy is the ability to clean debris from the inside of your cells, and we know that most people that get long COVID have a weakness in that cleaning and we only clean ourselves when our cells are at rest. Well, if you got long COVID, your cells don't rest and so as that debris builds up, we essentially create trouble delivering glucose. And we know insulin resistance plays a very big role in non-recovery potential for people. So we use a lot of special vitamin called D-chiroinositol. So inositol is you would probably know it as vitamin B8, although it's not a true vitamin. We can actually make it. But this special form, D-chiro, C-H-I-R-O, inositol, helps insulin deliver glucose, so it assists us in being able to deliver more glucose for those mitochondria to recover.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 37:58

And then the third thing we look at is we actually look at basically detoxification of chemicals and other things through the methionine glutathione system. So when we see all of those things, we know exactly what's necessary for the individual patient. And you know I would tell you if you can get access to that. I think it would be a wonderful thing, and I'll take a chance to plug my podcast. It's called Coffee with Dr Stewart. So if you go on Coffee with Dr Stewart, you're going to see me talking about all this stuff for years and it'll give you a little bit better idea of how we think. We only want to attack and utilize what's necessary for the individual. We don't want to waste money and time putting everybody into the same box, because everybody's unique.

Jackie Baxter: 38:52

And I'll make sure to put a link to that in the show notes as well for anyone that does want to check out any of these things that you've mentioned, maybe in a little bit more detail. So, yeah, I love this because it's's you know, we want to bring down this inflammation. You know various different ways of doing that. It's going to be different for each person, um, as we've kind of talked about, but we're kind of hitting this at the root. So, you know, if you cut it off at the root, then it's not going to keep flaring up, whereas if you keep putting those band-aids on little things, not that that might not be helpful in the moment, but it's not that long-term solution that's going to help.

Jackie Baxter: 39:37

You know, recovery in the long term and you know what, what I would be interested in, your kind of perspective on, kind of to finish off here, would be you know, we want to bring down this inflammation. We want to allow the body to heal. We want the body to be able to turn itself off rather than get stuck on all the time, all the time. Um, so these things that you're kind of talking about, and many more that we haven't touched on, I'm sure you know this. This does put this body into this kind of healed state where it does function correctly, where this overreaction has calmed down and where you know health is returned, um, rather than having to continually take medication, long-term kind of thing.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 40:32

Well, that's the ultimate goal. It's kind of like building a house to me. If you don't have a foundation, that's good. You can build a great house, but it's going to come down and so, like, when people come to me, a lot of times they're on all these medicines for controlling their symptoms and we don't touch those initially because they might be helping in some way form or fashion. But we've got to have, we've got to slide underneath and build this nice foundation of what I would call an environment that's favorable for healing.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 41:06

Okay, and if we can create that environment that's favorable for healing and give you the best chance to heal, eventually you will Almost always. So, what we want to do, we've got to create that and we got to know how to create that because, like I said, it's different for everybody and we can make some general assumptions because there are trends, especially in something like long COVID or chronic fatigue. There are certain requirements that have to be there in order for you to get into that situation. That in an effective, lower cost manner, then I certainly think that you will be far better off. And if we do this right, a lot of times we make people, once they've recovered from long COVID, they become healthier for the rest of their life Because nothing gets your attention like being devastated.

Jackie Baxter: 42:07

That's why you're doing a podcast. Attention, like being devastated. That's why you're doing a podcast. Yeah, yeah, and you know, everyone that I've interviewed that has recovered and I would include myself in this has said that they are healthier after their recovery than they were before they got sick, which I think is very telling.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 42:25

Sometimes it's really funny that some of these things happen as a blessing, in disguise, and I'm a spiritual man, so I'm always thinking the Lord has a purpose to everything. And I can tell you as an advocate I would see you as an ultimate advocate for this space. Once you have a real reason to advocate an experience, it makes you a much stronger advocate than just having an interest in it. So I applaud you for what you're doing.

Jackie Baxter: 42:58

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's one of those silver linings, isn't it, which is much easier to talk about having come out the other end than for someone who is still, you know, in the trenches, um, you know, in that recovery journey, um, but um, so I think it's always a challenging one to talk about, because I I do agree with you and I do now see it as that silver lining, but you know, three years ago, when I was still ill, I would have been throwing things at the screen right now. So you know it's, yeah, I think it's something to hear when you're ready. Maybe that's the way to put it.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 43:35

I'll tell you yeah, I'm just telling you that. Always, remember that. So I've been doing this a very long time, I mean, and I'm still learning every day, and in fact it's wonderful because I've taught so many thousands of doctors that they actually feed me information all the time because they ask me what my opinion is, and the more I learn, almost the I like to say the dumber I feel that's such a catch term. But but basically always remember that there's, there's always a mechanism, uh, that that is inherent in the body because it's been designed there, uh, to actuate, um, recovery. The plasticity of the body's ability to recovery is enormous, Uh, you do, but you have to act on it. You can't just wish it would happen, and that's the problem. You've got to actually do something, to expect something, and so that's the thing I always tell people. I mean, I cannot, in good conscience, as your physician, sit back and try nothing. It's just not going to happen. We're going to try something. As long as it doesn't hurt you, we're going to try it. And so you've got to try something, to do something. And the nice thing about it I like to also say, from my neurosurgical background, there's one thing a neurosurgical doctor will never do that. Every other doctor does. Do you know what that is? It's called guessing. You will not let me cut your head open on a hunch, I promise you Okay. So I have been trained to not accept guessing and giving you my best guesstimate. I like objective indicators.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 45:26

So we have all kinds of new blood tests that can give us a better indication of inflammation in the system. I'll mention a couple. We have myeloperoxidase I don't know if you've ever heard of that. We also have complement C4A, which is also the complement system which is involved in clearing infections. So those are some blood tests and I don't know if they're available in the UK, but those are tests that are typically not measured.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 45:54

Because the problem is, seeing inflammation in the nervous system can be very hard. We know it's there and we can see it on certain scans and other things. It's there, we can see it on certain scans and other things, but being able to know when we've turned off the inflammation can sometimes be hard to measure in blood testing and other methods. So you know, I would just encourage your listeners who are still suffering to be diligent. Uh, try to get the right access, because you're not going to hear this from. I mean, western medicine is tied so heavily into pharmaceuticals that it's really just about giving you a pill because of your symptom and we've got a, but we've got to heal you out of this. You can't come out of it on your own usually. Usually something's missing.

Jackie Baxter: 46:45

Yeah, so it's coming back to this beautiful full circle where we started this conversation, where you said we put in what's missing and we create that environment for healing. And it's amazing what the body can do when you put it in the right place and you give it the right things what the body can do when you put it in the right place and you give it the right things.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 47:12

Let me give you one more analogy, and it's my favorite. Okay, let's say you're going to make a vegetable soup.

Jackie Baxter: 47:17

What's the first thing you're going to do? Chop the onions.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 47:20

Oh, you missed it. Nope, you missed it. The answer is actually you're going to look in the fridge and see what you got. Because if you look in the fridge and see what you got, then you go to the store and you only purchase what you need and you come home. If you skip the fridge and you go to the store and you purchase everything and you come home, you get a little miffed that you bought something you really didn't need and now everybody's going to be complaining that they're having to eat too many carrots or whatever.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 47:49

That you had Make sense. So that's what genetics is. Genetics tells us what you do well and what you don't do well, so that we only have to put back in what's necessary. And so it allows us to not only improve compliance because we build supplements to put in the recipe or to use a medicine that's only needed, and not try to look at putting everything in all at once, because it's just impossible to do and financially, a lot of times it's impossible to do. And I can tell you, especially if you're dealing with a man, men will not take more than four or five things at once ever, because they're just. Women are very compliant. Men are typically in this country, not very compliant. Children teenagers are also that way. Teenagers tend to not be very compliant. So we want to make sure that we're prioritizing what's really the most important thing for your recovery, and that's why we like genetics so much, because it tells us only about you and it prioritizes our approach for you.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 49:03

Yeah, so it's a bit like a map, a very individualized map, absolute map, and it's a map of your genome. That's correct.

Jackie Baxter: 49:07

Amazing, cool. Well, dr Stewart, thank you so much. This has been absolutely fascinating.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 49:21

I'm going to remember to look in my fridge before I start making soup. From now on, I'll have to come to Scotland and have some soup with you.

Jackie Baxter: 49:26

Let's do it. It's going to happen. Thank you so much for being here. It's been my pleasure.

Dr Kendal Stewart: 49:32

You're welcome. Thank you so much, Jackie.