Protect Yourself From Covid!

Dear friends,

What a year. 

First of all, Sister Sage Herbs stands behind the black community and all POC and refugees 100%. We all have a long way to go and a job to do and you have our love and support.

It's also important for everyone to stay healthy. As Covid continues to have devastating consequences all over the country, Jayne and I have been following several of our mentors. Most notably Steven Harrod Buhner and Dr. Paul Bergner.

I’d like to try and sum up a few of their ideas as it pertains to building your immunity, and optimizing your health so that you never get the virus in the first place. If you want to learn the actual statistics I’d encourage anyone to check out Dr. Bergner’s lecture from American Herbalist Guild last week. It’s about 2.5 hours long. I encourage you to sign up for the 5 part series- sliding scale $20-$50! He has been compiling stats from all the Herbalists that he knows asking what herbs they have been using. He has also been studying and treating respiratory symptoms for many years and going through the old journals of Dr's who successfully treated the 1918 Influenza Pandemic for the herbs they used.

Dr. Bergner’s single biggest recommendation to protect yourself against Corona is: Vitamin D (4000-7000 iu). To be clear, Vitamin D doesn’t cure Covid19, but helps strengthen the cell walls providing proteins to fight off all infections. The statistics of patients who tested positive for Covid -19 with low vitamin D levels are staggering.

Taking Vitamin D is also an easy way to help optimize your health at the very least, since we typically don't get nearly enough. Your body requires sun to create Vitamin D, so those who spend a lot of time indoors or have more melotonin will be more likely to be Vitamin D deficient. That includes... well, a whole lot of people!

Have a look for yourself. This is a screen shot from his talk:

As you can see in the slide, Vitamin D levels greater than 30 ng/ml show significantly reduced Covid-19 severity (The name of the Vitamin D test your Dr will order is called a 250HD3 and he recommends taking the higher end of the Vitamin D dose for about 6 days or until the levels stay above 40 ng/ml in the blood).

Other recommendations from the talk:  Check for deficiencies of Zinc, Vitamins A, C, E, Selenium, Omega 3 fish oil, rhodiola, elderberry, and echinacea. (Hey we make that one!)  

Do Not overload with the supplements as a preventative, but make sure you have the recommended amounts. Individual Vitamin supplementation is recommended rather than a multivitamin, and he recommended capsules over tablet form.

He did state emphatically that if you have an auto-immune disease you SHOULD NOT take immune enhancing herbs- like the echinacea and the Elderberry (Sambucus).

Perhaps the easiest way to protect your respiratory system: Garlic. Eat it until it comes out of every pore of your body! That’s how you know your system is working...

Combined with a healthy diet, good sleep schedule, and daily exercise, we feel these are easy additions to optimizing your health. So buy your family a big bottle of Vitamin D, and buy one for someone with other risk factors such as diabetes and heart conditions... It might take a week for the levels to rise up. Dr. Bergner says it might even save someone's life! 

Stay safe everyone! Peace & Love to all,

Marc Fendel (& owner Jayne)

P.S. This is information concerning the healthy person who may have been exposed, or a compromised person who is at high risk in other ways. Once there is the onset of fever and chills you will be moving on the deeper acting herbs or the hospital depending on the severity. He also advises that this progression can come on suddenly. And (so much info) another thing to recognize is that an older person has a much lower resting temperature, so a low grade fever for them may be under 98*. It might be a good idea for us to create a temperature diary to track our normal temps so we have something to compare it to later if we start feeling other symptoms.