Activated Charcoal, Cytokine Storms and COVID-19 | Level Up

welcome thank you so much for joining us i'm dr leela lewis and this is level up i'm the host of level up and i'm also a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and the medical director of adventist world radio and it is a pleasure to have you back with us again today today's topic you are not going to want to miss out stay tuned for some amazing information as we discuss more closely the effects or perhaps possible beneficial effects of charcoal before we get started on this very interesting discussion in relation to covet 19 i again want to welcome my good friend my mentor pastor dwayne mckee dr dwayne mckee is the president of adventist world radio and it's a pleasure to have you with us again today thank you sir for joining us thank you so much dr lilly it's exciting to be here welcome to all of you to level up adventist world radio is so thrilled and excited to be able to present these medical programs to you i know as we talk about charcoal wow charcoal tonight we are going to be blessed shall we pray father in heaven thank you for jesus i bless i pray and and ask your blessings on each one who listens tonight and our doctors as they present i pray that we'll be blessed and learn how to have happy healthier lives in jesus name amen [Music] ladies and gentlemen we will be discussing some very interesting information kobit 19 has now been with us for seven or eight months it's had an effect here in the united states and globally it's changed our world we want to talk about some simple things that perhaps you might be able to do wherever you are in the world whether at home or in a small rural community that may have a benefit we want to investigate that scientifically and again i am excited to welcome my friends and mentors i want to welcome each of them dr zeno charles marcel pastor mark finley and dr steve lee it is a wonder and pleasure to be with each of you dr zeno is an internal medicine specialist he has spent many years practicing and studying natural lifestyle principles as well as many other aspects of internal medicine and he's an adjunct professor at loma linda university thank you for joining us dr zeno it's my pleasure and we have again dr steve lee he is the assistant director for the ear nose and throat department at lumbal india university my alma mater he is also a very accomplished gentleman he has his phd and we are very blessed to have you with us again dr lee thank you so much for joining us thank you and pastor mark pastor mark of course is my friend my mentor he is a very amazing gentleman he's written many books he has world-renowned as far as speaking skills are concerned and tonight again he's joining us to provide us with a holistic approach physical mental and emotional and most importantly spiritual healing thank you pastor mark for joining us as well thank you leah another exciting evening well we are looking forward to your input gentlemen uh specifically on this topic of charcoal and covid19 and i think before we get started on directly relating to this question i think we need to pull back to the the big overall picture you know we've been looking back at the 1918 pandemic for some time investigating the early seventh-day adventist institutions or sanitariums and some of these lifestyle principles that they incorporated to really bring about holistic health pastor mark can you just kind of give us a recap on these principles that have really been found scientifically to be beneficial especially in our situation with coven 19. well the 1918 pandemic killed probably about 50 million people and seventh avenue sanitariums entered into a number of very significant practices during that period of time adventist sanitariums have been around since the middle of the 19th century sometime after 1863 started early history of adventist health message and then on into the late 1960s rather and then into the 1870s and adventists developed their sanitarium system typically adventist sanitariums followed a number of basic principles adequate water the drinking of water abundant amounts six eight usually nine glasses a day ten glasses even at times for people who were suffering from various fevers hydrotherapy that we talked about um a vegetarian diet a plant-based diet fruits nuts grains vegetables adequate rest um eight hours a night exercise so these adventist sanitarians focused on the whole person they integrated spirituality into the healing process and interestingly enough we can look at some of these early sanitariums and see that they were using charcoal for a variety of reasons that we'll get into in our program tonight that's that's amazing dr zeno i i could tell you had something you'd like to add yeah i just want to uh to add even though we're talking about charcoal i want to make it clear and we should make it clear to anybody who is listening or watching that we're talking about activated charcoal we're not talking about the charcoal that people go out and buy the light fires and heat their tools and things like that we're talking about activated charcoal which um is is made uh from any uh substance like wood or or so or that's heated at very high temperatures right and and that uh creates a lot more porosity and a lot more surface area of of of the charcoal that's part of the activation process so that uh charcoal itself actually will be able to absorb or to hold on to small particles uh that may come its way whether it's toxins or viruses or things like that yeah thank you dr zeno you know dr lee before we delve into this idea if there is a relationship a beneficial relationship or not with charcoal and covid can you just kind of give us a a overview of where we're sitting with covid19 right now yeah so right now worldwide we're sitting at about 18 and a half million confirmed cases so those are just the ones that have been tested and confirmed so likely there's far more cases than that and then about 700 000 debts worldwide and the number one and number two country in terms of case numbers is no sitting at number one is the united states at close to five million confirmed cases and about 160 000 deaths and brazil is number two now at almost three million confirmed cases and about 100 000 deaths so a lot of the countries that we'd heard about earlier like italy and china and south korea they've kind of been left behind by um the usa and brazil unfortunately so it is a significant health crisis globally and especially in the countries that are hit experiencing it pretty hard right now which is brazil in the united states and i think also it would be beneficial to just very briefly review the phases of copic because charcoal as we'll begin our discussion may have a role in different parts or phases of the kovid cycle dr zeno could you just very briefly describe to us again the favorite sure uh the model that we that we use is uh kind of the three-phase model uh the first phase is where uh the person may or may not be exposed but they certainly not infected okay then comes uh the exposure with infection and that's the second phase the that is broken up into two uh segments the first one which might be three to five days or so is where the person is pre-symptomatic they have they have no symptoms if you were to test them you may not be able to test positive either during that period of time and then they convert into a situation where they are positive with or without symptoms but if they develop symptoms that usually would go for anywhere from uh day five to day 14 15 16. during that time some people will actually progress into stage three or or phase three and that's when they will need uh medical intervention hospitalization and they go from needing hospitalization to needing uh support ventilator support and then uh body failure and right now we're looking at about uh one percent or so a little bit more than one percent of individuals who go through that process uh end up with up with a the worst outcome which is death uh so it's by no means a death sentence if someone were to get uh covet right that's not it but at the same time uh we don't have any real way of being able to predict exactly who is going to follow the worst path and who would be following a better path so prevention is still the best approach and then early intervention with some of the newer things that we're that we're using and uh maybe you leela can talk about uh uh some of that of the things that that you might be doing in labor and delivery for people who come in with that uh in that phase well thank you dr zeno yes you know i i'm an ob gyn and so i work in the hospital specifically as a hospitalist or a laborist so i deal with the patients anybody who comes through the door in labor and delivery you know that's basically me and we are seeing an uptick in our pregnant women uh with covid particularly yesterday on my call last night we had a patient who was on the floor she's 35 weeks so she's almost term she's almost ready to deliver her baby she was sitting up she was on room air and within a couple hours she just crumped we call it crumping whatever you want to call it i mean she she she decompensated um so much so that within just a couple hours we had to bump her up to six liters of oxygen um we ended up having to transfer her to the intensive care unit uh the baby was having what we call late decelerations which are a sign that it's not getting the oxygen that it needs and we weren't sure if we would have to do an emergency c-section on a patient that's actively not able to compensate her respiratory drive as it is so currently what we're doing in labor and delivery is patients are coming in the door and if they're covered positive and they have any symptoms at all they're getting dexamethasone so it's a steroid 10 milligrams every day for 10 days um then we also give them if they're having increased respiratory symptoms they'll get rendustavir which we've heard a little bit about that we've talked about the antiviral medication um and it is a very difficult medication to get a hold of um there's so many there's such a demand for it if you will and then they get azithromycin because there is some research to show the antibiotic beneficial effect basically as a preventative measure for getting a secondary bacterial infection or and plasmapheresis which in and of itself is a little bit scary um in fact my patient uh just this morning ended up having a reaction to the transfusion which again put her at a higher risk so we're we're doing a lot of things but you know there's got to be something more which is what we want to talk about today before we get into that situation where we're in um these are these are important if you have a a worsening symptomatology you definitely need to go into the hospital but what we want to talk about is are there some things in addition to some of the other principles that we've talked about that perhaps might be a benefit as we're trying to prevent ourselves from needing to get into that situation where we have to take all these additional medications and supplementation so i'm looking forward to to you guys's insights today um pastor mark you know you have been looking and researching uh i believe the we've been talking about activated charcoal has this been utilized in the past or is this just a new idea well dr layla it's quite amazing when you begin to look back at the history of the use of activated charcoal the earliest that i could find was in the papyrus embers that the egyptians used in their medical text 1550 bc so that would have been about 3500 years ago the egyptians were using activated charcoal for three basic reasons number one odors they found that it absorbed odors and you read in the egyptian medical text about how activated charcoal absorbed odors secondly they were using it for intestinal issues there were a lot of parasitic issues and a lot of gastrointestinal problems and the egyptians were using it that way there's a third way that they were using it that we probably wouldn't want to use it today and that is after a person died they used it and it was part of like an embalming process it wasn't quite embalming but they used it to preserve the dead so we hope that people don't die so we don't have to use it that way but but it's very fascinating when you study also i was looking at some things by hippocrates the father of modern medicine who's basically said medical students learned there's a medical suit do no harm you know he really believed in the use of charcoal activated charcoal he used it for a number of varying uh cures um when you look for example at world war one the greek soldiers the egyptian soldiers and the american soldiers uh used activated charcoal when they perceived that there would be chemical attacks so you can see it pretty well used in a variety of usages down through history seventh-day adventists sanitariums have used it and let me just give you an example or two of the use of charcoal in early adventist history ellen white was a found one of the founders of the seventh adventist church one we believe wrote with prophetic insight and she was in melbourne australia and while she was there there was a phys there was a physician by the name of merrick kellogg and he was treating a young woman who had been at what we call a camp meeting which is really a spiritual renewal meeting and this young woman had fever then she had this terrible terrible stomach pain the it progressed to such an extent that kellogg thought he was going to lose her and that this is not dr john harvey killed america he thought it was going to lose the girl that she was going to die so he came down white said what should i do they got activated charcoal they made what they called a poultrus which is kind of a bandage they put the charcoal through it wrapped it around the girl's stomach she began to absorb that within 30 minutes she was sleeping and resting very very well so there are numerous examples like this in early adventist history both in adventist sanitariums uh and adventist [Music] in adventist homes in the usage of charcoal maybe i can add a little something to that mark back in the 1850s which is before we had adventist sanitariums the the british uh in their navy ships and uh uh with people who were who were wounded and also on land with people who had cancers they used charcoal poultices and that's been reported in the medical literature of the day and even in books by one of the famous surgeons of the time dr byrd who who described the the ample use of activated charcoal in all sorts of inflammatory conditions and and in rooms yes fascinating and i just want to make a quick plug for our viewers right now you can get this book and pastor mark just mentioned the author ellen white this book ministry of healing talks about among many of the things that we've talked about it does talk about charcoal so this can be as a free gift to you if you go to awr.org forward slash gift you can get your free copy so again we want to encourage you to do that so thank you gentlemen for bringing that up now there is one thing before i go to past our dr lee and talk about the current scientific potential relationship of what we're hearing i just want to demonstrate very quickly this is a bottle there's no relationship to our show but it's an idea of how you can purchase activated charcoal you can go online you can get it on amazon you can get all kinds of different brands out there so it's very easily accessible and we'll show you at the end how you can make a practical application now doctor and the key issue activated charcoal right just remember to let people know yes it says very clearly activated charcoal right here and i would open the bottle except it would make a very large black powdered mask and so we'll talk about that at the end if we have a few minutes for practical applications on how you can use it and how you don't want to use it because it can be very staining if you will okay well dr lee you know we've heard some historical benefits perhaps of charcoal can you bring us up to speed where we are in modern utilization of charcoal is it is it possibly utilized currently in our medical community and if so how and why well it's very commonly used um and the main place it's used in is in like drug overdoses or toxin overdose because of the large surface area that it has like dr but one teaspoon of charcoal has the surface area of a football field basically so that's a lot of surface area so basically when people come into the emergency room and they've ingested like too much of a toxin or overdosed on drugs then you can give them charcoal the charcoal will absorb a lot of the toxin or a lot of the chemicals or a lot of the drug and then it can't get absorbed by the body and then you just pass out charcoal so that's the most common use of charcoal it's very it's also widely used in a lot of um like cosmetics and drug preparations because it's a delivery mechanism and then there's a lot of like new things that they do like there i saw one paper that was published uh there's several papers actually published um in the early 2000s 2000 2010 talking about interestingly they were doing um hemofiltration and they were passing blood through a charcoal filter basically we can take out toxins in the blood and also cytokines in the blood now that's interesting dr sino what might be the significance of that you mentioned to us the phases of covid if it's taking cytokines out wouldn't that potentially help us in our latter phases of coding exactly because the the part of the problem at the end stage of of covet or the end stages or in parts of of the natural history of uh the condition is that we end up with this cytokine storm we end up with oxidative stress uh and in other words we have more oxidative or reactive oxygen species than we have antioxidants to counter to counteract that and uh and yes so this cytokine storm if if we can do something to actually remove some of those uh products from the blood then this will be helpful and uh but of course in order to do that you have to you have to actually run the blood against uh a charcoal filter so this is not something you do at home you know you don't buy a uh a bottle of uh of activated charcoal and uh and assume that you're gonna do hemoperfusion at home part of the the the reasoning if you will for being able to do but also yeah so yeah can you see me uh yeah i think your internet's coming are we still back on spotty yeah you're still with us are we back on i think your your internet's a little bit on are we back online yeah sort of i think so yeah so uh alyssa just cut this part out we'll just we'll just cut that section out so um along these lines of what dr zeno was just saying you know that's very interesting i i have to say what what we're talking about you know we're not going to necessarily be doing hemofiltration at home like we said but pastor mark you told me a story that just recently happened to you and you weren't using hemofiltration but you did do something else and it was a personal story do you mind sharing that with us well it's an interesting story i was on a preaching itinerary speaking in one of the northern states and i got bit by a spider and the arm swelled up quite badly and then i had this large red like target a uh red line began to go up my arm and one of our physicians was present in the meeting dr david derose and his wife sonia who is also a physician so i showed that to dave and he said look you really need to go to the hospital immediately and so i went got intravenous etc and did that i would go get intravenous come back and preach and go get intravenous come back and preach again and um but it wasn't making much progress so dr um dr derose and his wife said look let's try a charcoal poultice so they took powdered charcoal they and by this time my arm had swollen it was quite red they wrapped this charcoal poultice or this this um charcoal powdered charcoal with a wet cloth around it put plastic on my arm and they said look keep this on for about six hours we'll change it so we would keep it on for six hours and change it within two days the swelling had gone the uh arm was just you could still see some redness but within a few days it was totally totally gone so i really have had that very positive experience um recently um i had some very intense stomach pain and you know it can really concern me because one of the earlier signs today of covid is gastrointestinal which we didn't know earlier we thought it was like cough and fever and i was really concerned about it it was not like me at all i was feeling very weak he was feeling this gastrointestinal problems so knowing about charcoal i said you know what um before i go get tested and before i really because i knew the test results in our area wouldn't come back from seven to ten days so i knew that's not gonna help me very much at this point um so i'm gonna just see what happens if i take charcoal so i began taking very and i won't use the numbers but very increased amounts of charcoal knowing a little bit about it because i've used it for years within 24 hours my gastrointestinal symptoms were gone now my guess is and this is my guess that it had absolutely nothing to do with clover19 it probably uh because we had a lettuce recall in our area it was pop probably a touch of food poisoning dr lee that would be my guess and um but within 24 hours that toxicity was going i was interested to learn that in one pound of charcoal there are 50 million of activated charcoal there are 50 million particles 50 million like dr lee said you take that teaspoon and that that has the absorption or the size of a football field so i am a believer in an intelligent rational use of charcoal when it is appropriate wow thank you so much pastor mark i want to come back to dr lee i do want to demonstrate something very quickly so what pastor mark was talking about is you take your powder this is your powder you can get again there's many different brands out there i just happen to use this one i've been using it for about 20 years um you take your powder you get about a tablespoon put a little bit of water you want it to almost be like a thick mud consistency if you're going to do an external poultice if you will like he was describing on the arm for the infection that he had with the spider bite if you don't have if you have amazing hospital 4x4 and gauze and those kinds of things that's wonderful but if you don't let's say you're out wherever you are and you don't have access to that get a paper towel you can get a paper towel you can use a cloth if you get a paper towel you take your single paper towel you put water on it you don't want it to be soaking wet you want it to be just kind of moist you take your tablespoon of your kind of your mixed water with the charcoal you put it right on your wet paper towel you fold it over so it's double layered then you can take that and you can place that on the area that you would like to apply it pastor mark mentioned plastic that's what i do at home with my children again if you have hospital supplies that's great that's even better but if you don't you can use household things like saran wrap you take the saran wrap you wrap it around the area and that holds it in place what i do is i'll do this at night so if you do it at night then you just change it out in the morning you don't want to put it on if you have like white sheets or white clothes you're not going to want to do that you will end up everything turning black but that's just one practical application and pastors or pastor mark i just want to emphasize you know dr lee a week and a half ago i called you because i had sort of an emergency situation that happened to me i was out exercising pastor mark i was out doing my walk in the evening and acutely out of nowhere i had this sensation in only in my right ear that you know how when you're flying and you change your altitude and you feel like you need to decrease the pressure in your ear acutely out of nowhere i had that sensation only in my right ear and that lasted for about 15 hours at which time i went to sleep i woke up i thought well it'll be gone by the morning when it wasn't gone i called dr lee who of course is an ear nose and throat specialist and dr lee what did you tell me that i needed to do so you were experiencing something that's you know relatively commonly seen by ents but is overall pretty uncommon we just happen to see it because we're the ear doctors but it's called sudden sensory neural hearing loss or at least that's what i suspected you had and i told you you need to go get a formal audiogram a formal hearing test to kind of determine if that's what was the case and you went and got it and it turned out that was the case you did have sudden sensory neural hearing loss and it is sort of an emergency is that right in your area yeah so that's an emergency what if you have that and it is uh so there's two kinds of hearing loss there's a kind that you get because just the sound doesn't get there just because you have ear wax or there's some water in your ear or for some fairly innocuous reason that one is not a numerator but there is a one where your ears totally normal looks normal on exam but you can't hear very well and that one is an emergency in that you need to get treated within about two or three days and usually our normal treatment is high dose steroids because we believe that it's some inflammation of the nerve and so that's what i recommended you get some high dose steroids um now a large proportion of them kind of get better regardless of what you do but usually we recommend high dose steroids so that's when i would when i went to go see the ear nose and throat specialist and they did tell me dr lee correct me if i'm wrong um that this is oftentimes related to a viral infection so it's a it's almost like an inflammation of the nerve almost kind of like an autoimmune response is that correct yeah yeah i mean no one really knows what causes it like the the the theory that most people go on is that it's some kind of viral infection of the nerve but other people think oh maybe it's a micro uh embolus or maybe it's an autoimmune thing the way the reason we'll never know is that the only way for us to find out is like when someone gets it we take out their ear and we slice it up under a microscope do all kinds of things and then we figure out what's causing it but as you can imagine no one has volunteered for that study yet thank goodness because i wouldn't volunteer either so um so i was there with the ear nose and throat specialist that you recommended that i see and he offered me the very high dose steroids which of course come with a lot of risks i was on the phone as you know dr zeno i we were talking in you know continuously through this process dr lee i was talking to you and the question was what in the world to do i i worked like i said in the hospital with covid patients constantly now is not the time i want to be immunosuppressed on high dose steroids the other concern was there was seemingly an increased association with this particular sensory neural hearing loss and even coping 19 similar to our loss of taste and smell and so they wanted to test me for that so i went home and i told the ear nose and throat specialist i said i'd like to go home i'd like to think about things i wanted to talk to my colleagues you guys and i wanted to talk to god and i wanted to ask him what he wanted me to do and when i got home i felt impressed and i'm not advocating this for everyone i'm just telling you what a personal testimony for myself i felt impressed to take charcoal put it in my external canal i put a heating compress on that as well and i went to sleep and i was it was very uncomfortable because the sensation was just it was a very uncomfortable sensation with this loss of hearing and this unequal pressure when i woke up in the morning and i removed the charcoal i also put it behind my ear as well when i removed the charcoal in the shower i immediately noticed that that sensation was significantly diminished by the afternoon at which time i had another appointment with the ear nose and throat specialist i knew my hearing was back and so i asked for a repeat audiogram and dr lee you looked at my audiogram as an expert what did you see as the results yeah so when i when you first sent me your first audiogram you had mild to kind of moderate sensory neural hearing loss in some frequencies and then afterwards the next day was basically back to normal which is you know impressive and um i mean i can't explain how what you did help that because theoretically it shouldn't work but i think one of the important things that we need to think about whenever we talk about some kind of intervention is like the risk benefit ratio and i think like putting charcoal topically on your skin is essentially zero risk there's like almost nothing that can go wrong with that so you definitely won't hurt yourself by doing that and in certain situations like a spider bite or some kind of rash it it probably does help absorb some of the toxins and things that that um are causing the problem and is you know there's like a mechanistic reason why that would be helpful and like the gi symptoms like pastor finley had um you know it definitely helps with that there's no question that it helps with gi symptoms and that's a very commonly used reason for it because then you're delivering the charcoal directly into the gi tract where it can absorb the toxins and things that are causing you to have the diarrhea and the and the stomach upset so it definitely works for that but i think you know it was worth a shot and in your case it worked so i'm i'm really glad for that i i i still think we should be careful in terms of of what we ascribe your uh your return to normalcy to be you you didn't just use charcoal you prayed and you slept and you were at peace and you know all of those other things around it and you know god is still in the miracle working business okay and we don't control whether you know what he does and to whom he he does it um so you know that's that could be an explanation of course uh it could be something uh associated with the charcoal and you know since we're talking about activated charcoal okay that was part of your your treatment uh but you know there is so much stuff going on on the internet today so much confusion about what is good and what is not good and what can you use and what you're not going to use i'm not even going to go through a list of those things the thing is we need to be prudent in the way that we we evaluate things we must consider the source where is who is giving this information and what uh how credible is it and is there uh as dr lee was mentioning is there a mechanism that we know of that can explain some of how this works and uh in the case and i'm sure mark you would be more than willing to talk about this we should never underestimate the power of god to work through natural things to work through medications that we might have work through the surgeon and the surgeon's hands uh in in applying uh some kind of treatment we should never underestimate god's ability to do that it's never can he do something it's will he do it uh today and will this be something that will uh that that he sees is what needs to be done maybe mark you can you can talk a little bit more about that sure you know one of the passages in the bible that i love is john 10 verse 10 where jesus says the thief cometh not but for to steal to kill and destroy but jesus says i've come that they might have life so the devil wants to tear down our health god wants to build up our health so go so we maintain our health in a variety of ways we live in a broken world there is sickness all around us and it's not possible to avoid all the germs all the bacteria all the pathogens in our society so if a person gets sick it's not necessarily because they sinned it's because we live in a broken world god's mechanisms of healing can be in a variety of ways god can use certain natural means to help our bodies to heal for example you take heart disease a person may have very clogged arteries and it may be that through diet and exercise they cooperate with god in the healing process in their bodies um on the other hand a person may be at the point where they need medical intervention and god can use that medical intervention so we cooperate with god in making the best possible decision for our health certainly if we follow these laws of health that we've been talking about from the garden of eden if we make positive choices if we get adequate rest and adequate exercise if we eat a whole food plant-based diet if we have peace of mind and positive social relationships if we drink adequate amounts of water we build our immune system and in that process we are enabled to uh reduce the risk of disease and so but after we've done all that i think it's important to recognize that god himself is the healer amen ourselves that's right dr lee i want to ask you a question i'm sorry you had it you had a comment you wanted to make as well were you trying to say something sir no don't if i if i was i forgot it now i didn't want to cut you off um i i do have a question for you there was a article that i saw from the national institutes of health and i believe there was a couple other articles that you were looking at you and pastor mark actually specifically can you tell us just as we're coming back because we want to bring this back to our our discussion about cobit because that's where we're we're kind of discussing all of these things related to a relationship if possible to coronavirus cove to can you tell us a little bit about that nih result with charcoal and maybe some of these other studies that pastor mark you were mentioning a couple coming out of japan etc so dr lee if you could yeah i mean there's a couple of things looking at activated charcoal and viruses and um one of the things they looked at was there was a paper that looked at using charcoal as a delivery mechanism for acyclovir and acyclovir is an antiviral drug and they were using that as a release mechanism because again like the charcoal has a large surface area they bind the acyclovir to it and it it's kind of like a time delivery system so acyclovir isn't delivered all at once it's delivered slowly over time as it comes off the charcoal and then the charcoal was actually absorbing like in in vitro setting so in the laboratory when they uh exposed herpes virus to the charcoal the the herpesvirus would stick to the charcoal and this has been shown with rotavirus and noroviruses and lots of other viruses because viruses are essentially small particles and then with coronavirus as well yes and they'll stick like basically almost any virus will stick to the um the charcoal which is why it works great for a lot of gi symptoms because a lot of gi bugs are gi viruses and coronavirus just like pastor finley mentioned a little while ago is now known that there is some gi component to it so at first we thought it was a totally respiratory virus but there's a gi component to it you can get stomach upset and diarrhea with it and so theoretically charcoal could absorb some of the viral load in the gi tract dr zeno i want to come right back to you so we know that there's ace2 receptors in the gi tract quite a number of them correct right if we're taking charcoal orally which is and i want to talk practically in just a second of how you might do that pastor mark mentioned that but if we take charcoal dr lee insinuated or maybe perhaps stated that perhaps it could absorb some of those virus particles let's say in this case coronavirus because that nih study was looking specifically at different forms of chronovirus not stars called two what effect i mean if if it did decrease the virons the number of viruses in the body could that possibly decrease the symptomatology of coronavirus yes it yes it can i mean research looking this is now from the animal literature looking at what happens when you use charcoal and clay and some of those other natural high surface area absorbents they can hold on to the particles and they don't let them go very easily right so imagine you had a load a viral load of 100 particles in your gi tract and then you took activated charcoal mechanistically that charcoal uh would be able to absorb perhaps 99 out of those hundred okay and by holding on to them and having that go through the gi system without being absorbed into the body and going out into the stool uh then you only have one particle that's left and if if we look at the at the epidemiologic triad okay of host environment and agent we know that the dose of something the load of something actually increases the chance that uh with exposure you can become or not become infected so you're decreasing uh theoretically the load the viral load and therefore decreasing the chance that the virus will attach to one of those h2 receptors and thereby mitigate against the whole cascade of things that should happen after that additionally if in the gi tract we have we have viral and gi tract cell contact and this produces then an immunologic reaction and the charcoal in its anti-inflammatory role then decreases uh the amount of cytokines that will be in the area you again you you have an anti-inflammatory effect you can disinflame the uh the gi tract and therefore uh theoretically you might be able to reduce the symptoms so yes there are mechanisms that are that that can be invoked that have a plausibility for being able to say yes charcoal might be helpful but again we don't know the whole answer and uh and we're careful to not say that this is a panacea you know you take charcoal and everything is is okay uh but uh but as part of what someone might might be willing to do especially since as dr lee mentioned you know what's the downside okay for the most part if you're using it on your skin there's no downside if you're using it in your gi tract you should never use this along with other medications and whatnot because in the same way that it will absorb the the virus it cannot absorb the other medications and those things might have been essential for your uh for your health and well-being so so be careful you don't use it with other with other medications on board yeah so i usually say wait two to three hours minimum i mean if you if you do take other medications make a minimum of two to three hours and i just want to talk practically just very practically simply i'm going to leave this also to my uh fellow colleagues who've been using this as well so what i do in my household and also with my patients i've been doing this for a number of years i take a tablespoon of charcoal and dr lee said a teaspoon is as big as a football field so if i take a tablespoon dr lee would that be a couple maybe a couple of yeah i don't know what the conversion is but i think yeah a lot more i'm going after the nfl okay you know they actually studied this 50 grams is equal to 17.5 football fields well then i need to figure out how many grams i'm actually taking so i i so what i'll do like i said is i'll take a tablespoon of charcoal for my children for younger people i usually put it in some apple juice or grape juice it does not have a taste it has a chalky consistency so i'll mix it up with a glass of apple juice or grape juice or something like that for myself i just put it in water and i just drink it and i'll do that a couple times a day and it's it's very beneficial pastor mark i know you said you used that how do you practically apply it internally yeah internal we easily either use the powder or we use the tablets so if we feel any uh indication of indigestion we will use it that way you know dr leila today i read two studies that indeed that talk about covet 19 and charcoal but you know i'm a preacher so i didn't fully understand them so i'm wondering if i could ask our physicians a question i just want to quote from those studies and then if you could break it down so a preacher could understand it doc i would i think others could understand it but here here's the stuff it was published in the american chemical society's journal june 29 2020 so this particular study is pretty relevant it was a study that was done between three universities participated in the study rice university texas university medical school in texas a m and what they did is they took powdered medical grade charcoal and they mixed that with nitric acid and they formed what was called you're going to have to help me with this one nanozymes and here's what i'm going to read the quote from the article certain nanozymes made from charcoal were highly effective i was interested in that expression highly effective antioxidants that help in breaking down the damage from reactive oxygen species and help to reduce the inflammation from cytokine storm the other study came out of japan and it was very interesting study as well published by a renowned journal of artificial organs in japan it says it demonstrated that charcoal beads used in monolithic columns were an effective method of uh removing inflammation from the cytokine storm in the blood um now kind of explain that to me doctors um this i could understand some of the language but i understand what this means by the nano zions and so forth so um the use of charcoal covid19 some of these studies help us understand that dr lee yeah so i i had never heard of nanozymes until just now so i just i just looked it up and nanozyme evidently is like a new term that they use for you know there's this thing called nanotechnology which is um basically the study of very small molecules and how like when molecules are studied at the very small level they have completely different properties than they have at the macro level that's why like graphene which is like a type of carbon acts totally different than carbon just because of the way that it is its molecular structure so nanozyme i guess is a term that they use when small particles like small particles of charcoal in this case they act like enzymes and enzymes are generally what we call enzymes are actually proteins they're proteins that basically catalyze reactions in your body they make certain reactions happen faster and in this study they're using a nanozyge which is not a protein evidently it's cause it's formed using this activated charcoal and it breaks up these reactive oxygen intermediates like an enzyme does so that's what i gathered out of that yeah you know for years even before we knew much about molecular biology and uh you know what was happening at the cellular level and knowing much about the biochemistry that we know today and immunology certainly we didn't know how this thing worked what what we did know was that uh was that activated charcoal seemed to disinflame on a on a macro level disinflame uh lesions so someone had a boil or something and they put a poultice on it and they would they would bring that uh that inflammatory reaction to a head and decrease the amount of redness swelling and pain associated with the with the infection or inflammation so we we we have had in a in a very basic way of thinking that this is an anti-inflammatory now what this research is showing is that there might be a mechanistic way of addressing that information through what happens uh mark at the level of the interaction between let's say the covid uh sars2 virus and the immune system now we've talked about this before on the show uh but when when the virus uh is you know infects the body we we mount an immune response the immune cells go to the area where that virus is and they try to get rid of it okay part of what they do is they they signal for other uh other cells and other chemicals to be released to be able to bombard this uh this area and the cytokine storm is because there is a hyper reaction it's an overreaction to what's going on and some of that is induced by the virus itself okay so we have this over reaction we have all of these chemicals are coming there and no longer is it just the virus that's uh that's hurting the tissue but it's the reaction to the virus that's hitting the tissue so it's like thinking of um you know a fly in your in your home and you're going to swat it but instead you take a cannon and yes you may get the fly but you you're going to have to deal with the whole wall when you shoot that cannon at that fly and this is kind of what's going on so uh so what activated charcoal's submolecular particles might actually be able to do is to quell that over reaction by the body and therefore decrease the inflammatory response and decrease the damage that the inflammation is going to cause in the tissues you know that that was very very inspirational gentlemen you know we only have a few more minutes left and i just want to give some closing wrap-up thoughts for our viewers dr lee i was going to ask you one more time what are the caution pre-cut we want to make sure that we leave our viewers with an understanding of a proper precautions what would we advise them as as they're considering whether or not they want to perhaps try activated charcoal yeah so i think it's important like i said earlier to look at the risks and benefits of things and so you know we talked about a couple of studies and most of these studies are in vitro which means it's in the lab means it really hasn't been tested rigorously in people so we don't know there's all these mechanisms that say like this is probably going to be helpful in certain situations with covid if you have if you're having some gi symptoms with um some virus it's probably helpful but it's it's definitely not proof that it definitely works and it's not a cure for covid i mean let's be very clear about that charcoal is not a cure for covid um but if you're if but there's very little downside to it using it topically almost no downside and if you're taking it orally you know it will absorb any drugs that you also take which you may need like dr charles marcel said it also will absorb any nutrients from the food that you're eating so if you just take it all the time it's going to absorb the nutrients and the vitamins from the food that you eat so that's the downside but it's not dangerous in that way especially if you use it for a short period of time so i think that it's worth giving it a shot because it has such a low risk profile and has a potential benefit to it thank you dr lee and dr zeno do you have some closing thoughts or remarks for our viewers as again as they're considering whether or not they might want to try charcoal and what are the different ways from from my standpoint i i didn't hear your question but but maybe i can i can just mention with with all the confusion that's going on uh even some of the things that we might be saying uh we're trying to i i am sure we are not trying to tell people this is they have to do this is a be all and end all it's going to solve with problem this is not true uh yet uh you know check it out for yourself uh to pull up these and we see what's going on in this lots of reach uh going on and all sorts of uh things that are now going to be used and to help prevent but there's some basic things that we know to do we should do those and the other things uh you know if the if the benefit is potentially high and the risk is potentially low then by all means if it's at your disposal to be able to do do it and uh and allow god to uh to bless your efforts at trying to be healthy and being healthy i think that's key i think that asking god's blessing you know we can do lots of things for ourselves but if we don't have god's blessing what what good have we really accomplished so i think asking god's blessing whether it's what we eat whether we go out and exercise i think whether we use charcoal when we implore his simple methods i think it's a it's it's imperative that we ask his blessing because he's the one that gives life pastor mark you know just as charcoal draws out the toxins as we've talked about what relationship could we possibly see with the relationship of christ and his ability to draw out the toxins in our lives there's a wonderful story dr leila in the old testament well maybe not so wonderful when it starts israel was in the wilderness and they were being bitten by snakes the toxicity of that poison was killing many god told moses make a serpent and put it on a pole and he that looks will live why a serpent on a pole when jesus was talking to nicodemus he said to nicodemus just as moses lifted the serpent on the pole if i be lifted up i'll draw all men to me the serpent represented the toxicity and poison of sin when jesus hung on the cross he drew out of us just like charcoal absorbs poison jesus on the cross absorbed all the poison of sin all the toxicity of sin all the guilt and shame of our sin and he took that away from us so that we would be cleansed and healed so as we look to jesus on the cross as jesus becomes our personal savior he takes away that guilt he takes away that shame he takes away that condemnation and we become whole and healed in jesus name amen pastor mark can you have closing prayer for us sure father in heaven we've talked about charcoal tonight and how that absorbs toxicity and how that helps to minimize pain but we know the one that absorbed all of our pain that took all of our suffering to the cross was jesus and there he took the shame and the guilt of sin upon himself and as we look to jesus we thank you that there's forgiveness there's peace there's mercy and security and eternal life in christ keep us looking to him in jesus name amen amen amen thank you so much gentlemen all three of you it's been a pleasure as always to participate with you and i just want to again invite each of our viewers if you have not yet gone to our website awr.org forward slash health go and join the facebook group you are going to be receiving amazing messages we're going to start having personal live sessions where you can ask questions and have your questions answered so again awr.org forward slash help and join the facebook group i also want to again invite you to get your free gift of ministry of healing as we've been talking about again awr dot o r g forward slash gift and you can receive your free gift of ministry of healing we are looking forward to next week's presentation but until then we want to wish you god's blessing stay happy healthy in jesus until then we'll see you next time

Channel: Seventh-day Adventist Church

Views: 228,984

Rating: 4.8434782 out of 5

Keywords: use of charcoal, health tips, pandemic, pandemic update, neurological sequelae, charcoal, benefits of charcoal, cytotoxins, simple remedies, natural remedy, mark finley, health benefits of activated charcoal, oxidative stress symptoms, adventist church, adventist world radio, awr360, dr. lela lewis, health, healthy living, immunity, lela lewis, level up, optimal immunity, seventh-day adventist, covid 19, coronavirus pandemic, Level Up, Hydrotherapy, AWR, Adventist Church

Id: 8hNVsyTB1SA

Length: 60min 37sec (3637 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020