The Functional Medicine Approach to the Coronavirus

Okay, so as a functional medicine provider, what do I recommend? I first and foremost recommend paying attention to the five foundations to health. That’s nutrition, sleep, exercise and movement, stress management and toxin reduction. Those five things are not only the foundations to health, they are also very supportive of the immune system. So now is the time to tighten up on all of your lifestyle factors because that will actually go a very long way.

Next, I want to address talking about any nutritional supplements, herbs, vitamins, minerals, antimicrobials, antioxidants and so on. The coronavirus is brand new guys, so we really have literally zero evidence, zero research to say that any of the standard recommendations actually work for the coronavirus specifically. Now, all we do have is research that has been done for other viruses like influenza and the rhinovirus for example. So all we can do is extrapolate data from them and kind of make assumptions about what might be helpful.

So, how I’d like to look at things is, if there are things you can do that are potentially helpful and not harmful, then I think that’s okay. But what I really, really want to impress upon everyone is that there is no single magical supplement of any kind that is going to prevent you from getting the coronavirus or any virus, actually. The best thing you can do is do good hygiene techniques to make sure that you don’t actually get the virus.

Now, that doesn’t mean that some of the recommended supplements like vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin A, zinc for example, can’t help shorten the viral illness or can’t help potentially lessen symptoms severity, but we really don’t know the answer for the coronavirus. So I definitely want to make sure that you guys completely understand that there’s no supplement regimen out there that’s going to give you complete immunity to the coronavirus or any virus that’s out there. So all we can do is do things that we know support our immune system.

Check out the other parts of this series below.

Part 1: COVID-19 Statistics

Part 2: What We Can Do To Prevent The Spread Of The Coronavirus

Part 3: Who’s At High Risk At Contracting The Coronavirus?

Part 4: Major Symptoms of Coronavirus COVID-19

Part 6: Supplements for Viral and Immune Support