Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Regular readers might remember my bouts with respiratory illnesses: bronchitis that hung on for months, colds that wouldn't go away, sinus infections so frequent that I had sinoplasty many years ago (it didn't stop my sinus infections), and even a week in the hospital with a sinus infection when I was a kid. The sickest I ever felt was when I had the flu at age 17. As someone (maybe Dr. Eades) recently described, I remember where I was and what I was doing when it came on.  Last week when I felt a cold coming on, I figured I'd be sick for several days. I was tired and starting to get congestion and a sore throat. But it went away 12 hours later and didn't come back.  Photo from Unsplash . Maybe it was short COVID. Kidding aside, the only difference is that I've been taking Ideal Immunity , a probiotic made by Biotiquest. (I'm not an affiliate.) Some of the members at Dr. Davis's Inner Circle have been getting incredible results with Sugar Shift lowering thei...

Have You Been Pwned? If you donated to the Canadian truckers via GiveSendGo, your personal information might have been compromised by hackers who attacked the site. No bank information was apparently compromised, but names, emails and locations were hacked and in some cases publicized. To find out if you were a victim, go to  https://haveibeenpwned.com . If you were pwned, make a complaint to your state's attorney general. To be safe, protect your accounts. One way is to put a freeze on your credit so that nobody can take out a loan in your name (IIRC, this is a free service with the credit reporting agencies). You can also use a fee-based service like LifeLock, which monitors your credit and accounts opened in your name. Ivermectin Study from Malaysia This randomized, controlled study didn't find that ivermectin had any effect in older people with comorbidities who had COVID. In fact, the ivermectin arm did a little worse than the placebo group as far as severe illness (the pr...

With the emergence of the Omicron variant, the federal government has "paused" distribution of Regeneron, since it doesn't work as well against Omicron. But there's still a lot of delta out there (it's 99% of cases here in Indiana) and some places are running out of monoclonal antibodies, and the federal government is actively preventing states from getting them . In the US, call 211 if you're a candidate for monoclonal antibodies (COVID positive, mild to moderate symptoms within ten days of onset, and at high risk for progression of the illness). They might still have some where you live. If you're ivermectin-curious, now is the time to order some since many hospitals and pharmacists are actively preventing patients from getting it even when it's prescribed. I'm not a medical professional, and I don't know for a fact that it works on COVID. But there's little else available for early treatment, it does have anti-viral properties in the lab...

Gibraltar has canceled official Christmas celebrations over surging COVID cases. Its >100% vaccination rate is due to "doses given to Spaniards who cross the border to work or visit the territory every day," according to RT .  The article continues, "Similarly well-vaccinated countries have also reported surges in Covid-19 infections recently. In Singapore, where 94% of the eligible population have been inoculated, cases and deaths soared to record highs at the end of October, and have since subsided slightly. In Ireland, where around 92% of the adult population is fully vaccinated, cases of Covid-19 and deaths from the virus have roughly doubled since August." As I said months ago, if you can get COVID, you can spread COVID, and vaccinated people are obviously getting and spreading COVID. This study in The Lancet found vaccination only reduced household transmission of the delta variant from 38% to 25%. This preprint of a huge study found vaccination modestl...

Disclaimer: please note I'm not a medical professional.  Last week I took ivermectin for what turned out to be a cold. I'd been feeling tired and had a little congestion, but didn't feel sick until Monday morning. I took a COVID test Tuesday (the soonest I could get one), and Tuesday evening started taking ivermectin.  I immediately felt better. Maybe there was a placebo effect; maybe it really started working that fast. Still, I got very tired early in the evening Tuesday and Wednesday, which is unusual for me, and had a runny nose. But the mildly miserable feeling you get when you're fighting a cold was gone. I am still coughing, but it's a dry, itchy cough. The only other cold remedies I took were a few doses of Mucinex and lots of cough drops. I felt well enough yesterday to go out in the cold and plant some fountain grass. I'd have planted the 15 coral bell plants I bought on sale, but it got dark. Today has been snowy and windy.  The ivermectin affected my...

The Fifth Circuit Court just rejected the Justice Department's request to lift the freeze on OSHA's crazy forced vaccination scheme. From NBC News ,  "On the dubious assumption that the mandate does pass constitutional muster, which we need not decide today, it is nonetheless fatally flawed on its own terms," the court wrote, signaling the uphill legal battle facing the administration... "[H]ealth agencies do not make housing policy, and occupational safety administrations do not make health policy," the court wrote. "In seeking to do so here, OSHA runs afoul of the statute from which it draws its power and, likely, violates the constitutional structure that safeguards our collective liberty." Sorry, Brandon! Photo from Pixabay . It sounds like OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) doesn't have the authority to make people get a vaccination just for showing up at work, contrary to the blue checky-checks who insisted it did. T...

I don't have COVID.  On the one hand, it would have been a relief to have finally caught COVID and gotten natural antibodies, especially from having a mild case of it. On the other hand, I was concerned about my dog catching it from me (he's healthy, but nine years old) and it might have interfered with Thanksgiving plans.  Until I'm well, I'll stay home.

It hit me Sunday night. After feeling tired and a little congested for a few days, I went to bed with a sore throat. Monday, I called in sick. The next day, I took a COVID test at a CVS drive through, worked from home and decided to go to bed early. But that day, I saw this video on Pfizer's new antiviral pill. I'd seen some videos from this YouTuber, John Campbell, before--he's pretty gung-ho on COVID vaccines. So I was surprised to see him talking up ivermectin, and I'm even more surprised it's still on YouTube: he describes how ivermectin does exactly the same thing the new Pfizer antiviral pill does, plus inhibit COVID in five other ways. It looks like the new drug is "Pfizermectin," an antiviral without ivermectin's long safety record or low price. I had some ivermectin, purchased when I was enthusiastic about the stuff after watching episodes of the Dark Horse Podcast with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. First, I made sure I could get more...