DPP #25: When Will Festivals Happen Again‪?‬ Drug Positive

It's been almost a year since the pandemic ended mass gatherings. A year without live music and festivals has taken its toll on many of us. When will they start up again? In this episode I discuss the latest COVID science to try to find an answer to that question.
 
Rough Transcript
Hi everyone. I’m back, and once again . . . I know it’s been a long time since my last episode. I’m not even gonna apologize this time, because in the end just gets ridiculous. All I’m gonna say is that I do INTEND to produce episodes more regularly. And I will at some point. But … so much has been happening in my life it’s crazy. I’ll tell you about it briefly, and then we’ll get into the episode, which is about covid and festivals. Basically… when festivals are likely to start happening again.
Ok, but me first… Here’s what’s happening… A few months ago, in my last episode I told you about my mom and her dementia. And thank you everyone who wrote me with your sympathy and words of encouragement, and those who asked me how she was doing. It’s actually quite interesting. She’s doing maybe 70% better, but she does still have dementia. It wasn’t all about the medication she was on. If you remember I was hopeful her problems were all about this one medication called pramipexole, and that once I got her doctors to discontinue it, she would get better. But it really wasn’t that.
It was another whole month before she improved. But here’s the thing… I believe it was the covid that fucked with her brain, and that during those few months she had it, IT was responsible for wiping out her short term memory. I mean she couldn’t remember what we spoke about from moment to moment. She’d literally say the same thing over and over, not realizing she just said it. But when she finally beat the covid, she slowly got better… I mean… 70% better, which is huge… and that just doesn’t happen with typical Alzheimer’s. With typical Alzheimers, it’s a steady downhill. You don’t get better like that. You may have good days and bad days, but her improvement is dramatic. I really have my mom back. And I plan to visit her as soon as I’m allowed to travel internationally, and as soon I get a covid vaccine. She just got her first shot herself a few days ago.
But here’s why I think the covid affected her brain so much. You see, this virus can strike anywhere in the body, and there’s a lot of cases of people who get cognitive problems when they get covid, problems that can last a quite while. You’ve probably hear of post-covid brain fog. There’s a lot of people talking about that, but there’s even covid-psychosis. Seriously. Some people who get covid literally become psychotic, as in full-on schizophrenia type psychotic. It doesn’t seem to be permanent, but these are people with no history of mental illness. Totally weird.
So we know this virus can affect the brain, and it can also produce lots of different symptoms all over the body. And so… here’s my theory… Again it’s just just a theory. But what I think is that some of these non-standard symptoms that some people get… meaning more than a cough and fever and stuff, depend on the particulars of a person’s immune system, and particularly, where that person might be experiencing inflammation. Preexisting inflammation.
Everyone has SOME degree of inflammation. There’s so many toxins in our environment these days. So many foreign things getting into our bodies. And our immune system tries to recognize them and attack them, but sometimes it gets confused and attacks our own tissues instead, even after those toxins are gone. And this can cause chronic pain and disease. Inflammation is so common in fact that we take it for granted. Inflammation is the number 1 cause of pain and illness … by far. When it gets way out of hand people get diagnosed with autoimmune disorders, like ALS, multiple sclerosis, arthritis. You name it. There are so many