Winning for losing (part 3 of 3)

Our work at the Leading Edge Clinic, the casino of care, and reframing health

PRESENT

Dr Pierre Kory opened our telemedicine practice, the Advanced COVID-19 Care Center, in February of 2022. We became partners in June of 2022, followed by renaming our practice the Leading Edge Clinic. In the years since than time, we have learned a lot about how to prevent COVID, treat acute COVID, and care for patients with post acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and injury from the COVID shots. I really don’t want to call them vaccines because, in truth, they are experimental, genetic therapy products at best, and bioweapons at worst.

As someone injured by the COVID shots, I’m very sympathetic to patients who become frustrated with the slow pace and not-so-linear path of recovery. At times, they turn in desperation to novel therapies, clinicians and practices which make promises of effective treatment – and frequently charge a hefty sum for their services. Part three of my series on Winning for losing is where I was headed all along. I wanted to make you laugh and smile with stories of small time gambling in part one, and shared my car follies in part two, because when we delve into the misadventures of my patients, it can get pretty dark.

The Leading Edge Clinic is a cash-payment telemedicine practice, and our fee structure can be shocking to anyone who has only ever paid co-pays for shitty conventional healthcare. Our prices reflect the true cost of delivering quality care, in which you spend a lengthy period of time in a visit with an expert clinician. Our course of care utilizes live, highly trained and knowledgeable Registered Nurses to deliver patient education and perform regular clinical follow ups, rather than Medical Assistants or computer bots. Thanks to Pierre’s relationship with the FLCCC Alliance, we have a very modest pro-bono fund which we can utilize to supplement care for existing patients, and once in a great while, a new patient.

In this context, I don’t blame a patient when they decide to bet it all on the roulette wheel of treatment. It’s just that, most of the time, it doesn’t turn out very well. One thing I have learned in our care of PASC and vaccine injury, is that ongoing trials of treatment, over time, is what has the greatest long-term benefit. There is no magic cure, in part, because we are living in a world contaminated with spike, and like a lobster trying to crawl out of the tank, as soon as you reach the top, another lobster may pull you right back into the morass. Recovering from PASC and injury by COVID shots is certainly not for the faint of heart.

A few weeks ago, during my ritual visit to the Ithaca Farmers Market, I stopped at the stand for Christi Sobel and bought four boxes of cards featuring her original artwork. Why would I do that? Because in the last two months, three patients have died, and when they do, I want to send a personal note to the survivors. Caring for PASC and the vaccine injured, and more recently, cancer patients, is not for the faint of heart either.

I’ll preface the stories below with the assertion that most of the practitioners who these patients went to are “the good guys.” My writing isn’t meant to pick on any of them, but rather to illustrate how much time, effort and money can be expended without clinical improvement for individual patients. This is the strongest argument I can make for the wisdom of limited, successive trials of therapy, with steady, modest gains, as the most successful path forward. All patients’ names are changed to protect their identity, but their stories are true.

RECENT PAST

Welcome to Hard Times by Charlie Crockett

Life's a casino
I'm telling you
And everybody's playing
Boys and girls
women children
Me and you
The dice are loaded
And everything's fixed
Even a hobo would tell you this

MILLY

Milly had been a writer before vaccine injury, and made a decent living at it. She was very proud of her sharp mind and financial independence. The shots changed all that, and there wasn’t a single visit with me in which she didn’t shed some tears or offer a few choice words for the rat-bastards who did this to her. If only she could get her hands on them. In my estimation, we were making steady progress, but, as happens sometimes, the incremental improvements only made her hungrier to be completely recovered. The day came when her package of visits was completed, and rather than sign up for another four months of care, she pivoted to a different solution. It was a clinic which promised redemption, for the small price of $20,000. She dipped into her life savings, and put herself at their mercy. They drew blood, tested urine, performed a wide range of studies which I had never before (or since) encountered, made pronouncements about her diagnosis, delivered an arsenal of proprietary pills and potions, and...she got worse. Just like with the slot machines in Atlantic City and a used car dealer on Long Island, there was no guarantee of success, satisfaction, or your money back.

She felt depleted, distraught, and humiliated. We didn’t hear from her for several months, as she gathered the gumption to return to us and relate what had happened, asking if we would take her back, while gathering up the pieces of her remaining health and trying again to rebuild some semblance of a functioning life. We did start again, and as we keep on learning, we were actually able to help her regain lost ground. There was, however, a new tension to each visit, because now Milly was $20,000 poorer, so that the cost of each visit, test, supplement or prescription, became a constant source of contention and complaint.

SUE

Sue is in her early twenties, and comes from a very modest working family in a Southern state. She has long standing mental health issues which have compelled her to continue living at home with her parents when she would have rather been living on her own. Upon the recommendation of her family’s long-time PCP, she received two mRNA COVID shots; the second one despite adverse reactions and an Emergency Department (ED) visit within hours of the first. Her health deteriorated rapidly, and she suffered a wide range of symptoms, from debilitating headaches, skyrocketing anxiety, chest pain, dyspnea, dizziness, palpitations, POTS (rapid heart rate with position changes and minimal exertion), severe bilateral leg pain, and neuropathy. She spent days in bed or on the couch due to soul-crushing fatigue.

Her family dipped into their life savings and paid for Sue to travel with her parents to Los Angeles, CA, home to one of two clinics run by AMA Regenerative Medicine & Skincare Inc., founded in 1999 by  Dr. Alice Pien and Dr. Asher Milgrom. Pierre knows Dr Milgrom to be a talented physician and fine human being; he presented at the first FLCCC Conference in October 2022. AMA focuses on use of five central therapies, which include IV ozone therapy, EBOO/F, and IV therapies, which effectively target mitochondrial health. AMA reports that together with stem cells and hyperbaric oxygen, their treatment has resulted in a speedy and complete recovery for approximately 70% of their patients. Unfortunately, after spending about three weeks in California receiving treatment from AMA, Sue was worse, and headed home with her parents. The center continued to call them for weeks, encouraging Sue to return for more treatment, but her parents had used up what money they had; there would not be another visit.

Months after this disappointing – and discouraging – trip, Sue and her mother had their first visit with me. It was challenging, because her symptom burden was so severe, and her anxiety so high, that the outline of pathology and treatment which I explained overwhelmed Sue. As I recall, she didn’t start any of the medications which I ordered, and didn’t show up for her second or third visits. At least six months passed, and we heard from Sue’s mother, signing her up again. At that time, Sue said she was now ready to try the interventions which we had initially discussed. Between Sue’s first visit with me, and her second visit six months later, I had begun to learn about Iliac Venous Compression (IVC) or May Thurner Syndrome in patients with PASC or those injured by the COVID shots. With my new understanding, Sue’s presentation was more clearly that of a person suffering from IVC, and we initiated plans to have an MR Venogram to evaluate this. The MRV was positive, meaning it showed severe left iliac venous compression, and we set up an initial telemedicine consult with Dr Brooke Spencer, our collaborating Interventional Radiologist in Colorado. Sue traveled to Colorado, had a stent placed, and returned home, showing excellent improvements over the next weeks. She is still a patient today, and we are steadily addressing the lingering, although significantly decreased symptoms of leg pain, headaches, and cognitive impairment. She has initiated treatment with Sulodexide, which is showing great promise for repairing injured endothelium, while also dramatically lowering microclotting, with less bleeding risk than Eliquis or Plavix.

FRANK

Frank is one of the most injured patients I have ever met. He has also spent more money and tried more therapies than any of my patients. Conservatively, by last count, he had spent more than $200,000 on trying to get better. Among the list of physicians he dropped big money with are Dr Bruce Patterson’s team where he paid $1500 per month for Maraviroc, before Patterson dropped the price (as he owns the patent for Maraviroc) to $500 per month. The Maraviroc helped him breathe, but as he reported, “It shrank my stomach to the size of a walnut!” He did countless cytokine panels (Patterson’s proprietary lab), with levels that went up and down with the wind.

Next he traveled to Panama for stem cell therapy, which he later repeated in the Midwest. Since May 2023, we have offered mesenchymal stem cells and exosomes (MSC-Exosomes) to patients. We replicate the stage two clinical trials of Vitti Labs, which use MSC-Exosomes to treat post-COVID pulmonary fibrosis, administering infusions on days one, three and five. But we also administer nebulizations and nasal administration of exosomes. This is about $40,000 worth of therapy for a third of the cost, because unlike most other practices, we aren’t marking it up 400%. I tried several times to persuade Frank to come see us for treatment rather than the physician he chose in California, but ultimately, he made a Hail Mary pass to Hollywood.

In Hollywood, he paid $42,000 to have fat cells sucked out of his body, have the stem cells harvested, and then injected back into him. He was in quite a bit of pain after this treatment, and ultimately, it didn’t help. Amidst his many expensive forays into promising treatments, he would pop in and out of visits with me, checking up on the latest developments we were exploring. I can’t say that I did much better than any other practitioner for Frank, although these days I wish he was still in touch, and that he could try Sulodexide (SDX). The anti-fibrotic properties of SDX offer some promise of reducing the pulmonary fibrosis which continued to plague him.

JENNIFER

Jennifer is a woman in her mid 30s who lives in the Midwest and has always been a clean-eating, physically active, outdoors-oriented person. The vaccines brought all that to an abrupt stop with persistent chest pain and shortness of breath. She has pursued treatment with many different practitioners, and went so far as to travel to Cyprus to have aphoresis treatment with Dr. Marcus Klotz. The out-of-pocket cost for that treatment alone is more than $10,000, not including the airfare and the cost of food and lodging while in Cyprus. Unfortunately, not only did the treatment not help her get better, but long-term, she thinks it led to her clinical deterioration.

Dr Klotz is in the ZeroSpike forum which I participate in with about forty other practitioners worldwide. When he was extolling the virtues of his treatment in the group, I challenged him, because Pierre and I have had consistently negative experiences with aphoresis. Patients either get worse right away, or they have neutral effect, or they have some short-lived benefit before getting worse again. I can’t say that no one ever benefits from it, but when you have negative feedback like this right in front of you, with patients under your care, it makes a stronger impression than a stranger’s testimonial.

After I raised questions, Marcus, to his credit, qualified his statements to say (I’m paraphrasing here) “Well, there are more than forty methods and machines used to perform aphoresis. Most of them don’t work very well and some make patients worse. We are using The Big Green Monster, a machine which is no longer produced, very technically challenging to learn how to use and maintain, and we only have them in our clinics in Germany and Cyprus.”

Okay, that sounded more consistent with our clinical experience.  During one of her most recent visits, Jennifer filled me in on some of the details around her experience in Cyprus. “I have a bone to pick with Marcus. When I was in Cyprus, I asked him for data about the treatments that they were giving, and what the mechanisms of action were. He tapped his head and said, ‘It’s all up here.’”  She went on to note that she herself was a scientist, and told Marcus point-blank,“That is not how science works Marcus. You need to keep track of data and be able to present the factual evidence of your clinical successes, and failures, mechanisms of action, and the rationale for treatment.”

INSPIRATION

Sister Calista Roy

When I was in nursing school in the early 1990s, one of our assignments was to identify a nursing philosophy which we found compelling, and write about it. At the time, because I was working full-time and going to school full-time, it felt like a poor use of my time, and not immediately relevant to my practice. Over the last thirty years, I have slowly come to appreciate the value of this exercise. The nursing philosopher I chose to study was Sister Calista Roy, who taught at Boston College and developed the adaptation model of nursing.

Originally, Roy wrote that health and illness are on a continuum with many different states or degrees possible. More recently, she states that health is the process of being and becoming an integrated and whole person. Roy's goal for nursing is "the promotion of adaptation in each of the four modes, thereby contributing to the person's health, quality of life and dying with dignity".  These four modes are physiological, self-concept, role function and interdependence.

I think the most important insight of her philosophy is this: health is not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, but reflects the individual’s ability to adapt to various environmental stimuli. Health exists on a continuum and is constantly changing based on the person’s ability to respond and adapt to changes in their environment. A healthy person is one who can successfully adapt to physical, emotional, and social challenges, achieving a level of balance and well-being across different dimensions of life.

This is not just a matter of semantics. As more and more of us struggle with chronic health challenges, it is a very practical matter to reframe our definition of health to include adaptability and support a positive sense of self. Last week I spoke with two patients, both far along in their recovery, which has been noteworthy to family and friends. Yet those patients think they have made no progress. Until they have reached 100% recovery, they think that they are unwell. A shift in perspective will serve them better.

OUR PATIENTS

I will be the first (maybe the second, because the patients will say this first), to say that not every patient story of treatment with us represents a resounding clinical success. None of us was taught in school how to treat injury from a bio-weapon! What I can also say is that every one of the twenty people who work in our practice cares deeply, has suffered financial losses, has endured persecution for acting on their/our convictions, and is mission-driven.  This is not just a job for us. It is a calling.

When patients discontinue care with our clinic, we don’t hold it against them or take it personally. As Pierre has said to our team many times “If I was vaccine injured, I would also be doing everything I could to recover.”  We don’t blow ozone up people’s asses, we don’t have an HBOT facility, and we don’t do aphoresis.  We do continue to learn from our own research, and from our patients themselves. We have provided stem cell and exosome therapy to a limited number of patients, more than half of whom have benefited from it.  We continue to add services for our patients. Aly Burt, RN is skillfully providing the Safe and Sound Protocol to help stabilize the vagus nerve in patients with dysautonomia and adrenal fatigue. We continue to advance our treatment of patients with safer anticoagulation which actually heals the endothelium and more effectively breaks down the fibrotic changes directly and indirectly provoked by the spike protein. Dr Sid Lawler is our Medical Director of Adjunctive Cancer Care, who brings her twenty years of clinical experience as a hospitalist. She is leading our participation in a five year study using repurposed supplements and prescription medications, in conjunction with a keto diet.

Our scheduling, nursing and medical team includes people who have PASC or have been vaccine injured themselves, and whom we have recruited to join our team. Our experience has been that from the front end to the back of the house, people who have gone through what you are going through are often in the best position to be empathetic and provide insightful and informed care.  As someone who is injured by the Covid shots, I would say the same about myself.  At the end of the day, we are all looking for a path to winning from losing.

A Burning Soul, glasswork by KG

P.S. I’m more than halfway through Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth by Anonymous (Author), Zoey O'Toole (Editor), Mary Holland J.D. (Editor, Foreword). I hope that you have your copy and are reading too, so that you can join me in a live book discussion in the near future.