462: Dr. David Brownstein on Proven Effective and Natural Protocols for Respiratory and Covid Viruses

Ashley James And Dr. David Brownstein

Highlights:

  • Importance of hormones to overall health
  • Importance of maintaining adequate iodine levels
  • Natural therapy for COVID
  • How to maintain a properly functioning immune system

In this episode, we have Dr. David Brownstein. Dr. David Brownstein is a family physician that specializes in using vitamins, minerals, herbs, and natural hormones, and utilizes nutritional therapies. He shares how he went from being a doctor practicing conventional medicine to becoming a holistic doctor. He talks about how he has helped his patients recover from COVID and gives some tips on strengthening our immune system so we can have a good immune response to stressors or illnesses.

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You're going to love Dr. David Brownstein who has a very interesting story that he shares right off the bat at the beginning of the show. I don't want to spoil it, so you're going to have to listen to it because it really blew my mind. But his story is what got him into holistic medicine, and holistic medicine is where he ended up with a bunch of patients in his clinic who had COVID. He used the same tools he's been using for several decades, and here we are with this amazing study that he published and the FTC coming after him. Just so much crazy information, I'm so excited for you to hear today's interview.

I hope you listen to the last interview I did with Dr. Paul Thomas, and I hope you also listen to the next interview I'm going to be publishing. It's a three-part series. It just so happens I did these interviews and I thought they really go well together. Even though it's similar information, it's also very different. 

This doctor used a more holistic natural approach to helping his patients boost their immune systems and fight viral infections with great success. And then the next interview I'm going to be publishing one of the things we do talk about is his 1800 person study using pharmaceutical drugs very successfully at supporting the body's ability to fight this specific viral infection that we are facing at the moment. 

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I'm creating a platform for them to give you the information you need so you can make great health choices for yourself. I'm so excited to continue to do that, and I hope and pray that everything we do here, we get to continue doing. It does concern me that the people I've been following have been taken off of platforms like Facebook and YouTube. It does concern me, and these are people who are also sharing similar information.

So, I hope that we can all stay sound, healthy, and safe, and also be able to continue to learn and grow from all these wonderful experts and guests. But do follow us at places like BitChute, LBRY, and our Facebook group. And you could also join the email list by going to learntruehealth.com and the pop-up pops up, just put your email in there. I do not spam. I send very few emails, but you will get notifications from us should there be any news that's worthy for you to know about.

Thank you so much for being a listener and sharing this podcast with those you care about. Today's episode not only touches on COVID and supporting the immune system, it also talks about heart health, hormone health, and how hormones directly affect heart health. So share this episode with those who care about that may have those concerns as well and want to learn more about that. Come to Learn True Health Facebook group after listening to this and share what you think. This episode really blew my mind, so I'm really excited to start a conversation with you guys about today's interview. Have a fantastic rest of your day.

 

[00:04:59] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 462. I am so excited for today's guest. We are in for such a treat. We have Dr. David Brownstein with us who's an MD, board-certified family physician, and you got into natural and alternative therapies. I’m always fascinated because medical school does not necessarily like the holistic approach and doesn't necessarily teach it or focus on it. I've met a lot of MDs that their training kind of led them to [inaudible 00:05:43] it or almost look down upon holistic or alternative methods.

I would love to know just jumping into this conversation, and I'm very excited because you have some books that I know my listeners would absolutely love. Your latest one, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, which of course, isn't that just the big buzz for the last year? But you also have Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can't Live Without It. I mean, we can have you on again for an entire episode about that.

You have a book specializing in vitamin B12 for your health, which, again, I would love to have you on multiple times because every book you have, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's an entire interview. The list goes on and on. The Guide to a Gluten-free Diet, The Guide to a Dairy-free Diet, The Soy Deception, I mean, I have a feeling we're going to be learning a lot from you. And then Ozone: The Miracle Therapy. I have listed all of your books, they're all very interesting.

But what I really want to know just jumping into our interview today is what happened as a medical doctor that had you go into that holistic realm, that had you go, I really want to help people, maybe natural therapies instead of just jumping to a drug right away? What happened as a doctor that had you go this route?

[00:07:09] Dr. David Brownstein: Oh, Ashley, thanks for having me on. And I didn't start off as a holistic physician, I've turned into one. You know why? My career in medicine started as a little boy when I used to go to the doctor for severe asthma and just decided I want to be a doctor and help people. So I geared my undergraduate training at the University of Michigan for going to med school. I went to Wayne State University School of Medicine, and I wanted to model myself after my family doctor.

I didn't come from a holistic household. We didn't take vitamins in our household. We didn't do anything holistic. We went to the doctor when we were sick, we took whatever they gave us. We didn't question anything in my household. That's what I thought I wanted to do in medicine. So I finished a family practice residency and started practicing conventional medicine as I was taught in my training.

My turning point came around six months into that when, for a couple of nights, I just lost sleep for an unknown reason and became anxious after losing sleep for an unknown reason this anxiety percolated up in me. I remember getting ready to go for work the next day after the sleepless nights and my wife, Allison, was getting ready to go to work. I blurted out to her, “I don't want to be a doctor anymore.” It’s the first thing I ever said to her about it. 

Now, she has known me since I was 18. I had $100,000 in student loans. I always talked about being a physician, this was all I wanted to be. I want to be a family doctor. So she says to me, what's wrong? And I said I'm not really helping people. I'm just prescribing all these drugs that don't really work. I'm prescribing more drugs to treat the side effects from the first drugs, and they're not getting better. I just said to her, I can't do this for the next 30 or 40 years. She said, Well, why don't you do another residency? And I said, I'm not doing that again, one was enough.

What was happening in my life at that time was my father was really sick. He had his first heart attack at age 40, he had a second heart attack at 42. Over the next 20 years. He had two bypass surgeries, he had numerous angioplasties, he was on 12 medications for heart disease, cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes. My dad had suffered from continuous angina over a 20+ year time period. Every day he was having chest pain, it was getting worse. If he did any mild activity, he would start popping nitroglycerin pills like they were candy. 

We were all just waiting for the phone call that he had died because he looked so bad. He was pale and pasty. My dad wasn't the best patient either. He could eat like the best of them, he was overweight, he smoked, and never exercised much.

Those sleepless nights came, I didn't really know what was going on. I go to work that day and I happen to see a patient. The patient is friends with Allison and I. We've gone out and his wife works with Allison. He was bothering me to meet his chiropractor. At that time of my medical career, I never met a chiropractor, I never went to one, never knew what they did. In my medical training, I was taught to not send patients to chiropractors, they were dangerous, and that was it. So I never sent a patient to a chiropractor, and I used to actively tell them don't go because they were dangerous, even though I never knew what the philosophy was, never knew what they did.

But the patient, Michael, was bothering me to meet his chiropractor, and the chiropractor really helped him out in much more so than back pain through taking some supplements and things like that. So in my anxiety and my lack of sleep state, I took the phone number from him. I remember I called the chiropractor at lunchtime, we set up a dinner meeting for a couple of days the following week. Tuesday comes around for dinner with the chiropractor, and I tell Allison when I get home from work, I'm going to cancel. I don't want to waste my time with a chiropractor. She said that would be rude, you need to go because you made this date. She said, be nice.

I met the chiropractor, his name was Dr. Robert Radtke. He was using nutritional therapies and he was talking functional biochemistry to me much more so than I knew, way more than I knew at that time. He brought a book Healing with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright who was an allopathic physician. I read that book. I took the book home. First off, Dr. Radtke and I hit it off. He was much more functional biochemistry than I did. He was very smart. He was telling me stories of using nutrition to heal his patients and to help them along. Either Dr. Radtke was lying to me, or there were other therapies out there that I wasn't exposed to.

So I took that book home. I read that book until late at night. The next morning, I called my dad up before I went to work and said, I want you to come in the office, I want to do a few blood tests on you. I checked two blood tests on him based on talking to Dr. Radtke and what I read in that book—his thyroid hormone levels and his testosterone levels. A few days later, I got his blood work back. His testosterone levels were below detectable limits, they weren't even reading on the lab test. No one had bothered to check that. His thyroid levels were in the reference range but in the very low part of the reference range. No one had bothered to check anything but a TSH before. So I checked his other thyroid levels of T3, T4, and thyroid antibodies.

So based on that lab work, I started reading and I put my dad on two things. I put him on natural testosterone, and natural thyroid hormone, desiccated thyroid hormone. Within seven days, his 20+ year history of angina melted away and never returned. Stopped using nitros. He actually called me that day. He said, I want you to know, I haven't used the nitro today. I’m like, why? And he said, because I don't have chest pain, it seems like maybe it's going away.

I followed up with him the next couple of days, that was gone, never to return. Instead of looking pale and pasty, he started to look pink on his face and looked healthier. Thirty days later, I checked his cholesterol levels, which were stuck in the 300s on cholesterol-lowering medication. Without changing any of his bad habits, his cholesterol fell below 200. All these inflammatory markers improved his blood work. 

Once I saw the changes in my dad, I decided that's what I wanted to do in medicine. I decided I was going to be a holistic doctor. I didn't really know what it was, but I knew I couldn't do this in a conventional office. I went to the partner of the practice and said, I need to leave. He said, why, you’re going to be a partner in a few months? I said, I want to do holistic medicine. He goes, what's that? I’m like, I'm not really sure yet, but I’m going to figure it out. He said, well, why don't you do it here? I said, No, I can't do it here. I need my own office.

So I left and that's how it started. Since I treated my dad with natural testosterone, natural thyroid hormone and he made such a dramatic improvement, every patient that I've seen for the last 27, 28 years has been given a full thyroid, full hormonal workup, and full nutritional evaluation. That's how it all began. The first book I wrote was The Miracle of Natural Hormones in 1998. I've featured my father in that book because of the response he had. Overcoming thyroid disorders came shortly after that because of the response I had with him and seeing all the thyroid effects.

One thing led to another and it was the best thing I did in medicine. Now I know biochemistry much better. You learn it in medical school, you learn it in undergraduate school, but you don't learn to utilize it in your practice. You learn it to pass the test and then you forget it. Now, I'm studying biochemistry every night. I've got biochemistry charts up in my office at home. My goal is to support a patient's biochemistry, which leads to support for the immune system and leads to better health. It was the best thing I did in medicine. Medicine went from being I can't do this for the next 30 to 40 years to I’m almost 30 years into it and hope I got another 30 ahead of me to do it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[00:16:20] Ashley James: Now, the Center for Holistic Medicine in West Bloomfield, Michigan, that's your clinic?

[00:16:28] Dr. David Brownstein: That’s mine. I left his office and that's what I formed when I left that partner's office. And then lo and behold, about eight years later, I liked him. He and I kept playing tennis and I kept bugging him about, hey, Rick, this is a better way to practice medicine, this is way better. I finally convinced him eight years later, he just walked away from this practice and joined me. There are three doctors in the practice now. We have a nurse practitioner and a physician assistant. We have a busy holistic practice.

[00:17:00] Ashley James: I love it. I've been in this space studying intensely holistic medicine for 10 years. Applying it to my own life first and then I became a health coach and I've been working with being mentored by Naturopathic physicians for the last 10 years, I have never heard of heart disease being caused by and also then cured by balancing testosterone and thyroid. I mean, it makes sense, but I have no idea what the process is. Why is it that his thyroid was out of balance, his testosterone was out of balance, and he had heart disease because of it? Why is that?

 

[00:17:48] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, it's a good question. It took me some research after I saw the improvement he did, so I started researching all these hormones. What I found was that having a balanced hormonal system is just essential to health. If you look at the hormonal pathways of the body, the adrenal and sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, DHA, and progesterone, they're all produced in the ovaries in women, testes in men, and adrenal glands in men and women. We all have the same pathways. The precursor substance to all this is cholesterol. You can't make hormones in those glands without adequate amounts of cholesterol.

So here, my dad, he's got this high cholesterol in the 300s, and he's got testosterone levels of zero, basically. Now, I checked his other hormone levels like DHA and pregnenolone, they're all in the same pathways. It's kind of like driving from town A to town B to town C in order. Your hormones are made in a certain order, one follows the other, and that's the way it is. If you go from the beginning, cholesterol is really the substrate that fuels this pathway.

So here's my dad with a cholesterol of 350 or so and he can't make hormones. They're all near zero when I checked them all as I started learning about one after another and I put him on small amounts of all of them. Why wasn't he making hormones? Well, you need adequate thyroid hormone to stimulate that pathway. You need vitamin A as a cofactor to make that pathway go. You need magnesium and some B vitamins to make that pathway go.

So my dad was lacking a lot of basic nutrition like most of the patients that I see are, he was lacking thyroid hormone, and he couldn't make his hormones. If you look at the literature for heart disease and what causes atherosclerosis, hypothyroidism is known to cause it. That's been known since the late 1800s. Low testosterone has been known to cause heart disease. Much of the research with that has been out of Europe, but that's been known for over 50 years.

Maybe I got a little lucky with my dad, but when I put them on those first two things and I went and researched some more, how does that make his angina better? And there was tons of research showing this is why his arteries were blocking up. Either the underlying cause or a major part of the underlying cause of what was causing his problems.

After I treated him with those two things and then I started adding DHA, pregnenolone, and other things in there as I found what he was lacking, but he never had another day of angina in his life. He was able to lose weight without changing his bad habits. Once I saw the changes in him, I knew that's what I wanted to do in medicine. That's been my passion, that's been my drive. It served my purpose and it served my patients' purpose.

 

[00:21:06] Ashley James: This is what I want for every listener, to have a doctor on their team that acts like Sherlock Holmes. I want a doctor that questions and goes, what's going on? Let's look deeper and understand this. The fact that they never ran these panels on your dad, that they were only looking. It's like the iceberg story. They're only looking at the tip of the iceberg. They're like, oh, heart disease. This is my frustration with allopathic medicine is it's reductionistic.

He has angina, let's look at the heart, and they're not looking at the body as a whole. Hello, we're not looking at his thyroid, testosterone, or any of his nutrient levels, right?

 

[00:21:49] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, you're right. He has angina so he’s got chest pain when he does any activity, right? He walks up a flight of stairs, whatever. Walking up a flight of stairs or walking sometimes a few steps, so you give him nitroglycerin which dilates the arteries and the chest pain goes away. 

Well, does he have a deficiency of nitroglycerin? I mean, it's kind of the reductionist model of conventional medicine. But really, what my father had was no testosterone, his hormonal biosynthetic pathways were not working because he was lacking thyroid hormone, he was lacking vitamin A, he was lacking some B vitamins. Once we corrected those things and supported him with small amounts of hormones, he made a dramatic change in his health. It was really something. 

I still think about that today, that got me going in the right pathway for medicine. He was my first patient. All patients are important. He was certainly probably the most important patient in my career.

[00:22:55] Ashley James: Of course, one of our parents would be, wouldn't they? Now, you mentioned that you use desiccated thyroid hormone, and that surprised me because you were just newly introduced into holistic medicine. The training of an MD is to do more synthetic. Can you explain for the listener what desiccated thyroid hormone is versus the synthetic that we're so used to?

[00:23:21] Dr. David Brownstein: So I ended up writing a book on this, Overcoming Thyroid Disorders. In med school, I was trained to assess a patient's thyroid status by drawing a TSH level, a thyroid-stimulating hormone level. That's a hormone secreted from the pituitary gland in the brain, and that is released from the pituitary gland, hits your bloodstream, goes to the thyroid, and causes the thyroid gland to release thyroid hormone.

Now thyroid hormone released into the bloodstream from the thyroid gland feeds back into the pituitary gland. It was supposed to be this check and balance thing to see if you got enough thyroid hormone. If you don't have enough thyroid hormone, you should produce more TSH. If you got too much thyroid hormone, you should produce less TSH.

There are multiple places where this pathway gets disrupted. Going back to basic biochemistry and physiology, and just basic biochemical pathways can help. Sherlock Holmes is a good example. As a physician, I'm always thinking, what's the underlying cause of this? I don't think this is sent from another planet if the patient's sick for something. I mean, sometimes you can never figure out why they're sick or why something happened and many times you can.

Again, I said that from the beginning that supporting the patient's physiology and biochemistry is really what we should be doing in medicine. And the problem with relying on drug therapies, I mean, look, most of the first two years of medical school are spent on memorizing drugs, their mechanism of action, their half-life, and things like that. When you look at those mechanisms of action, nearly every drug prescribed out there is either poisoning an enzyme or blocking a receptor in the body. For the long term in our lives, I don't think it's a good idea to poison enzymes or black receptors. The enzymes and receptors are there for a reason.

Now, there are times to do that. If you're having an acute heart attack, there are enzymes that might need to be poisoned and receptors might need to be blocked temporarily. But for long-term care, using those drugs doesn't support physiology, doesn't support biochemistry, it does the opposite—it disrupts it. 

I think that you also have to look at our health statistics in the US. We take more drugs than any Western people on the face of the planet. We spend more money on health care than any people on the face of the planet, and we have worse outcomes than every western country. We are bottom last in almost every outcome, and the only one we're not bottom last, we’re second to last. That includes infant mortality, neonatal mortality, maternal mortality at birth, longevity in adult males and females, chronic health conditions—the list goes on and on. We have lousy health outcomes.

What's happened with coronavirus epitomizes how we are as a country. It's a sad state we're in right now. I think the sad state is being driven from this lack of education of doctors that have no idea how to holistically approach anybody, no idea just basic holistic things like vitamin C, iodine, or I call these as basic things that people need and they can't live without. I mean, 99.9% of physicians out there have no clue what these things do with the body, why they're essential, how to assess them, and how to rectify deficiencies with us.

Unfortunately, we have 600,000 deaths from COVID because, in part, we're an unhealthy country, and we're unhealthy because we take too many of these drugs, and we're unfollowing holistic lifestyle.

[00:27:24] Ashley James: It's those with comorbidities that have the highest chances of passing away from a viral infection, let alone COVID. But also, in the United States, doctors are being told not to prescribe drugs to try to treat it or try to try to support it. There's no treatment, you just have to manage the symptoms. It’s just very frustrating.

[00:27:52] Dr. David Brownstein: No, no, no, you can't manage the symptoms either because there's no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID. Therefore, any mention or any action thereof falls in violation of the federal code. That was part of a letter that I received from the FTC for treating COVID patients, and we can get into that.

[00:28:12] Ashley James: We're definitely going to get into that. I want to go there. The little voice in my head is going, we're going to be delisted from Google from going there, but we have to, everyone has to understand you. We live in a country where the government—this is unheard of. I feel like I'm in an Orwell novel. 

The government is telling doctors how to practice medicine. It's unconstitutional what's going on right now, and it's unethical. It's unethical that your hands as a physician are being tied and unable to practice medicine. You're allowed to practice medicine with other illnesses, why are you not allowed to treat the patient the best way you know-how with this one? It is so political and we are killing people, are harming people for politics.

So anyway, I'm just upset, scared, and angry for all the people who are suffering from this when good doctors like yourself could absolutely be saving lives but they're being told not to. Isn't that crazy? That sounds crazy. That sounds absolutely crazy, doesn't it?

[00:29:25] Dr. David Brownstein: I'm 58 years old and I’ve never seen anything like this, never thought anything like this would occur. Orwellian is the right—what is that, an adjective? I'm not quite sure when I use it that way. But it is an Orwellian-like thing where big brother is just controlling everything. The message from the beginning of COVID was to hide in your basement and don't leave your house except to get food until we have this vaccine. 

The message to physicians was you can't treat it so don't even try. What physicians were telling their patients from the beginning of COVID, well, nothing I can do. Stay home until you can't breathe then go to the hospital. We all know what happened at the beginning of COVID. We were, as physicians, we didn't know how to treat that disease, and we were treating it incorrectly. That's not blaming anybody, it was a new illness. We really didn't know what we were doing and we tried our best.

If you went to the hospital and you got ventilated a year ago—March, April, and May—you had an 88% chance of dying. It's the first illness that I've seen that physicians were instructed not to do anything and wait for this vaccine. Waiting for the vaccine caused about 400,000 people to die for doing no therapy. Doctors who were doing therapy like me were silenced. You were warned, either you stop talking about it or you're not going to be able to practice medicine. You have to make your Sophie's Choice. I was seeing COVID patients from the beginning. Do you want to get into COVID right now?

[00:31:17] Ashley James: Yeah, let's do it. Let's go there. We're already there, let's go there.

[00:31:20] Dr. David Brownstein: So when COVID came, when those first reports out of China in December 2019, an atypical pneumonia. I think it was three or four patients who had this novel coronavirus with atypical pneumonia. I read those reports and I followed it from the beginning. I watched what happened in January and February, Spain and Italy, and Europe experienced it before we did. I knew it was coming. I mean, we all knew it was coming. And then the first cases in the US were in Seattle and California. That was the middle to the end of February of 2020.

COVID was clearly coming, and it was going to come across the country. We didn't have any immunity to this. I remember I had a meeting with my staff at the end of February 2020 that the media headlines were awful. Everyone's dying or gets COVID. Italy's got bodies piled up on the streets. Spain was a mess. It's only a matter of time until it comes here.

I have this meeting in my office at the end of the workday, the end of Thursday. The tension in the air was palpable. You could cut it with a knife, everybody's scared. Everybody's scared. In this meeting with the staff, I said, we got to clear the air here. We're going to stay open through COVID, and my staff started to question me, why don't we close? I said, why would we close? This is our time. 

I said, I've been practicing medicine for I think it was 27 years. I said, 26 years and a few months were for this. This is what I've been practicing for. I used to talk we, my partners and I. This is what we were practicing for, to get ready for something like this. This is a novel illness that conventional medicine has no clue what to do yet we do. I said, we've been treating flu-like illnesses with 30% of them being coronavirus infections, because it's known that 30% of all influenza-like illnesses are coronavirus every year, with an approach to support the immune system. 

We've done the same therapy for over 25 years. The only thing we changed was if we learned something new, we added something new with little tweaks like that. But otherwise, it's been the exact same therapy for over two decades. The therapy consisted of using high dose vitamins A, C, and D, iodine for four days, and nebulizing a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide and iodine. 

What we found over the 25+ years was that our patients didn't get hospitalized, didn't get pneumonia, and didn't die at anywhere near the rates of what's reported every year from influenza-like illnesses during the flu season. Remember, in a light flu season, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 Americans die. In a medium season, it's up to 80,000 or so. And in a bad season, 100,000 to maybe 120,000 dies. A lot of people die from flu and flu-like illnesses every year in the wintertime in America. Our patients didn't seem to do that, so this therapy was working.

The other part of the therapy was that if people got worse or they needed a little support, we would do intravenous vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide and then shots of ozone. That was the whole therapy in a nutshell. In the meeting with the staff, I reminded them, we've got therapy for this. The question came back to me, how do you know it's going to work for this new strain of coronavirus? I said, I don't know if it's going to work, but why wouldn't it work? It's worked for every other strain over the last 25 years. 

I said, we have an immune system for a reason. I said, we're going to support the immune system. The immune system is going to do fine with coronavirus if it's got the right raw materials. That was my prediction. I said to them, look, I can't guarantee anything because I haven't seen this one before, but I don't see any reason why we're going to have trouble with this.

So I told the staff, hey, anyone who doesn't want to work, you don't have to work. I'm not going to force anybody to work through this. I said, I will work alone if I have to work alone. I said, I'm working until either I get sick or they won’t let me work, but our patients are going to need us more than ever. I said to them, this is our time. This is 27+ years of practicing medicine for this moment. This is our time to shine. That was the meeting. We had about 40%, 50% of our staff. As soon as it hit Michigan, it hit the Detroit area where I was. We were one of the four hotspots, in the beginning, was Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts. It already started in Seattle where you are. We were one of the four hotspots when it moved to the western part of the US.

We were getting phone calls, people couldn't breathe, the hospitals were filling up, the media headlines were fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. I'm not lying to you, I was scared at the beginning too. Here we were treating patients, we didn't let them come into the office. We were treating them outside in March in Michigan. Let me tell you, March in Michigan isn’t pretty. It’s snow, sleet, ice, wind—it's terrible. We were in snowstorms in full hazmat gear trudging out there with ice and stuff and having people put their arms out the windows of the car in freezing weather and giving them IVs. Then when you have them put their buttocks out the door as we were putting shots in the rear end.

[00:37:20] Ashley James: Of what, B vitamins?

[00:37:22] Dr. David Brownstein: Shots of ozone in the rear end. So look, truth be told I was scared for myself. I have a 65-degree scoliotic curve with lung involvement. I have severe asthma, which I used to be in multiple inhalers and wheezing all the time, and adopting a holistic lifestyle, that doesn't bother me much at all. I play tennis without inhalers. The only time it bothers me is when I get a cold now. But I have severe asthma, I have lung involvement from scoliosis with half a lung missing on one side, and my normal pulse ox is low just because I don't have a full two lungs like everybody else. And I have an immune system disorder that 1% of the population has.

My immune system disorder is lack of immunoglobulin A, which makes me more susceptible to viral illnesses.

[00:38:17] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that's three. That's like the trifecta.

[00:38:20] Dr. David Brownstein: I went in the wrong profession for my body. Let me tell you, I was scared for myself as well. You know what, I eat well, I take my supplements, and I know what to do for viral flu-like illnesses. So we were treating people. I was reporting it online on my website. I was putting videos of patients as they recovered. Patients who couldn't breathe, who called their doctor, the doctor told them there’s nothing to do. Take Tylenol or something or stay home until you can't breathe in and go to the ER. Patients would come in with pulse ox in the 80s and low 80s, even upper 70s sometimes. They were trying to stay out of the ER. Everyone was scared because you were going to die it felt like if you went to the emergency room back then.

About a weekend into this, the fear starts to go away for me and for my partners because people are calling us back, I feel better. They particularly reported they felt better after nebulizing peroxide, and they felt better after getting an IV if they really were sick. Two weeks into it we feel no different than any other flu season except we're swamped with too many patients. We’re going outside and we're working after hours, we got cars lined up in the parking lot. We're all taking turns going outside. We have an assembly line going to meet them outside.

We're lining up 10 cars on the weekends. Three docs, nurse practitioner, my PA, we’d all show up and do our job. So a couple of weeks into it, we've got a pretty good plan, these patients are doing okay. I was doing interviews online, I was talking about it. I was saying what I thought was wrong with conventional medicine. But I titled each of these blog posts, there's still hope out there because there was no hope from conventional media, there was just no hope. You got COVID, you were going to die. That was the feeling out there. We all remember this. I mean, it’s going to be seared into our psyche.

About two months, March-April, I'm posting my blog post number 30 or something. Out of the blue, I got a letter from Federal Trade Communication. I remember I walked in the door, it was Tuesday night, which is my late night, not only was it my late night at work, but we’re treating patients in the parking lot and it's tiring. 

I'm walking in at 8:00 or 9:00 at night after getting there at 7:00 in the morning. I'm working as hard as I worked as a resident it felt like. I'm way older than I was back then, and so I'm exhausted. I walked in and my wife and daughter were at home. They're looking at the computer, which I see as soon as I walk in. I'm like, what's wrong? I thought someone died, from their face. She said, well, come in. I’m like, no, tell me what's wrong and I'm standing there holding my bag and I got my coat on. She said, you got a letter from the Federal Trade Communication. I said, The FTC? She goes, yeah. I said, what they want? She goes, well, they're ordering you 48 hours to remove all your blog posts about COVID or else. I said, what? I probably said a few words after that.

[00:41:53] Ashley James: I know, me too.

[00:41:55] Dr. David Brownstein: She said, you have 48 hours to remove it or you’re going to hear from the US Justice Department.

[00:42:03] Ashley James: What happened to freedom of speech?

[00:42:04] Dr. David Brownstein: I was speechless. I come in, my wife's a lawyer.

[00:42:14] Ashley James: Oh, that's handy.

[00:42:16] Dr. David Brownstein: So I said to her, maybe it's time to retire. She said, you're not retiring over this letter. This is stupid. It’s ridiculous. You're doing a good thing. You should get an award. You don't deserve this and you didn't do anything wrong. If you want to retire because you want to retire, let's talk about that. But you're not retiring over this letter. This is stupid.

She talked me off the cliff because I told my mother, I did tell my elderly mother this story. If the FTC released a press release about me and I thought the local papers were going to pick it up, and I didn’t want my mom to read in the papers. I told my mother, I was proud to be the first in the family to have a federal agency after them. I didn't cheat anybody, I didn't steal any money. I didn't hurt anybody. I was doing my job.

When we got the letter, we read it a bunch of times. We pulled everything down off the internet the next day. So in there, I got 20 years of stuff and we just took it all down. It was the last blog post I did, which was in April of last year. I’ve been blogging for 25+ years.

So I was keeping track of the patients I was treating with COVID and we're doing the same therapy. Out of the first 107 patients, we had a couple of hospitalizations and no deaths, when we should have had—I can't remember the numbers, they’re in my peer-reviewed paper I published on this. We should have had 8 or 10 hospitalizations and 5, 6 deaths, something like that, from the numbers that were occurring at that time.

My wife, being a lawyer, started communicating with the FTC, the gentleman who wrote the letter. He said, in this original letter, they went through all my blogs and they spent a lot of time bullet pointing what they said was inaccurate information about COVID because they kept repeating the line, “There's no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID, therefore, any mention thereof falls in violation of federal code…” and it's a long number. I've been cataloging these patients that we were treating, I knew we had 107 patients at that time when that letter came in. In that letter, they said, “because there are no clinical studies indicating what you say is true, there's no prevention, treatment, or cure for COVID, therefore, any mention thereof falls in violation.”

I called a few friends and one of them said to me, if they want a study, why don't you give them a study. You've been treating patients for two months. I retrospectively reviewed the data of my patients that were treated. Since I wasn't blogging, I had some time on my hands that I'm not used to. I put together a study of 107 patients, case series study, and I got it accepted for peer review. It was peer-reviewed three times. I got it published in a peer-reviewed journal. 

When it was published, my wife sent a letter to the FTC saying, well, you said there are no clinical studies, here's one. She attached it and said, we want to publish this on our website without commentary, just publish the study. And they said, no, this is not a randomized control trial.

[00:46:00] Ashley James: Now they change the story.

[00:46:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Now they changed it. So here we are at the beginning of an illness that's killing hundreds of thousands of people. There's no randomized control trial at that point of anything related to COVID because who could do it? You can't randomize a trial. And I wasn't going to randomize anybody to receiving therapy and not receiving therapy. Now when I thought it was going to help them. That's unethical. I should go to jail for that if I did that, and there's no way I could sleep another night, another minute in my life if I did something like that.

But anyway, there were no randomized control trials at that point, there were only clinical observations. I wasn't hiding in my basement. I wasn't closing my office. I was on the frontlines treating people. We get the letter back from the FTC saying, no, not a randomized control trial. That was the last contact we had with them.

We kept doing our thing. Now, we're over 400 patients. Again, we have a couple of hospitalizations, no deaths from any of our patients related to it. The therapy still works. The consequence of the powers that be telling physicians there's no therapy and you can't do anything for your patients and just wait for the vaccine was we had over 400,000 people dead before the vaccine was even started. I believe those were the numbers. When this post mortem is written on coronavirus, it's going to be ugly.

One other side to that story was, so here I published the study, FTC won’t let me put it on my website. So we hired a first amendment lawyer in DC who really is a specialist with the FTC recommended to me by two prominent people out there. This gentleman's in his 70s. He's been doing this for 40+ years. 

In the final analysis he said to me, you do not have first amendment protection right now to talk about COVID online. You should, but you don't. He goes, that's the political world we live in right now. He said, you have to make a decision whether you want to continue treating patients or you want to fight the FTC. He said, if you want to fight the FTC, I'll do it for you, but his retainer was multi-millions of dollars that I don't have. He said, it will go to the US Supreme Court and then we'll see. But if you don't have that money and you want to treat patients, then I advise you to stop writing about it. He said, I've never done this before in my career, and it’s not right, but this is the world we live in right now.

But I said to him, hey, I've been writing this book on my experience with treating viruses. Can I publish it? He said, oh, your book has first amendment protection. He goes, yeah, you can publish anything you want.

[00:49:12] Ashley James: Okay, so explain that to me. You're not protected by the First Amendment if you're posting a blog on your website, but you are if you publish a book, why is that?

[00:49:23] Dr. David Brownstein: He said it’s not right, it should go to the Supreme Court, and it should be rectified, but that's the way it is. He said, me personally, you do not have First Amendment protection. He goes, the book does. Books are treated differently than the web and anything you write.

So I published my book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, the therapy we've been doing. It's been amazing. We just got through another round of COVID in Michigan, in the Detroit area where I live. We were, again, working long hours in the parking lot. I think we're at the end of that. That seems pretty settled down now, but the therapy still works. There's nothing better we have than our immune system. It's what we should be focusing on more than anything as physicians. If the immune system has the basic raw materials it needs, it can do pretty, pretty wonderful things when it's confronted with stress from a virus or something else.

[00:50:34] Ashley James: Absolutely. So you mentioned that part of your therapy was high doses of A, C, D, and iodine. Did you mention zinc?

[00:50:44] Dr. David Brownstein: No, I did not mention zinc because we did not use zinc as part of our therapy. It’s never been part of our therapy.

[00:50:50] Ashley James: Why is that?

[00:50:51] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, that's a good question. Why is that is because I've been doing holistic medicine for 20 years checking people for nutritional and hormonal imbalances, and zinc is one of the things that I’ve been checking. It never was part of our therapy. So our therapy is what I told you, what you just repeated. I can't explain why it was never part of our therapy, and part of it was because we’ve been checking zinc levels for years and rectifying zinc levels. Most of our patients weren't low with zinc going into this thing, but we never found a need for zinc for treating viral illness. It just wasn't.

[00:51:29] Ashley James: Your patients aren’t deficient, everything was good, and if you saw zinc deficiency, you would handle it.

[00:51:33] Dr. David Brownstein: Of course I would. Do I think zinc should be used for this thing? I can't speak to you, I didn't use it.

[00:51:41] Ashley James: Yes. Sure, sure, sure. That makes sense.

[00:51:44] Dr. David Brownstein: I didn't need to use it. My patients did fine with what we gave them.

[00:51:47] Ashley James: I had COVID. Right after I gave birth and we lost our child, very traumatic. My body's in shock. My immune system is tanking because I'm in grief and I just gave her, so postpartum. And then I had postpartum high blood pressure, which we weren't sure if it was—I had no signs of preeclampsia during pregnancy, but it was very high the moment I gave birth, which also having paramedics work on your newborn for an hour while you're begging for your daughter to be alive, I'm sure that raised my blood pressure. But my blood pressure was through the roof for the first time in my life. That's a comorbidity in and of itself for COVID.

We think maybe one of the paramedics gave me COVID because a few days later, I developed symptoms, and my husband had it but he had a sniffly nose and he mowed the lawn for four hours in the height of his COVID. He's like, yeah, I'm kind of tired and I was sniffling. That was it. We did quarantine just to protect everyone else. I'm not going to be a schmuck and just make anyone sick. So we stayed at home, obviously, and I was postpartum. 

But I was hit really bad. Normally I'm a very healthy person, but knowing what my body had just been through with giving birth, grief, and high blood pressure from whatever it was from—whether it was grief or whether I did have all of a sudden, out of nowhere, have some preeclampsia. But I had no other symptoms of preeclampsia. It was just like, okay, well, the body acts weird after giving birth, who knows.

So I was hit really hard, I was in bed, and I was exhausted. And then I'd get really lightheaded and dizzy, and my blood pressure all of a sudden tanked into the double digits. I was like 94 over 46 or something crazy, like I was fainting, which I also read is something that can happen. When you have COVID, you can experience all of a sudden these dips or drop in blood pressure. And those on blood pressure meds, there's this whole article that talked about blood pressure medication and how doctors need to know that patients should be taken off of them because it can cause massive kidney damage to be on blood pressure meds while someone has the active infection that they're fighting.

I didn't have a lot of the symptoms like I didn't have the headaches. There's a bunch of things I didn't have, but it was really hard to breathe. My lungs felt like I had asthma. I've never had asthma in my life but describing it, it's like I took a breath and everything hurt, everything was tight, and it was very hard to even get air into my lungs. It felt like it was all tight like asthma. And I lost my sense of smell, it was crazy because I have essential oils. I was just like, all of a sudden I can't smell peppermint. This is crazy.

What I did was double my zinc. I went from 30 milligrams to 90, and two days later, my sense of smell came back. I was like, okay, maybe my body was using up more zinc to fight the virus and I dipped into a deficiency and so my smells went away, and then it came back when I took more. But basically, my smell came back the moment I took more zinc, which I thought was really cool. 

Then my husband noticed his sense of smell went away. So I said, okay, take more of your zinc. He did and his sense of smell came right back. I was like, this is cool because some people lose their sense of smell for a while. I've heard weeks and some people, even months later, say they don't really feel like their taste or smell is back to normal whereas mine is totally back to normal. I definitely incorporated zinc into it. I was taking everything I could, everything I could get my hands on. And now NAC, which Amazon has taken out of their store even though NAC is not illegal. But this is really frustrating.

Also, Amazon also took down I think Colloidal Silver a while ago because they're like, how dare you use natural medicine to support your body in fighting an infection. We're going to make sure that doesn't happen. This is pretty crazy that major stores like Amazon are limiting our access to natural therapeutics that support the body's ability to fight infection. Why is that? It boggles my mind.

I'm very excited about your book and I think listeners are. Considering the fact that your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses is protected, giving you free speech, you're allowed to share everything that you're not allowed to share online. Are there things in your book that you aren't even comfortable with saying in an interview? Are there things that are so shocking that you couldn't say it here? Are you allowed to talk freely about what's in your book?

[00:56:54] Dr. David Brownstein: First off, I'm sorry, for your loss. I didn't know any of that.

[00:56:59] Ashley James: Yes, the last month or so has been a little crazy for me.

[00:57:07] Dr. David Brownstein: But no, there's nothing shocking in the book. It's a 25-year history of what we've been doing. There's still good news out there, there's good news in that book. Your immune system was designed by somebody for a purpose, and the purpose was so you can survive, have kids, and perpetuate the species, otherwise, we wouldn't be here. This is what should be done, in my opinion. I think that when you look back at this, and basically CDC, NAAT, Dr. Fauci, and everybody is basically saying there's nothing to do. Just stay home, social distance, and wear your mask. That's it.

That was incorrect. We should be supporting the immune system. It's not rocket science. It's pretty basic stuff in my mind. I wrote a peer-reviewed paper, I published a book on it, and we're still doing it. I don't know. I feel like I'm in Alice in Wonderland where down is up and up is down right now. It's sad, it's really sad. When the truth finally comes out about this, people could see through the fog of fear that's been thrown at them, I imagine there's going to be a lot of angry Americans out there. I mean, right now, they're just placid Americans, I don't quite understand that.

[00:58:40] Ashley James: I don’t understand it either.

[00:58:42] Dr. David Brownstein: We should be in the streets. Europe they’re in the streets. They're not happy with the situation they're in. We just do nothing here. We’re just complacent sheep. I'm not quite certain why that's the case.

[00:58:56] Ashley James: Maybe they're drinking the fluoride in the water.

[00:58:59] Dr. David Brownstein: Maybe.

[00:59:02] Ashley James: Well, it's probably because so many people are listening to their friends and family and listening to the mainstream media, and the narrative is very convincing. But we have to start thinking for ourselves. We really do. We have to put on the critical thinking cap and go, okay, I'm going to question everything. I want people to question what I say. I want people to question what you say. I want people to question everything, become the Doubting Thomas. Don't just blindly listen to anyone. I don't care how much of an expert they are. I don't care what level in the government they are, what level in science they are, how big up in leadership they are, question everything. We really, really, really need to put on our thinking caps, what's going on here?

[00:59:53] Dr. David Brownstein: Let me tell you, I bring back the analogy of Vioxx. Vioxx was a COX-2 inhibitor. It was in the 2000s I think when it came out. The headlines were, we have a new anti-inflammatory medication and it's not going to cause GI bleeding because tens of thousands of Americans die a year from GI bleeding due to NSAIDs, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use like Motrin, Advil, and prescription NSAIDs. 

Here's Vioxx, it’s not going to cause GI bleeding and it's going to treat them because it works in the COX-2 pathway instead of a COX-1 pathway, which most anti-inflammatories work on both COX-1 and COX-2.

So, here I go look up the mechanism of the drug when it was announced it's coming out. I look at the pathways, I look at my biochem charts, I'm like, hey, this is going to prostacyclin, which is an important prostaglandin that needs to be produced to keep blood vessels dilated. So if you don't have prostaglandin, the blood vessels are going to constrict. If you don't have prostacyclin, the blood vessels can constrict and you can get strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots.

I saw that and I remember writing about it and said, this may be causing strokes and heart attacks. I'm not going to use this drug, and I never prescribed Vioxx once.

Well, the consequence of Vioxx coming to the market, FDA-approved, touted in all the headlines as the greatest advancement in NSAID therapy. Fifty thousand Americans died that didn't have to, over 150,000 had strokes and heart attacks that didn't have to, and the drug was pulled from the market. Merck paid billions of dollars in fines. There was no reason it should have been approved in the first place.

There are many incidents of conventional medicine, missing the boat, and being late to the boat. People do need to think for themselves. They need to not rely on TV personalities and fear to make their decisions. Because really, through this whole COVID crisis, this was being driven by fear decisions from Dr. Fauci on down. It was a fear-based approach of locking yourself in your basement, social distance, and wearing 10 masks when you go outside. Look what we got for it, almost 600,000 dead while we waited for the vaccine. That was just a mess.

[01:02:36] Ashley James: I want to talk about the vaccine, we're going to get into that in a bit. In your book, do you talk about what we can do to support the body in preventing getting infected? This is my thing, my son was exposed and had zero symptoms. He was exposed to both of us. 

We all sleep in the same room. He has his own bed, but we're all in the same big room. I do that because actually, he has asthma. We have it under control now, but I want to listen to him. I'm like a paranoid mom and I want to listen to his breathing because oftentimes, he would go into respiratory distress at night. He's been hospitalized twice. It's allergy-induced, and one of the things he's allergic to is dust mites. That's hard with a house that's carpeted. We just stay on top of vacuuming, but we can’t get rid of all the dust mites in the world, so I like to listen to his breathing.

But he was in the same room as us, he's in the same house as us, we hugged him. I'm sure he grabbed our glass and started drinking from it. He's obviously breathing our air. Apparently, this is highly contagious, what I've been told, and he never had any symptoms. What I've heard is that people can get exposed to the virus, the body will mount a response, the immune system will figure out how to handle it, and they won't have any symptoms. But some people develop symptoms and develop this COVID-19 sickness. Maybe you could explain why some people either have incredibly minor symptoms or no symptoms at all. Is there anything we can do proactively to support our body so we're one of those people?

[01:04:33] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I mean, look, we're all unique biochemical individuals. I can't explain why some people’s households got nailed with it and some people got very minimal or didn't get it at all. I mean, that's life and that's how things go. But there are things people can do to minimize the risk of becoming a statistic with COVID, becoming a severe statistic or a death statistic. But it's not just COVID, it's with any viral illness, it’s with any infectious illness. If you have a properly functioning immune system, we were designed to withstand things like this. How do you do it? 

You do the basics. Number one, eat a clean diet free of refined sugar and other refined food products like refined salt, flour, oil, and sugar. Number two, maintain adequate hydration. Drink half your body weight in water. Take your body weight in pounds, divide it by two, and that many ounces of water a day should be your minimum. 

Number three, maintain adequate salt levels. My book, Salt Your Way to Health talks about that where salt is the second major constituent next to water. We need adequate salt levels. Many people find themselves every flu season in the hospital because they become hyponatremic. Their sodium levels fall when they become ill. We want to start off with good sodium levels when you get sick, good salt levels.

Part of the basics for my practice is maintaining adequate iodine levels. Iodine levels have been falling over 50% over the last 40 years across the United States. The vast majority of people are iodine deficient. My testing has shown over 97% of people are iodine deficient, most of them severely iodine deficient. Iodine deficiency explains the epidemic of cancer of the breast, ovaries, uterus, prostate, pancreas, and thyroid that we're seeing in this country. One in seven women has breast cancer, and one in three men has prostate cancer. Thyroid cancer is the fastest-growing cancer in the US.

I say, iodine deficiency, if not the underlying cause, is a huge part of that underlying cause of why we're suffering so many endocrine cancers across the US. That's just basic stuff that I think people should be doing. And then you should work with your holistic doctor to correct your nutritional and hormonal imbalances. When you get exposed to a viral illness, bacterial illness, a parasitic illness, or a stressor in your life, your immune system and your body can fight back and do what it's designed to do, do what we were programmed to do by our maker. The proof is what I've seen in my practice for 28 years. It does work.

On the other hand, you can eat the typical American diet and call it the standard American diet or the sad diet full of refined foods, way too much sugar, way too much refined flour, salt, and oil and be overweight like 2/3 of Americans are. We don't exercise, we don't drink enough water, and we probably drink too much alcohol, especially during COVID. And then what's going to happen to you when you get hit with some stressors, some viral illness? It’s not going to be kind to those people. 

I think that this COVID-19 brought forth everything that I've been talking about for 28 years, everything I'm seeing in my practice, everything that's wrong with our country health-wise, and everything that's wrong with conventional medicine all in one package. It's an ugly look for us.

Here we spend 20% of our GNP on health care. What the hell do we get for it? It’s 600,000 people dying when Dr. McCullough and others feel that's probably at least 75% of people with coronavirus, if we treated them early, tried to support their immune system, and treated them with therapies that were known to help support the immune system or to help other viral illnesses, we probably would have had over 75% of people still alive from this.

Maybe we'll get 150,000 people dead from Coronavirus, which is basically a bad flu season. We wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. We wouldn't be still talking about masks, social distancing, gloves, and all that stuff. But we're not, we are here. People need to wake up. They need to get past that fog of fear; start reading for themselves; and start adapting eating better, exercising, and taking better care of their bodies. The proof is in the pudding. It'll pay off when you're exposed to something like SARS-CoV-2.

[01:09:29] Ashley James: Your protocol, which you've used for many years for other viral infections and lung infections is working tremendously well. I love the statistics that you have that you're showing. The proof’s in the pudding. The proof in the pudding is in the eating. You are showing that you are having a better outcome than we're telling you all to sit on your hands and stop treating them and just let him go to the hospital and wait until they get a trial vaccine. That which just again blows my mind that that's what doctors are being told. So you have this great protocol.

I do have a question. Have you looked into glutathione and supporting glutathione? I've heard people have really good success with it. I personally also took oral glutathione and noticed a very positive shift in my health while my body was fighting the infection.

[01:10:40] Dr. David Brownstein: We use glutathione in our practice both orally and intravenously. I've used glutathione for the majority of my holistic practice. However, it wasn't part of our holistic protocol. You should certainly want to have optimal glutathione levels when you get sick. The best I can tell you is it wasn't part of our protocol. We just didn't use it and we got the results we got. But I use glutathione in my practice and it is very important. When you take Tylenol, Tylenol blocks the production of glutathione. So if you take a lot of Tylenol, you're going to be glutathione deficient.

I was talking to my patients on the phone when they were calling and they couldn't breathe, don't take Tylenol, unless you absolutely have to. Just get in the bathtub or sponge off with cool water to keep your temperature down. I didn't want people taking Tylenol unless their fever was over 103.5. It's because it would deplete glutathione levels, but we didn't use it as part of our protocol. 

It was high dose vitamin A—100,000 units A day for four days. Vitamin C, 1000 milligrams every hour until they got loose stools and they felt better. Vitamin D, 50,000 units a day for four days. Iodine 25 milligrams a day if they weren't using it, and double whatever they were using if they were going into it with iodine for four days. And then nebulizing 0.03% solution of hydrogen peroxide and iodine every hour while they were sick, and then lessen it as they got better. 

Then they'd come in the parking lot, they're still coming in. Not doing as many now, thank goodness. It's not as bad here. But coming in the parking lot for IV of vitamin C and peroxide and ozone shots. Keep in mind, ozone stimulates glutathione production. Vitamin C helps regenerate glutathione in the body. So, there are mechanisms to get glutathione levels up through doing what I was doing.

[01:12:52] Ashley James: And these patients of yours, you've seen them for a while, you've helped them adjust their diet, you've already been working on helping them with any comorbidities they may have had such as high blood pressure, obesity, or type two diabetes. These are patients who have been seeing a holistic doctor and have been working on building their health.

[01:13:14] Dr. David Brownstein: They were part of our practice.

[01:13:16] Ashley James: Hopefully they were already healthy, to begin with, or at least they didn't step into this illness with nutrient deficiencies. These were healthier than normal people, would you say?

[01:13:30] Dr. David Brownstein: Probably. That's one of the criticisms of my study is that they were healthier than regular people. Well, I don't think that's a criticism. I think that's praise. I'm glad they were healthier. But look, we had our share of people with low pulse ox, who couldn't breathe, who we were scared. We called them every night, the sick ones, to check on them until we felt they were out of the woods. There were some people that kept me up at night that I wasn't sure are they going to make this or not? 

COVID was very random and it seemed to hit harder than others. I was shocked that sometimes some of the healthiest people got really nailed with it. But again, the end of it is our results speak for themselves.

[01:14:12] Ashley James: They do.

[01:14:13] Dr. David Brownstein: It's a powerful message.

[01:14:17] Ashley James: It is. Who should read your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses?

[01:14:23] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, I think anyone interested in how to properly support the immune system, so it can overcome viral, other illnesses, and other stressors. So who should read it? I think we should all read it. I've written 16 books, people ask me, how do you write? I have a full-time practice, I write a newsletter. I was blogging every night during COVID and still writing all this stuff. The books come easy for me because either I write them in one of two moods, either I'm really excited about something, or I’m really irritated about something. But there's a passion either way with it.

What I write in my books is what I see works in my practice, or what I see doesn't work in my practice like my Drugs that Don't Work book. What I see work is easy for me. I've done this enough to know this therapy works. I've done testosterone enough to know that it helps people with heart disease. I've diagnosed thyroid enough to know that I feel like I know what I'm doing. It's not like I’m not learning, I'm learning every day in my practice and I'm changing things up. I write about what I see works in the practice.

I wrote this book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses because we were seeing it work. We've seen it work for 28 years, and we saw it work through COVID. I told you the story. I wasn't sure, this was a different corona strain, but it helps a third of the flu-like illnesses every year or coronavirus, why wouldn't it work? That was my view, and it did. 

Who should read this book? We're dealing with SARS COVID 2 right now. Next year, it's going to be SARS COVID 3 or some other thing. The year after that it would be SARS COVID 4, 5, and 6, or whatever else is out there, This isn’t going to be the last of this stuff. We're going to have to learn to have a good immune system going into this, otherwise, we're going to be going through what we just went through over the past year and I don't want to do that again. I don't think our country can handle it again.

[01:16:40] Ashley James: No. I mean, we're the 99%. We need to help our fellow friends, family, and neighbors learn this kind of information. We all need to protect ourselves with knowledge and with the truth. So absolutely buy A Holistic Approach to Viruses. Read it, then pass it along, get all your friends and family to read it, and share this podcast with them. They need to understand that there are doctors like Dr. David Brownstein who are successfully helping those who are infected with the coronavirus. They're having way better outcomes than just sitting, waiting, and being sick, way better outcomes. And that we can support the body's ability to fight it off, support the body's structure and function of the body to heal. We can do that with natural medicine. And I just love the work you do. I love your books. Definitely, please come back on the show.

[01:17:50] Dr. David Brownstein: I’d love to.

[01:17:50] Ashley James: Thank you. Yes, absolutely. We got to go through more of your information because every book you've written, I feel like Alice in Wonderland, I don't know which rabbit hole to go down. There are all these rabbit holes, I can't wait. I'm very excited.

I do have a few questions about your protocol, and I'm sure that you specify in your book as well. The A, the C, the D, the iodine. It doesn't matter what form someone gets it in. Like vitamin C, there's Ester C, there's these Buffered C's or whatever. Does it matter what? Obviously D is D3? But is there a specific kind that we make sure that’s the most bioavailable, it's the cleanest, or are there certain brands that you say this is the best because they’re better quality?

[01:18:39] Dr. David Brownstein: It's a good question. Before we get into A, C, D, and iodine, the more important thing is to eat a clean diet free of refined sugar and other refined foods. Drink enough water. Maintain adequate salt levels, and maintain optimal iodine levels going into any illness. But having said that, I recommend in the book, ascorbic acid is the form of vitamin C. I don't think it's that crucial what form of vitamin C. I certainly don't think you have to spend expensive amounts of vitamin C. Some companies complain there's is more absorbable than others. I haven't seen that occur in my practice.

As far as vitamin A goes, that's really the only thing I guess to make a point of. I'm talking vitamin A here, not beta carotene. Beta carotene does not have the immune support properties that vitamin A does. I use an emulsified form of vitamin A. Vitamin A can be toxic like all the fat-soluble vitamins we take large amounts of. The four days of this is, in my experience, hasn't been toxic to anybody. But the emulsified form has less chance of toxicity too. Vitamin D, like you said, is vitamin D3. And then iodine is a combination of iodine and iodide. I write about that in my iodine book. It's Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can't Live Without It. It is important to use the right kind of iodine for whole body support of iodine.

[01:20:10] Ashley James: Oh, man, I got to have you back on the show because I want to start going down this iodine rabbit hole but it's not really relevant to this conversation. It's more of just I want to talk more about iodine. I definitely have to have you back. We'll just leave that on a cliffhanger and say listeners got to keep listening because we're going to have you back for a whole iodine talk for sure.

I'd love to finish off the interview by discussing these experimental tests, this experimental thing they're doing where they're calling it a vaccine, but I don't even think you can actually call it a vaccine yet because it's still an experiment. We're the guinea pigs. We're not even doing an animal trial. You know, all the animals died or a majority of them died when they did animal trials in the past. 

Just like they make flu vaccines, they’ve been trying to make corona vaccines for a long time and all the animals died. But let's just skip the animals and go to human trials, incredibly scary. This is a trial. This is not an approved drug. This is what really scares me. We have to understand, this isn't about anti-vax or pro-vax, and that's what the mainstream media wants to just taint this picture. This is not about that.

I know doctors who are incredibly pro-vaccine who like, yes, I got all the shots. They are very pro-vaccine and they're incredibly scared of what's going on right now. So I'd love to know, if you could just paint the picture, what are your thoughts on these trials that are going on right now?

[01:21:55] Dr. David Brownstein: Okay, so the vaccine for COVID. I wrote a long chapter about that in my book, my virus book. I hope the vaccine is safe and effective, but the last two words in that chapter are we'll see. This is a phase three experiment undergoing right now. As far as the animals go, the animals are waiting for us because they're not going to take until they see if the human trials are favorable or not. They're waiting. This is the first time in history that a vaccine has been used like this. The best two words I give you are we'll see.

Do I think the vaccine should be used for kids? The death rate for kids is near zero, as near zero as you can get it. No, I don't think the vaccine should be used for kids. Should the vaccine be used for people under 70 where you have a 99.7% chance of surviving? I guess the people can decide that one. Should it be used for over 70 when there's up to a 5% death rate for those who get COVID? Maybe we could consider it for them. But look, I think if people had a healthier immune system this thing overall doesn't kill the same percentage that kills the flu. The problem is, it's killed more people because it's a novel virus and we're so unhealthy in our country.

I think the big mistake we made was telling everybody to just wait for the vaccine, wait for the vaccine. This is a new technology that hasn't been used before, and I am not very quick to use new drugs as I told you with Vioxx. 

Let me give you this analogy. I remember when I was a resident, I was rounding with Dr. Solomon. He was so knowledgeable, I thought he knew everything. He was a good family doctor. I said to him, Dr. Solomon, how do you keep up with all these new drugs that are coming out all the time? He says, David, that's easy. The drug hasn't been out for two years, use something else. Why would you consider using it? They don't study well enough. I was a resident back then, I wasn’t even a holistic doctor. I was just a regular doctor and I took his advice to heart, and I certainly took it to heart with Vioxx, which killed all those people.

What do I think about this vaccine? I tell you, I think we're moving way too fast. And if this vaccine turns out to be problematic, we have vaccinated half of our country right now, 160 million people have it. What the hell are we going to do If this turns out to be a problem going down the road? We're really not going to know if it's a problem for a couple of years fully, but we're going to find out a lot this fall when coronavirus comes back. We'll see how people's immune systems respond who have had this vaccine. 

I hope it's safe. I hope it's effective. I hope it's a wonderful thing and it's protected a bunch of people, but I can only leave you with we’ll see. People need to study it, people need to make their own decision. I’m not so thrilled about rolling out something that hasn't gone through proper safety studies. If this turns into a problem, what the heck are we going to do in this country?

[01:25:36] Ashley James: Especially because all our first responders got it.

[01:25:38] Dr. David Brownstein: Not all the first responders. Not all of us. That's not true. Now remember, if you look at some of those numbers, I still see the numbers. There's 40% to 50% of nurses out there who aren't getting it. The reason they're not getting it is because they're on the front line and they're seeing some of the side effects with these vaccines. We've seen in our practice some serious side effects with it.

[01:25:57] Ashley James: What are the side effects that you've seen?

[01:25:59] Dr. David Brownstein: In our small practice, we've seen three strokes, we’ve seen a couple of pulmonary embolisms, we’re up to six blood clots, and then the host of other problems, some serious other problems. If that's happening in my small practice, we're not solely just seeing this, this is happening elsewhere too. I think that time will tell. I'm hoping it's safe and effective. I think people need to, again, not react as part of fear with this issue but study it and make their decision about what they want to do.

[01:26:44] Ashley James: I'm not a guinea pig. I don't put myself in drug trials.

[01:26:53] Dr. David Brownstein: This is a drug trial.

[01:26:54] Ashley James: This is a drug trial. And the fact that there are companies, not that I would go to Dick's Burgers anyway. But here in Seattle, we have Dick's Burgers. It's like a really popular local burger joint and they have a sign outside that says, if you're not going to wear a mask, you have to show your vaccine card to us. Doesn't that violate HIPAA? That blows my mind.

[01:27:23] Dr. David Brownstein: Show us your papers.

[01:27:24] Ashley James: Right, show us your papers. And then I went to Chipotle a few days ago and they have a sign up that says if you're, you don’t have to wear a mask. I'm like, oh, all I read was you don't have to wear a mask so I walked in and the manager’s like, wear your mask. Where’s your mask? I just pointed at the sign, I'm like, your sign says I don't have to wear a mask. I mean, they can't. It's against HIPAA violations to ask me medical questions like that, at least that's my understanding. 

But the fact that we're being pushed in this direction by businesses, by the media, and we're being peer pressured. The way they're doing it, they're getting your friends and family to pressure you. I've heard from several people that they're feeling pressured by their friends and family. I can't go to my bridge club or I can't go to my book club until I get it. Why in the world were you even discussing your private business? That's private. Your medical decisions are private, and yet the way that they're marketing it is that we got to do it right now.

You mean, you want the entire population to be in a drug trial? We don't know the long-term efficacy and safety of this. What is going on? Again, very Orwellian. I'm very concerned for people.

[01:29:04] Dr. David Brownstein: Concerned for our country.

[01:29:05] Ashley James: I'm very concerned for all countries. Look at Israel where people's freedoms are completely taken away because if you don't have your vaccine passport, you can't even practically be a citizen. This is what we're hearing is that all rights are being taken away, it's very scary. I keep hearing about they still have outbreaks there because again, trial, right?

Maybe you could speak to explaining vaccines because I think this would be good for those of us to understand the difference between marketing and reality. Marketing is vaccines are this bulletproof, all of a sudden, you won't get the infection. You won't get the infection. You won't be infected, but that's not what vaccines are. Vaccines don't stop you from getting an infection.

[01:30:03] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, a true vaccine should. The measles vaccine should stop you from getting measles. The chickenpox vaccine should stop you from getting chickenpox. This vaccine has never been shown to stop you from getting coronaviruses. In the original studies, they were shown to stop severe illness and hospitalization. It has never been shown to stop transmission, and it's never been shown to stop you from getting sick.

So this is different from other vaccines that we've had, and that's why you're seeing some places on the internet where they're saying, well, it's really not a vaccine. It's a genetic device or the kind of medical device to modify your genetic material. But this is a whole different mechanism that they're titling a vaccine, which is different from how we're used to vaccines as we know them. 

If we take the chickenpox vaccine, I was a resident when the chickenpox vaccine came out and that really stopped chickenpox. Kids don't get chickenpox anywhere near what they used to get it. This is different. This one's different. It is a grand experiment and we'll see. There are many people out there who feel like you do, they don't want to be part of any big pharma experiments. But this is where we are. I think if people were more aware of that, we see some more hesitation and some more thinking about this. Right now, people aren’t thinking, they're just reacting in fear that that’s the only way to protect themselves.

[01:31:58] Ashley James: Yeah, that's the sad part is buying into the fear. So we don't need to buy into the fear, we need to educate ourselves. Knowledge is power. The more knowledge we have, the more we can utilize the more tools we have in our tool belt. 

Slow down, take a deep breath, take in the information. Anytime you make a medical decision, one of my friends was deciding whether she was going to get radiation or not after chemotherapy, or when she was deciding to do chemotherapy or not. They want to just rush her in and they tell her all statistics that make her afraid so that she'll take immediate action. I thought that was very manipulative. 

Let her take a deep breath, let her do the research, and let her decide for herself. They wanted to schedule, okay, we're going to start your chemo tomorrow. If you don't do this, you're going to die. Do you really need to give someone that just found out they have cancer scare tactics? You don't do that, that's not helping. Let the person Take a deep breath and give them true informed consent, give them all the information—the good, the bad, the ugly, and also tell them about alternative therapies. 

But we're not experiencing true informed consent with this drug trial because we definitely don't know all the side effects yet. People are still reporting to VAERS, and that's even being manipulated. And then they're not allowing physicians to practice any kind of alternative therapies, so we can't really get true informed consent. It just boggles my mind. 

But what we can do is we can get your book, A Holistic Approach to Viruses, and we can learn what's really working to support the structure and function of the body to fight viruses. Thank you for writing this and thank you for coming here and sticking your neck out. They're trying to silence you and you're sticking your neck out. I love that you found a workaround by publishing your book. I'm excited that this information is getting out there.

[01:34:05] Dr. David Brownstein: Well, thank you for having me, Ashley. It was a nice talk. Hopefully, we can take the fear knob and start turning it down and then we can become rational people again and make better healthcare decisions. 

[01:34:20] Ashley James: Absolutely. And listeners should go to your website, drbrownstein.com. And also, I love this because you've been doing this for so long. You bought these really good URLs, centerforholisticmedicine.com. I love it. Those are your websites, and of course, the links to everything that Dr. David Brownstein does including his books will be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. We're definitely going to have you back on the show because there are so many rabbit holes we could go down with all the information and all your wonderful books. I'm very excited to have you back.

[01:34:54] Dr. David Brownstein: Thank you.

 

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Iodine: Why You Need It. Why You Can't Live Without It. 5th Edition

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Ashley James

Health Coach, Podcast Creator, Homeschooling Mom, Passionate About God & Healing

Ashley James is a Holistic Health Coach, Podcaster, Rapid Anxiety Cessation Expert, and avid Whole Food Plant-Based Home Chef. Since 2005 Ashley has worked with clients to transform their lives as a Master Practitioner and Trainer of Neuro-linguistic Programming.

Her health struggles led her to study under the world’s top holistic doctors, where she reversed her type 2 diabetes, PCOS, infertility, chronic infections, and debilitating adrenal fatigue.

In 2016, Ashley launched her podcast Learn True Health with Ashley James to spread the TRUTH about health and healing. You no longer need to suffer; your body CAN and WILL heal itself when we give it what it needs and stop what is harming it!

The Learn True Health Podcast has been celebrated as one of the top holistic health shows today because of Ashley’s passion for extracting the right information from leading experts and doctors of holistic health and Naturopathic medicine

 

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