This is an excerpt from my substack, pinned to my profile.

I have been living with "long covid" whether you want to believe it or not. It's not just a psychosomatic disease, it's not just all in my head. I know, because I've altered my mental states quite a bit these last few years, and just getting high or drunk hasn't been enough to suddenly fix my body.

What I am confident saying is that this is a multi-layer disease, where damage to the cells leads to dysfunction of tissues, which leads to problems with the nervous system, with organs, and with digestion. I've gone through almost every supplement regimine, diet, biohack and herbal treatment, done a lot of therapy, spiritual work, somatic movements, graded exercise, deconditioning therapy, I've tried most of it.

And while last year in the spring-summer I got a lot better, eventually I crashed back when I took the supplements away. I've been bringing them back in strategically, using how I feel and what I know about body systems to figure out what the "bare minimum" I need in order to stay healthy is. It's been 6 months, but for the last 6-weeks I've been on a steady recovery path, so I think I'm close. I know the basics to deal with at least me, and my wife's, version of "long covid".

And then, I ran across a random comment about how nanoplastics harm the tubulin inside cells. I’ve been fascinated by tubulin and how our cellular skeleton works, so I read up more about it.

Specifically, nanoplastics are able to enter our individual cells and cause all sorts of damage:

• Muscle cells: nanoplastic uptake alters cytoskeleton, induces senescence, mitochondrial damage.
• Neurons: Microtubule disruption enhances neuroinflammation, cell death.
• Hepatocytes: Larger microplastics worsen oxidative stress, cytoskeletal harm.

And I noticed a pattern, this is a lot of the damage we seem to be seeing in Long Covid.

So, I looked at how we treat microplastics and nanoplastics using conventional medicine, alternative medicine, and diet:

• Soluble and insoluble fiber
• Cruciferous vegetables
• Kimchi, specifically with the CBA3656 strain
• Polyphenol-rich foods
• Glutathione or N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC)
• Omega-3 Fatty Acids
• Milk Thistle
• Cilantro, Chlorella, Celery
• Dandelion Root
• Acupuncture
• TCM Herbs (Coptis. Forsythia) to “clear heat”
• Lymphatic movement, gua sha, massage, slow dance
• Water filtration, no heating food in plastic containers
• Sweating: sauna, hot showers, exercise if tolerated

I realised, this is basically two-thirds of what my “bare minimum protocol” is shaping up to look like. In reading up on clearing micro/nanoplastics, I saw most of my long covid recovery list appear. Make sure the diet is low-histamine, add in some anti-histamines as needed, clean water and electrolytes, minerals, methyl b-vitamins, some mitochondrial supplements, and low-doses of some polyphenol-rich cannabis, and that’s it.

What I’ve found through elimination testing to heal my “long covid” also appears to match the effective treatment of nanoplastic overwhelm really closely. This is still a correlation, not a causation. But I think it’s a really interesting idea, and might explain why the specific “viral cause” of things like mitochondrial damage are still unclear.

We know that Covid can attack and enter nearly any cell in the body, and we know it causes vascular inflammation and damage. What if Covid damages the machinery responsible for collecting and clearing micro/nanoplastics and they build up over time? This might explain the 6-12 week post-infection onset of long covid symptoms, it takes a while for the nanoplastics to build up. The damage was done, the symptoms come later.

As of yet, there appear to be no human studies on the amount of nanoplastics in the body before and after Covid infection, and there are no studies on the amount of nanoplastics in long covid sufferers. There is a study showing inhaled microplastics given to mice with covid infection both dysregulates the immune system, and the infection slows their ability to clear microplastics.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11128561/

If this is true, the implications for future nanoplastic health concerns are quite concerning.

• It could explain the sudden rise in disability rates. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01074597
• It could explain the rise in cancers, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, and even childhood dementia. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/whats-behind-alarming-rise-old-203152947.html
• It could explain why everyone is getting so polarized, brain damage like this is linked to more insular, tribal behaviour. A similar thing happened in the late 1920’s, tuberculosis, influenza, and smallpox wiped through the population and gave rise to fascism. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35080961/
• It could also explain why the kidneys, liver, pancreas, and lymphatic systems are such a mess, if your body is clearing micro/nanoplastics all the time. https://www.helixbiotech.com/post/how-are-lipid-nanoparticles-cleared-from-the-body

And it may be the reason why scientists are having such a damn hard time looking for the specific viral cause of a lot of this damage. It might not just be viral particles causing the damage, but further consequences of modern life building on viral damage.

• At the population-level, repeated Covid infections will likely make this worse.
• This damage to our cells and cytoskeleton might also be happening to our gut microbiome, kicking off bad shifts into an unhealthy gut profile.
• If microparticles are the problem, it's not just plastics, this makes wildefire smoke, soil erosion, higher particle load from mold blooms in the spring, etc. all potential dangers.
• Ironically, some mask types may make this worse, but without multiple layers of ventilation, filtration, uv sterilization, etc. they are likely worth it. Invest in the best masks you can.