Can natural remedies help with Long Covid microclots?
...and platelet hyperactivation?
At the end of my last post, I asked a simple but somewhat provocative question:
Are there any natural remedies or over-the-counter (OTC) products or ingredients that can help Long Covid patients with their health and recovery?
This is a simple and to me a logical question because natural products - natural extracts, their components, and other natural ingredients - have served as medicinal therapies for thousands of years. It’s only been in the last 100 years that we have stopped using natural products and extracts as remedies for ailments. Natural products have also served as the starting point for drug discovery in pharmaceutical industry, especially in areas such as cancer, anti-bacterial, and antiviral drugs.
This question is provocative because in the era of Big Pharma, the FDA, and Science driven by NIH funding, the Scientific and Medical Establishments look down on natural remedies and supplements. The FDA has regulations about what you can and can’t say about supplements and their effects. Most physicians and scientists will scoff at the suggestion of taking a natural remedy or supplement. To be fair, many medical conditions do require pharmaceutical drugs because there is no existing or efficacious natural remedy. And usually, a pharmaceutical drug is more potent and effective than a natural product or supplement. We all have our current high quality of life and standard of living due to pharmaceutical drugs.
But we should always remember that natural products, extracts, and supplements do exist. They are biologically active. They have specific mechanisms of action just like drugs. Though natural products do often have multiple mechanisms of action, which can be good in some cases and bad in others. And though they are less potent than pharmaceutical drugs, they can still help support people’s health.
Over the course of sharing information on Covid and Long Covid for the past few months, many people have asked me about whether specific natural products or supplements will work to help treat their Long Covid symptoms or underlying causes.
Whenever someone asks about a natural product or supplement, I always look at the known mechanisms of action, see if there is any scientific literature to support the biological effect, and then give the people as much information as possible.
As you can imagine, the list of natural products and supplements that I’ve been asked about is really long. Much longer than I can cover in one article.
So today, I want to refine my previous question and narrow the scope to something more tractable:
Are there any natural remedies or over-the-counter (OTC) products or ingredients that can help with microclotting and platelet hyperactivation in Long Covid?
There are a few ways to go about answering that question…
If you go to Google and search for “natural product anticoagulants” or “natural product platelet activation inhibitors”, you get lots of websites - like this one (Link):
And when you read these websites, they give you long lists of natural products and supplements that are “anticoagulants” or “blood thinners”:
For each one of the natural products and supplements listed, these websites give some vague information about how they impact blood clotting or platelets or bleeding, but not anything in-depth and most times without references to the scientific literature.
After reviewing a bunch of these types of websites, I have found some common problems that they all suffer from:
Interchanging terms that are not identical. The terms “anticoagulant”, “blood thinner”, and “platelet activation inhibitor” are NOT interchangeable. “Anticoagulants” and “platelet activation inhibitors” are two specific mechanisms of action that are NOT the same and cannot be interchanged. And “blood thinner” is a much less precise term. To describe all “anticoagulants” and/or “platelet activation inhibitors” as blood thinners is not really accurate.
Not talking about actual mechanisms of action. Rarely (if ever) are any of the natural products and supplements listed classified as an anticoagulant or platelet activation inhibitor. And none of these types of websites offer any information on molecular level mechanisms of action.
Not providing relevant scientific literature references. Sometimes these websites do try to cite references for the claims they make. But often the studies that are cited do not actually support the claim being made. They may be about the specific natural products and supplement, but the reference doesn’t provide scientific evidence for the claim.
While this information points in the right direction, it doesn’t really answer the question of whether these natural products and supplements can actually help with microclots and platelet hyperactivation.
The other way to answer the question above is to use a rigorous scientific approach.
That starts by going to scientific databases (like PubMed) and doing searches for natural products that are anticoagulants or platelet activation inhibitors. And then trying to find and match data showing that a specific natural product or extract or supplement ingredient inhibits a specific molecular target with a specific mechanism of action that’s important in the Coagulation Cascade (for an anticoagulant) or Platelet Activation pathway (for a platelet activation inhibitor).
Here are figures to remind you of what those two pathways look like:
Applying this rigorous scientific process to all of the natural products and supplements in the bullet list above obviously takes a ton of time and energy. But it’s what has to be done to understand whether natural remedies can be used to help with recovery from Long Covid.
And remember, as we learned from Triple Anticoagulant Therapy, you need a specific combination of three drugs to treat Long Covid - an anticoagulant with two platelet activation inhibitors. And all three compounds need to have the right mechanisms of action. To replicate the effects of Triple Anticoagulant Therapy would require identifying three natural products/supplements with the same mechanisms of action.
So answering the question “Are there any natural remedies or over-the-counter (OTC) products or ingredients that can help with microclotting and platelet hyperactivation in Long Covid?” with a serious and accurate scientific answer is a process that takes time.
I’m currently working through that process right now.
But due to the powers that be in the Scientific and Medical Establishments (and the FDA), I need to communicate that information to you someplace a little more private, rather than just blasting the information out on the internet.
So if you’re curious and want to see what I find out next about natural remedies for Long Covid, I need you to do one of two things (or both):
Come join my private Email List
Come join my Road to Long Covid Recovery Facebook Group
These are both closed, private environments where I can share scientific information without risking censorship or blowback that might happen from just posting this information on the open internet.
Many of you are probably asking yourself “Why should I join your email list when I already subscribe to your Substack?”.
A few reasons:
In order to make content private and closed access on Substack, I’d have to put it behind a paywall. I don’t want to do that - I don’t think people should have to pay for this information.
While I do have your email address if you already subscribe to my Substack, I think it would be wrong to add you to my private email list without your permission.
So if you want to hear what’s next on the topic of natural remedies that can help with microclotting and platelet hyperactivation in Long Covid, please: