In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, I get into inflammatory responses and the lessons pain teaches us with my guest, Dr. David Liepert.
“COVID is doing damage by overwhelming us and causing uncontrolled inflammation,” he says. “The inflammatory response to COVID is actually somewhat protective. The question is, at what point does it become counter-protective, or even counterproductive, or even producing injury? The same thing is true systemically, that, for instance, social distancing and quarantine are kind of a social form of inflammation.”
“Basically, uncontrolled inflammation is another way to think of a cytokine storm,” he says. “Cytokines are meant to be the solution, but uncontrolled, they literally become the thing that’s killing us, rather than helping us get better.”
Dr. Liepert a physician with a broad range of expertise in critical care, specialty anesthesiology, and quality improvement and assessment programs within Canada’s healthcare system. He’s dedicated much of his professional work to helping patients find solutions to chronic pain.
He also serves as chief medical officer and advisor to several companies leading development and discoveries for mobile health and wellness monitoring, and AI solutions.
I asked him to talk more about how this type of virus (Covid-19) is bringing our health systems down, not just us individually.
“My one big struggle with academic medicine and the way it responds to situations like this is, academic medicine assumes we know what questions to ask,” Dr. Liepert says. “And if we don’t even know what question to ask, we’re never going to find the right answer.”
Enjoy the show! And get more resources at Dave.Asprey/podcasts.
Follow Along with the Transcript
Covid-19 Turns Inflammation from Protective to Predatory – Dave Asprey with Dr. David Liepert – #690
Links/Resources
Website: mypainsensei.com
Key Notes
- Pain has a function both short and long term. – 3:21
- Substance P is very poorly understood. – 6:20
- Our experience of pain as humans is very different than it is in animals. – 11:26
- Cytokines, they’re often defined by what they do. – 15:16
- Uncontrolled inflammation is another way to think of a cytokine storm. – 18:24
- Make yourself more resilient by lowering your cytokine levels to normal. – 24:38
- The real issue is that cells aren’t taking in the oxygen. What’s going on there? – 27:41
- We know that lidocaine promotes IL-10 activity. – 32:24
- Getting ahead of COVID, it’s going to require crowdsourcing. – 39:42
- COVID gets into our body, it plugs into something called the ACE2 receptor. – 47:13
- There are the direct effects of the carbon monoxide. – 49:07
- Don’t do things that you know are wrong. If you see a problem, fix the problem. – 52:09
- Bayer was an aniline dye company. They were actually a paint company. They were experimenting with aniline dyes. – 57:40
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