In this week’s episode renowned cardiologist Dr. Boon Lim returns for Part 2 of the conversation with Emily Kate Stephens, presenting three clarifying analogies to represent a wider view of the impact of acute stress on the autonomic nervous system, and its role in complex chronic illness.

Dr. Boon Lim uses the poem The Blind Man and the Elephant to exemplify the need for us and our medical practioners to approach chronic illness by looking at the body and mind as a whole rather than individual parts. He describes the body affected by Long Covid as a factory for which we need to find the off-switch. And he sets out the image of a gazelle in long grass: constantly on high alert anticipating attack, as a way for us to understand the way in which our bodies have been pushed into chronic stress.

Dr Lim explains the way in which returning to homeostasis requires balancing of our sympathetic and parasympathetic systems and the consequences of imbalance. He calls for us to consider the idea of stress reduction for alleviating some of the negative consequences of post-viral illness and we discuss the power of the breath, mindfulness and acceptance, not simply as a way to calm the mind, but to influence the entire body and nervous system.

Dr Lim is able to demonstrate the scientific basis for what some might consider to be more esoteric ideas, discussing the ENO’s Breathe Programme, which carried out one of the first RCTs performed in Long Covid, alongside the way in which HRV monitoring can show the changes driven by such strategies. Despite his heavily medical credentials, Dr Lim endeavours to grasp the mental and emotional aspects of chronic illness, whilst highlighting the importance of collaboration between patients and healthcare providers to achieve progress.

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Director for the Center for Healthy Aging Research at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Dr William Hu is a cognitive neurologist: he studies and treats patients whose thinking is affected by disease.

Typically Dr Hu was dealing with Alzheimer's and related dementias in patients who were cognitively ageing whilst otherwise healthy, and those whose cognition was affected by their illness such as HIV or MS. But since the Covid pandemic began, Dr Hu started seeing large numbers of patients whose ‘brain fog’ was sufficiently severe that they suspected they had early onset Alzheimer's, along with those who knew that their cognition, memory and thinking had demised to a degree that they were aware of it, but standard testing was inconclusive.

In this week’s episode we discuss the way in which Hu and his team at Rutgers used brain imaging and analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which enabled them to identify changes in the brain of patients with brain fog. Their study, published in Cell, revealed that they could see that these patients had the markers of persistently activated immune function in the brain. Whilst they were unable to detect SARS CoV-2 virus in the CSF, their findings correlate with the theory that those with Long Covid have viral persistence, and they were also able to see that this brain activation was no longer present in those that recovered.

We talk through the implications of these findings for treatment and research into other chronic conditions, and discuss methods that might assist the immune system in recovering from these cognitive impairments and alleviate symptoms. And reassuringly, Hu’s ideas involve trials in treatments that already have FDA approval for other conditions, meaning perhaps resolution is not so far out of reach.

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