Herbal support for COVID-19 with Andrew Bentley

Herbal support for COVID-19 with Andrew Bentley
Andrew: Herbally I've been doing a combination of usnea, lemonbalm and elderberry, which are all things that have some relevance to how viruses reproduce in the body and how the body responds to the viruses.
And in the case of elderberry might keep the virus from entering the cells, in the case of usnea might also help the immune response to be more competent to the viruses. And that's something that's again relatively uncomplicated.
And I've been making that compound up and giving it to people as sort of a general immune support for the present situation. And I've probably given out many hundreds, maybe thousands of bottles of that since this has been going on.
You're listening to Plant Love Radio episode number 74.
Lana: Hello friends. I hope you're doing well. Over the past year, you've heard quite a bit about the new Corona virus - statistics, consequences, ways to prevent and treat it. And today I want to share with you one of my latest interviews with a clinical herbalist, Andrew Bentley.
Andrew is a fourth generation herbalist in Lexington, Kentucky, where he has practiced and taught for nearly 30 years. Since the beginning of the pandemic, he has helped hundreds of people who were affected by COVID-19. He has given talks about it in the community before the cases began and online since. And recently he spoke as a panelist on the subject at the American Herbalist Guild 2020 virtual symposium.
During our today's conversation, we talk about nutrients used to support your immune system as a preventative measure, herbal medicines used in mild cases of COVID-19 and how to use plants during the recovery and for sequella of this illness.
For links and information resources mentioned in today's episode, please head over to https://plantloveradio.com/74.
Hello, Andrew, how are you doing?
Andrew: Doing good. Thank you
Lana: Excited to have you here on the show. We're discussing a really interesting topic. We met several years ago at one of the herbal conferences. And I've been following your work ever since.
And a little while ago you presented on the topic of herbal support for COVID-19 at the American Herbalist Guild - there was a panel there. And then recently you shared a book about everything you have learned in your own practice. Andrew's journey to becoming an herbalist
And we will talk in detail about this topic, but before we do, I wanted to ask you to share a little bit on how you became an herbalist, how you got started and what excited you the most about this path?
Andrew: Okay. Well, I got started learning about herbal medicine because it was something that my family has always done and I learned from my father and his father when I was young. And then when I grew up, I was using herbal medicine. I was kind of traveling a lot and working with people who maybe didn't have access to conventional medicine and finding that herbal medicine was really helpful for them.
And then at around the same time, some of the laws around herbalism changed, made it more explicitly legal to use herbs to help people. And so at that time I started trying to make a living, doing it in the nineties. And so I've been practicing as a clinical herbalist since then. Yeah, it's been lifelong for me. Sort of something that I was in a sense born into, but also chose to make it my main thing.
Lana: That's great. Tell us a little bit more about your father and your grandfather. So they were herbalists as well?
Andrew: Yes, it wasn't their main way of making a living, but it was a role that they had in the community. People knew they could go to for help with plant medicines and then my great grandmother it was her main thing that she did. And That side of the family had been herbalists for a very long time. I have books that they wrote in the 1600's. And at that time had already been herbalists for a long time.
So it was just sort of a tradition that was passed down in the family from a long time ago. And that we keep doing and that I have trained my daughter to do. And so, she's a young herbalist getting started now.
Lana: This is incredibly impressive. So tell us a little bit about your practice right now.
Andrew's practice
Andrew: So my practice, generally speaking is basically primary care with herbal medicine. And so I have people come to see me for all sorts of different things. And rather than trying to treat diseases, I'm trying to support structures and functions in the body. But sometimes that amounts to about the same thing. And sometimes it's very different, but I have people come and see me for all sorts of different reasons. And I have a little clinical practice, which I'm here sitting in. You can probably see on the zoom meeting, I have shelves and shelves of Amber Glass bottles with different herbal tinctures in them. And then I have another area where I have a microscope in a centrifuge and some other things for assessment type of purposes and an exam table and a chair for people to sit in while they're talking to me. And so basically, it's a lot like a doctor's office but with herbal medicine. And I've got a whole community of people who come see me, I've been practicing here in Lexington for close to 30 years. And so families and sometimes generations of families that have come to see me.
Lana: And you teach as well, right? You teach in your community on the topic of herbal medicine as well.
Andrew: I do, I do. For a long time, I was teaching herbal medicine to medical students at the University of Kentucky college of medicine as part in their pharmacology class but that class no longer exists. But I did that from 2003 to I think 2016. Now I offer classes through the parks department where I take people around and show them what's growing in different green spaces in Lexington different forest spaces that are around town and I also do some or, well, not so much this year, but usually do classes in my clinic where people come in and we'll talk about a particular health topic. And then I also speak to some like health and nutrition groups that meet regularly. So I do a fair bit of of educating in my community.
Early thoughts on new virus
Lana: That's great. Thank you. So let's talk a little bit about 2020. So the year has not been an easy one for most of us. And I want to ask you to talk a little bit of what you have seen in practice and what you have learned, and also about that ebook that you have published recently and what you included in your teaching and writing there.
Andrew: Yeah. So at first, in the very beginning of the year, it was all a rumors and speculation and news from afar. And we were hearing about how there was this outbreak of this new virus, but it hadn't gotten here yet. And so at that point back in February I had a class where I got a group of people together and talked about the virus and what we could expect from it and what we knew and what we didn't know so far.
And Since then we've learned a lot, but the basics of kind of stayed the same. I mean, it's a lot like other viral respiratory infections in some ways and different in some ways. What you would usually see with viral respiratory illnesses is, the flu like illness and sometimes progressing to pneumonia. And the part that you wouldn't necessarily expect from that, the part that's different is that it affects a lot of other systems of the body. It has a lot of people have long-term effects from it. And these are things that, as an herbalist I've seen for years as after effects of other inflammatory illnesses. Like some people, a small percentage of people who get Epstein-Barr virus get these same types of things like fatigue, memory loss various other things that stick around for a long time.
So in some ways it's similar, not identical to that. And in some ways it's a lot like other viral upper respiratory infections in a lot of people. It's the one thing that I think has been so surprising about this, although it's not all that surprising, but it's been a hard for a lot of people to get their minds around is the variation in presentation from one person to the next with this condition. And as herbalists we think about that sort of thing all the time, we think about how the person getting the illness matters in addition to just what the illness is. And I think that people who aren't in the holistic world maybe are not as used to thinking of it in those terms.
But we've seen that very strongly demonstrated with this. Some people don't get sick at all, some people get a mild illness and some people get a life threatening illness or they die, or they have permanent damage. And so it's extremely variable depending on not just what the virus is, but the terrain that the virus comes into, the set up in the person's body that becomes infected with it.
Lana: Absolutely. Our listeners, without a doubt familiar with the mainstream recommendations. So I know that even in your book you talked about them as well, but I want to pick your brain a little bit more about the Strategies that you recommend that are more related to holistic health and herbal medicine.
Nutrients
Recommendations for prevention
So perhaps we could begin with the primary strategy for prevention. And your approach with that was the support of the immune system. So can you talk a little bit more about that and what are some of the nutrients and herbs that you typically recommend?
Andrew: Okay. Sure. So in the ebook, I split it up into general measures for prevention, which is sort of like social distancing, masking, all that sort of thing that everybody's heard a million times by now. And then I had one that was special measures for prevention that was more like nutritional and herbal.
And the biggest nutrient that we've seen a lot of evidence about is vitamin D and it was kind of something that a lot of people suspected early on, especially people who have been kind of following the research on vitamin D up to this point and how it affects immunity. But then there's been quite a bit of emerging information coming out many of which are cited as references in the book. About how people who are deficient in vitamin D have vastly worse outcomes or a much higher chance of having bad outcomes with this condition. And so vitamin D supplementation is a really good thing. Vitamin D can be a hard thing to get enough of from your diet. If you live somewhere that's very sunny then you might get plenty of vitamin D through your skin, but if you're further North than say Atlanta, that's probably not even possible.
If you're somewhere that's far enough North, that it actually has a winter, you probably don't get enough vitamin D just from sunlight. So it's something that you can safely take a lot of.
Since this has been going on, I've been taking 20,000 IUs a day of vitamin D. This is a dose that's been researched and it has been found to be pretty much uncomplicated. In some of the older research they were looking at vitamin D2, which does cause hyper vitamininosis, can cause problems if you get too much of it. Vitamin D3 - you can take a lot more of it without having to worry about that and 20,000 IUs a day appears to be basically a perfectly safe dosage. It's not expensive, it's readily available. So I've been using that and that's helpful.
Another nutrient that does have some research to back it's relevance in this situation is zinc. Zinc is something that's been researched as it relates to other respiratory illnesses for. It doesn't make a huge difference. It doesn't appear to make as big of a difference as vitamin D, but it does make some difference. And of course, zinc, you need a very tiny amount of in your system. It's probably less likely that people are deficient in zinc in the first place. Whereas a lot of people are probably walking around with a less than ideal amount of vitamin D in their system. But taking some extra zinc is pretty much harmless and might be helpful.
Herbal preventative recommendations
And then herbally I've been doing a combination of usnea, lemonbalm and elderberry, which are all things that have some relevance to how viruses reproduce in the body and how the body responds to the viruses.
And in the case of elderberry might keep the virus from entering the cells, in the case of usnea might also help the immune response to be more competent to the viruses. So I've been taking all of those on a daily basis.
And that's something that's again relatively uncomplicated, not something you have to worry about a lot of side effects. If you take too much of the lemon balm, it can make you drowsy. But the answer to that is just take less than that.
And I've been making that compound up and giving it to people as sort of a general immune support for the present situation. And I've probably given out many hundreds, maybe thousands of bottles of that since this has been going on.
Lana: Okay. Great. Thank you. So a lot of our listeners probably familiar with elderberry and probably with lemon balm. Can you talk a little bit about Usnea? So what it is and why you find it so helpful?
Andrew: Okay. Yeah. Usnea is a lichen that grows on trees. It's sort of an organism, that's a combination of algal and fungal tissues working together. And it contains some substances that you would find in other medicinal mushrooms like alpha and beta glucans, which are supportive to immune function. It also contains some lichen compounds. The one that's been most researched is called usnic acid and in a petri dish usnic acid keeps viruses from replicating. Whether it does that in the human body is kind of iffy. It's at least expectorant and anti-inflammatory. So if you have phlegm, it'll help you to break up that phlegm. And if you have inflammation in your respiratory system, it will help to reduce that inflammation. And really a lot of what you see as far as bad outcomes go has to do with inflammation.
If your lungs are not getting inflamed, then you're going to be okay. And if they are, then you're going to have a hard time breathing and you're going to possibly have pneumonia and so forth. So it has at least some relevance through those channels and probably contains some other things that we don't know about too, but it has a long history of use for febrile and respiratory types of conditions.
Lana: Andrew, how would an average listener get usnea? Is it a tincture, a tea? Can you tell us about that?
Andrew: Usually you can find it as a tincture. And I also outline a process for making a tincture of it in my book that's a little more full spectrum in terms of what it takes out of the usnea. But it's got some things in it that are not soluble in water. So just making a tea out of it would leave some things behind. But yeah, tinctures are definitely something that are commercially available that you could probably find it someplace in sells that sort of thing.
And I also mentioned in the book that it's something that can easily be sustainably gathered in some places and not at all in others. Here in Kentucky, for example, usnea is not something you find a whole lot of. In the Pacific Northwest there's tons of it. So it is like all the herbs has to be carefully gathered to be sustainable.
Lana: Great. Thank you so much for this reminder. So let's move on to the next step. In your book you're talking about prevention and then mild cases. What are some of the strategies? What are you thinking about when someone shows up or calls and tells you they have COVID?
Strategies for mild cases of COVID
Andrew: So usually at that situation, I'm trying to keep them from getting worse, keep them from developing pneumonia or something like that. So I keep doing all the things that I just said, but also thyme, which can be used as a tea or a tincture. Thyme leaf is very helpful. It's aromatic expectorant, helps to break up fluid in the lungs, if there is any and that's really useful. And that again is something that I've been using forever for respiratory conditions that might have a similar manifestation. It's nothing that's unique or new to this particular one, but it does appear to be very helpful.
And along with that, if someone's having a lot of coughing, I've been using cherry bark syrup or, or tincture sometimes. But cherry bark as a cough suppressant, which usually in my practice, I don't use cough suppressants a lot because they're just covering up the symptom, but in this case, a lot of people are having a dry cough. There's nothing for them to cough up and it's irritating and keeps them from being able to sleep.
So giving them something that suppresses that symptom so that they can sleep is actually helps them to heal, helps them to recover. So that's something that I've been using very frequently, the thyme I've been using for just about everybody.
And then other anti-inflammatories as well - things to bring down inflammation, which could include something like ginger for instance that there are a lot of different ones. Another one that I talk about some is a butterfly weed also known as pleurisy root Asclepias tuberosa and that's a pretty helpful plant for the situation, and for that stage.
Lana: That's great. Thank you. So antiinflammatories and once again, the support of the immune system.
Quick break
Quick reminder for you here. Andrew has recently put together his knowledge on the topic in an ebook on COVID-19 and herbal therapies.
To get a free download, please head over to the show notes at https://plantloveradio.com/74 to find a link to the ebook.
And now back to the conversation.
Sleep support
You mentioned that a lot of people cannot sleep and so anything else other than controlling their coughing that you would recommend.
Andrew: Well, so lemon balm will sometimes produce sleep and it's mild diaphoretic and it will help people to break a fever sometimes. So I've often been using that as a first thing to help people sleep. If they need something stronger or something just else, passion flowers, and other one that I've been using to help promote sleep. In some people, motherwort, especially if they're having heart racing or something like that, which a lot of people are along with it.
And that's something that's protective to the heart, which is sometimes affected by the process. And sometimes people have heart damage as an after effect. So that has something of a protective effect on the heart - the motherwort does.
Lana: That's great. Thank you. So if the symptoms do escalate. Is there a next step that you share with your clients or your readers in this particular case?
Andrew: So it's something that people have to be really careful with because it, anything that involves shortness of breath can go really badly, really quickly. So that's something to be conscious of. And whether it's appropriate for you to continue treating them is something to be cognizant of. And whether it's a possibility, I had one person early on who got very sick and who was a physician who told me that they weren't going to go to the hospital. They said that, , if I'm going to die, I can die right here where I am at. There are definitely things that I have used in more severe cases, although I'm not telling people that they should necessarily try and handle more severe cases at home. That's going to depend on a case by case basis, and it's really up to the sick person and not anybody else.
I've been using stronger anti-inflammatories in that situation - the butterfly weed that I mentioned is one of them. Sometimes I've been using wild yam as an anti-inflammatory and have seen some good results from that in a few occasions, I've used a likened called lungwort liken. Although it's not really commercially available or very widely available. And is kind of scarce in nature too.
So that's something that I've not been leaning on very hard, but it is something that I have used and have seen some impressive results from which there's also a case about that, that I wrote in the book. But yeah, so reducing inflammation, and again trying to keep up with supporting the immune response and keeping a fluid from accumulating.
Sometimes stronger expectorants - there's usually a point where people pass from having a dry cough to having a wet cough and where they're actually are starting to have some fluid in there. And at that point I've been using some different types of expectorants like pine or a Balsam fir, which are kind of in a way harsher, but more dramatic.
And I've also been using lobelia for people with a shortness of breath and difficulty breathing and have seen pretty good results from that sometimes. Sometimes it makes them feel more energetic. Sometimes it makes them Just having an easier time breathing. Too much lobelia can make someone lose their appetite and feel nauseous too. So you kind of don't want to take so much that you're making them throw up, at least I don't like to do it that way.
Some traditions of herbal medicine, like where I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, people would definitely use vomiting as a way to clear shortness of breath. To me that's a little too dramatic and a little too harsh for what I usually want, but it is a thing that sometimes works.
But mostly I've just been using lobelia at a dose that's less than that to help provide some relief from shortness of breath. Also use bitter orange extract for that, which contains some alkaloids that are stimulant and decongestant. And yeah, so those are both things that might interfere with people's appetite, but at least for a short term, that can be okay, what it means being able to breathe more easily.
Lana: Great. Thank you. So a couple of minutes ago, you touched upon the sequelae. Let's talk a little bit about this. What are some of the consequences that you have observed in your own practice and what do you do about them? COVID sequelae
Fatigue/exhaustion
Andrew: The thing I'm seeing the most frequently is really severe fatigue and seeing that in a lot of people. And in those people, I'm trying to rule out that there's any sort of heart dysfunction going on which usually there's not. Usually, they're just exhausted.
And so trying to treat that as though we're a sleep disorder, trying to give them something that will help them sleep that will produce a true state of sleep, like the passionflower or like the motherwort. And then have them do light physical exercise early in the day and sort of incrementally increase the amount of physical activity that they're doing.
Not increase it a whole bunch at once cause sometimes people will. They'll feel so much better and then they'll want to get a bunch of stuff done that they've been putting off because they were too exhausted and then they'll overwork themselves and get exhausted again. So just having people very slightly, very incrementally increased the amount of physical activity that they're doing during the day, especially early in the day, and then giving them something to help them sleep at night, make sure that they're getting a full night's sleep. Often clears it up after a couple of weeks.
Endocrine abnormalities
Andrew: In some people, the endocrine system is badly effected. So I mentioned this about how the virus interacts with the renin angiotensin aldosterone system because of the receptor site that it uses to bind to the cells. And so I think a lot of the sequelae that we're seeing are actually at least partly a result of that, including things with the heart, with the nervous system.
It's a very influential regulatory system in the body. And so that can cause all sorts of things from high blood pressure to irregular periods, headaches then the nervous system stuff often includes difficulties with memory and cognitive function. Sometimes that gets better when the sleep gets better, sometimes it doesn't.
And so one of the main thing I've been using for that are Rosemary and lion's mane. Rosemary helps with memory. It also contains some rosemarinic acid, which appears to have some effect against this particular virus. You can never be sure that a virus has completely gone from someone's system.
It appears to be, but if it weren't, that might help with it, if there's any lingering remnants of it and it also helps with the memory and then The lion's mane mushroom helps some with memory and cognitive function as well. And so I've been using both of those and they're both very well tolerated, very safe kinds of things. They don't have a lot of drug interactions or anything like that. So those are some things I've been using for that part of it.
I've been using licorice to try and adjust the endocrine system and licorice also interacts with the renin and angiotensin aldosterone system and appears to just sort of nudge it back in the other direction where it's supposed to be.
Lana: Okay. Great. Thank you. So you mentioned a lot of different plants. So once again, for someone that is potentially thinking more about prevention, usnea and lemon balm and the echinacea, elderberry. Am I correct?
Andrew: Yeah, he didn't really mention the condition much, but yeah, it can be helpful. So those are good things for prevention. And as I said, the thyme is a good thing to have around. It's something I think everybody should have around because it's good for all sorts of respiratory conditions in case you need it. Not necessarily to take on a daily basis if you're not experiencing any symptoms, though.
Lana: Okay. And I know that I have a favorite recipe of thyme infused honey. So perhaps even something like this that might be useful as well.
Resources for the audience
Andrew, have you seen a lot of other herbalists share their thoughts on COVID-19 where the treatment of prevention? Do you have any favorite resources or recommendations of companies that may be selling some of these products that you have mentioned? Anything in terms of the resources that could be helpful to our audience?
Andrew: Hmm, let me think about that one. There are certain companies like Gaia and Herb Pharm that I liked pretty well, but also there are a lot of small scale herbalists out there who are making medicine themselves. And I like to get things from people like that when I can, because they often have a direct relationship with the plants and they're gathering them and then making them into medicine and so forth.
But most of the stuff I use in my practice, I'm gathering from the woods and making into medicine here or having my daughter make it into medicine.
Lana: Great. And my original question was also any other herbalists that may be talking about this a lot or any of the resources that you find helpful in terms of really understanding what other herbalists the thinking in terms of prevention or treatment.
Andrew: Yeah. So a really good person to follow on Facebook or on Twitter is Robin Klein. She's constantly posting good information from all sorts of different sources. She follows a lot of scientists and virologists and she was one of the other panelists with me during the AHG panel on COVID-19. She's not a practicing herbalist right now, but she's got a background in herbal medicine and teaches at a college level. She's a biologist. So she's a really good person to follow. And let's see Paul Bergner who was the other panelist there.. He has some good stuff on Facebook about it.
Lana: Those are two great recommendations. Thank you. I will definitely include them in the show notes.
So Andrew as we're coming to an end of this conversation, I have two more questions for you.
How can our listeners continue learning from you and about you and perhaps get a copy of that e-book that you have published? And then my last question any parting thoughts for the audience either something that especially important for us to keep in mind or perhaps something that we still have not discussed.
Connecting with Andrew
Andrew: Okay. So as far as following me and finding out what I'm up to and stuff my Instagram is a good way to do that. My username on Instagram is clinical herbalist and have a link in my bio that will take you straight to the ebook. And that's free to anyone.
Well, something that we haven't discussed that I think is really important to keep in mind is that there's a lot of misinformation out there.
Some of it is wishful thinking. Some of it is malicious deception, but I think that it's really important to and what you've come across as far as information goes and ask when somebody's making an assertion, how do they know this? And they shouldn't be able to give you a good answer to that. And it's not something I've really seen with a lot of other public health crises recently around here. There's a lot of distrust, which I think has been fairly earned, but there's a lot of misinformation as well. And that it's important for people to be careful about that sort of thing.
Lana: Andrew. Thank you so much. Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for your experience. Thank you for your time. Really was very interesting to talk to you and to learn about all these different strategies and your experiences.
Andrew: Thanks for having me.
Thank you for listening!
Lana: Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you have enjoyed this conversation with Andrew Bentley. To get to the resources mentioned in today's episode, please head over to https://plantloveradio.com/74.
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