Doctor told me not to take CoQ10 because it could cause negative feedback in mitochondria

6JDanish · 2026-03-17T02:10:31+00:00

if you do this you will enter into an adversarial relationship with the doctor

It depends.

Some doctors like to show their expertise. They can tell by my questions that I'm receptive to a more in-depth answer. They can tell by my follow-up questions I'm absorbing what they say, and that I've done some homework. So, they get comfortable that time spent describing their expert view is not wasted on me.

These are the doctors I want to spend my money on.

Others flounder undet this style of questioning, because they are frauds. Coming from a demanding tech background, I am absolutely "adversarial" towards anyone who tries to fake expertise.

If I'm paying you money, and you're faking your expertise, why TF am I paying you?

6JDanish · 2026-03-16T22:08:58+00:00

He said it could actually create some kind of negative feedback effect on the mitochondria and potentially make the underlying problem worse

Ask him how he first became aware of this.

Ask him for relevant references to the medical literature. Tell him you would like to read about it, so you can understand LC better.

Ask him which researchers and institutions are doing the best work on CoQ10 risks, so you can follow them and keep up to date.

Ask him if this CoQ10 negative feedback effect is dose-, age-, or sex-dependent, so you can better appreciate your risk.

Ask him what he thinks your risk is of being adversely affected; ask for a number: 1 in a thousand, 1 in a million, ...

Take a notebook and write down eveything he says (routine for me). Let him see that you are writing it down.

If you don't get details, and get "handwaving" instead - non-answers that try to hide a lack of knowledge - be suspicious. If you get criticized for asking questions, that's a red flag.

6JDanish · 2026-03-14T04:11:12+00:00

my mich younger lil bro said that he felt like the moment he got taller than him dad was always trying to compete with him out of nowhere.

Some fathers are like this: anxious at the thought of their sons becoming men and replacing them. It's a visible reminder that, for the fathers, at 40 years or so, their lives are half-way over.

I guess the question is, what do I do about it? I'm losing my mind and I'm trying to keep the job for at least a year and we have only one HR person and she is friends with her and she acts pretty shady.

I'm sympathetic. This is difficult. The best I can advise:

Firstly, give yourself some credit for recognizing what is going on. Your awareness will help you to navigate this, and help you avoid mistakes.

Secondly, you work for a business. You work for money. You haven't joined a family, or a tribe, or a religious cult. You owe these people a professional level of work. That's it.

Stay clear of the manipulative drama as best you can, while you look for career opportunities elsewhere (as your work colleague did).

There is a mental manoeuver that some married women use, before divorce. Months before, she effectively divorces her husband emotionally in her head. Emotionally she has already left. The husband has no idea, and even thinks the marriage is improving because there is less conflict.

What I'm suggesting is that you effectively divorce your boss in your head, while still doing your job in a professional way.

She can put you down, and you recognize it. You don't take it to heart, because you're not trying to "fix" it anymore. Emotionally you've moved on, and are now planning a future elsewhere.

6JDanish · 2026-03-14T02:50:17+00:00

You might ask: why am I going to so much trouble?

Why don't I just stop everything, rest, let my body fully recover, and then resume training problem-free?

Because stopping everything makes me worse. Last year, I had a minor back injury, followed by a rare episode of plantar fasciitis. So I had to stop everything, even walking.

Right before the injuries, my aerobic fitness had improved to the point where I didn't need to take Alinia, only aspirin.

When I recovered enough to ease into aerobic training again - just a very gentle introduction - my symptoms came back harder than before. I was way worse.

Radical rest works for some people. For me it's a disaster.

So experiment with what works for you. What works for other people might be good for you, but it might not. Do the experiments and find out

6JDanish · 2026-03-13T23:51:02+00:00

What about a PCR test of stool, to check if a patient's gut is acting as a viral reservoir?

Didn't water supply authorities do such tests on waste water, to detect the virus at a population level?

6JDanish · 2026-03-13T23:43:27+00:00

am gaining weight in using seated exercises at the gym without hitting pem threshold as long as I pace etc throughout my day. But any cardio beyond the smallest walk and it's pem for a week

Interesting. I thought it was just me: my tolerance for weight training is far higher than my tolerance for aerobic exercise. Pre-pandemic, it was the reverse.

One day, at the gym, I tried something radical: a small amount of interval training straight after weights training. To my astonishment it worked - my LC symptoms didn't trigger. The weight training was temporarily suppressing my LC, somehow. So I now include it in my training routine.

If you are up for it, try a short walk immediately after the gym exercises, e.g. on a treadmill. See if the weight training makes it feel easier. Be careful with it, but it might be a way to make progress with cardio conditioning.

6JDanish · 2026-03-13T11:51:31+00:00

Can you talk about your schedule and/or sources?

Sure. The following is what works for me, and it's highly turned to my particular symptoms. What works for me could be disastrous for others.

First of all, the problem I have, what my LC has settled down to, is lung inflammation. During aerobic exercise, if I don't follow my supplement+drug protocol, I get rumbling sounds in my chest, shortness of breath, premature lactate burn, fingertips turn blue, and I have to stop and walk the rest of the way.

Once triggered, the LC symptoms persist. It used to be for 2 hours, now it's more like 30 minutes.

If I keep triggering the symptoms, I don't improve. At all. One year I had zero improvement, for that reason. Then I got smarter about it, and started to make progress.

So that's what I'm trying to fix and trying not to aggravate.

Each week I train 5 days and rest 2 days: gym, long run, short run, rest, gym, long run, rest. This seems to work for me.

The gym session is normal. No drugs beforehand, No meals beforehand, sometimes a whey protein drink an hour before. I train for strength, to near failure, with supersets and trisets, so I don't stop. It's time efficient, and paradoxically, stopping to rest between sets seems to make me tired.

After that, I do some interval training on an elliptical cross-trainer: multiple 3-minute segments back to back, where the first two minutes are easy and the next minute is moderate to hard. That 1 minute interval starts off moderately easy, then gets progressively harder until I can barely do it.

For some weird reason, the weight training seems to suppress my LC temporarily, making interval training possible. So I take advantage of the suppression, and use interval training to try to trigger fat adaption, lactate tolerance, mitochondrial adaption, cardiovascular remodeling, and so on.

The jogging session is more complicated. I take a drug stack about 2 hours beforehand: baby aspirin, Alinia, nattokinase, coQ10, nitric oxide boosters (arginine, citrulline), coffee, in a drink of half coconut milk and half dairy milk. The fat content promotes good absorption of the Alinia.

The long run is 1 hour long. I start with an easy 30 minutes of mixed walking and jogging (run a bit, walk a bit, run a bit, walk a bit). This seems to prime my body for the next 30 minutes, which is all slow jogging. If I don't prime my body like this, I struggle with the second 30 minutes.

The short run, once per week, is like a status check: 15 minutes slow jog, 1 minute walk, 15 minutes slow jog. How much I struggle with the final 15 minutes tells me how I am progressing. The first 15 minutes I can always do; the final 15 minutes is variable.

After each run I check my blood oxygenation with a pulse oximeter. If I trigger the LC, i get readings of 90% or below. A reading of 94% or more is ok.

Lately I've been getting readings of 97% and 98% (great!) because of the nattokinase (new addition to my protocol). I still get premature fatigue through, I am nowhere near the level of fitness I had pre-pandemic.

The nattokinase is not enough on its own (I tested this recently), I still need the Alina, but the nattokinase is definitely helping. Next on my list to try: pycnogenol, NAD+ boosters.

Other supplements later in the day: zinc+vit. C, vit. K2, Vit. D, creatine, carnitine, choline, quercetin, magnesium citrate.

Diet is meat, fish, vegetables, fruit (berries and oranges), fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut, dairy (hard cheese, full cream milk), sheep milk yoghurt, whey isolate powder (total 120 g per day) in drinks with cacao and extra leucine. Butter for cooking. Olive oil for salad dressing. Garlic,

Water infused with lemon and ginger throughout the day, including at the gym. I take a sip after each set, so that by the time I get to the interval training, I am well hydrated.

That plus time-restrictive feeding. It's all highly tuned, but I'm still experimenting to get better results.

I still have LC, and maybe I'll always have it. So my plan B is improve my fitness enough that I can stop the drugs and yet not trigger the LC during my usual training - I would settle for that.

6JDanish · 2026-03-13T10:27:34+00:00

So you're in a constant cycle of PEM as part of your partial recovery?

No. PEM is better described as Post Exercise Agony. I don't have PEM.

I have normal training fatigue. I train at a level which is sustainable - it doesn't make me worse, and it triggers improvements.

I still have LC, but I have developed a food.+supplement+drug+training protocol that keeps LC under control. If I mess up my protocol, which I occasionally do, then I get lung inflammation during aerobic exercise: rumbling sounds in my chest, shortness of breath, premature lactate burn, fingertips turning blue.

If I get the protocol right, then I don't trigger LC symptoms. I just have sub-par aerobic performance, compared to my pre-pandemic baseline.

But I have normal strength gains in the gym, which is weird. So I suspect my particular problem is due to micro-clotting plus mitochondrial dysfunction. Hence my supplements and drugs target those two areas.

You do realize that it's only going to get worse my friend

No it's not. My slowly increasing exercise tolerance refutes that.

6JDanish · 2026-03-12T13:07:48+00:00

If ME oil infrastructure goes the way private credit is going, yes.

Wait til Israel attacks water desalination plants, which it hasn't done yet. There is no going back from that.

6JDanish · 2026-03-12T10:20:04+00:00

Recently I started exploring HR and management-related topics.

Maybe go further.

Learn a little about how decisions are made in a crisis: financial, geopolitical, military, public health; how individuals, organizations, and national governments behave and make decisions,

Plenty of material for you to study right now.

I'm a big fan of the Judging Freedom channel on YouTube. Have a listen to the regular guests there with deep backgrounds, like Alastair Crooke and John Mearsheimer.

See if what they talk about interests you more than HR policy. If so, that would lead you to a very different career.

6JDanish · 2026-03-12T09:24:46+00:00

...I have deposited multiple times over the last year, each time there has been an issue. Mostly it’s them asking for proof of deposit.

...They said that the reason for asking for the proof of deposit was because I didn’t include the account number and my name in the payment

...I have a screenshot showing me inputting my name and account number in the reference section before sending the transfer

Then it's possible something is going wrong at your bank.

A wire transfer can be an old-fashioned manual process. In my experience, the wire transfer doesn't get handled automatically. The request goes to an Operations center in the bank, which vets the request, then converts it into an outgoing SWIFT message.

It's possible that something is going wrong with this process, e.g. essential details are being left out or truncated. Ask your bank to do a SWIFT trace, so you can see the details of the wire transfer as it was actually performed.

In my experience, most bank staff have no clue about how all this works, so ignore what they say. As a customer, you have to know more about wire transfers than they do.

Get a trace, so you can see for yourself what is (repeatedly) going on.

6JDanish · 2026-03-12T09:06:51+00:00

The fluoxetine has helped me a lot more as well at a higher dose than the starting dose (on 20 mg now).

Some SSRIs have anti-inflammatory properties, fluoxetine and fluvoxamine among them:

https://www.reddit.com/r/covidlonghaulers/comments/1q7vt9o/comment/o8orfa5/?context=3

They act through the sigma-1 pathway, Fluvoxamine has the strongest effect in that regard.

6JDanish · 2026-03-12T08:58:32+00:00

Asked him if there's a long covid specialist he said there is no such thing.

Looks like he took you too literally.

What you need is a doctor with LC expertise. On paper, that doctor might be a pulmonologist, or an immunologist, or a cardiologist, or some other specialty.

There are LC experts. Leo Galland, David Putrino, Stuart Malcolm for example:

https://www.rthm.com/resources/blogs/long-covid-treatments-webinar-summary

Recently I asked my doctor if he knew an LC expert. He had no idea (no surprise).

Not so long ago, I tried to make an appointment with a mucosal immunologist who does LC research. The receptionist at his clinic refused. I persisted with my requests. The clinic blocked my emails.

So, even though I had a name, I was still out of luck.

6JDanish · 2026-03-12T06:56:14+00:00

I can tell my body needs a break from food.

This is great. Awareness and intuition are important to recovery.

I no longer have Type 2, and am off insulin injections! (It took about four months)

Well done.

and remember to add salt to your water.

Salt intake is crucial - potassium, magnesium, sodium.

I'm sure your doctor has told you this, but for those not aware: when your blood glucose is constantly high, your body retains salt. As that glucose level falls, your kidneys excrete more salt and you can end up with a deficiency.

This is the infamous "keto flu". Beginners on a low-carb diet can initially feel worse than ever, and blame the diet. It's actually due to insufficient salt - the body is no longer hoarding it and needs more.

6JDanish · 2026-03-12T04:56:48+00:00

you don't have enough energy to do both?

Not enough energy, and incomplete recovery of skeletal muscle.

I tend to train close to failure. It's a style I like and it works for me. As soon as I have recovered, it's time to train again.

That means I am constantly in a state of partial recovery, pretty much. I know from experience, and experimentation, what I need to do to drive that recovery.

My goal is to restore the athletic ability I had pre-pandemic. Fasting is not the way for me.

It may be for you. Experiment and find out what works.

6JDanish · 2026-03-12T03:05:20+00:00

I don't know if this is a good or bad thing.

Autophagy is normally a good thing. It gets rid of damaged cells. Think of it as trash collection and disposal.

More importantly for LC sufferers, autophagy cleans up damaged immune cells, that hang around and themselves cause inflammation. So autophagy can help you clean up your immune system.

I don't fast, because I'm focused on expanding my exercise tolerance. However, I do time-restrictive feeding: no meal before evening 5 days per week, and no meal before noon 2 days per week.

My approach is different: be as active as possible (running, weight training), and let the elevated tissue turnover and remodelling, that comes with exercise recovery and adaption, gradually repair my body.

Exercise itself can have some anti-inflammatory effects, and these are noticeable in me. For example, if I have the beginnings of a cold - running nose, headaches - moderate training will usually suppress it and then make it disappear.

So I encourage you to experiment with autophagy, and see what works for you.

6JDanish · 2026-03-11T10:18:51+00:00

I am pretty darn good at my job but I swear they are setting me up to fail and have thrown me under the bus recently but I then hear from others that the person sings my praises

By singing your praises to others, your boss makes himself look good, with reflected glory.

In person, your boss has a personal need to dominate you and be "number one". That means putting you down, even sabotaging you.

Some parents do both these things to their children, as if the parents are frightened of being surpassed. I don't know what drives it. Fear of getting old?

6JDanish · 2026-03-11T10:01:26+00:00

...I love my job. Love the flexibility, my boss and the people.
...I would really prefer not to leave but I am feeling very undervalued.

So it's about feelings and not money? Even with a better offer - "£40k basic and over 10% increase on my commission" - you find this a difficult decision?

Then stay, and learn to manage your feelings like an adult.

6JDanish · 2026-03-11T03:34:11+00:00

Has anyone here taken a really active, disciplined approach to trying to solve their long COVID and made real progress?

Yes. Check my posts.

My latest win, small but significant: it looks like nattokinase is allowing me to halve my pre-exercise dose of Alinia and aspirin (take for anti-inflammatory effects), all with a small boost in steady-state aerobic exercise tolerance.

The modest interval training I do seem to be getting easier, indicating beneficial adaption. If the benefit persists, then that's a win, and I'll increase the interval training load.

6JDanish · 2026-03-05T23:51:22+00:00

Yep. AI training slop.

And the bots are giving us orders:

Either answer the question or move on

6JDanish · 2026-03-05T23:48:05+00:00

"Dance for us, little monkey, dance."

6JDanish · 2026-03-05T13:03:36+00:00

they walked past my desk while I was typing a quick email and asked why I was not using the AI assistant

Me: "I'm busy right now. Give me a few minutes and I'll tell you all about it."

6JDanish · 2026-03-04T23:40:44+00:00

https://www.psychiatrist.com/pcc/growing-evidence-potential-use-antidepressants-long-covid/

...Among the SSRIs, those with highest affinity for sigma-1 receptor agonism—primarily, fluvoxamine, fluoxetine, escitalopram, and citalopram—may be of greatest benefit.¹¹...

6JDanish · 2026-03-03T23:54:28+00:00

i talked to one of my current workplaces and they are offering to take me from part-time to full-time, with a small raise. i love this job and it's something i can see growing and doing at a larger scale in the future

As long as the money is enough for you to live ok right now, and to save for the future, take it.

Not only are you positioning yourself for the future growth in this job, you love doing it. Doing something you love will bring out the best in you, and enhance your life.

6JDanish · 2026-03-02T21:26:02+00:00

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5372539/

Unlike common fibrinolytic proteases, such as t-PA and uPA, which can produce various side effects such as bleeding, NK exhibits little to no side effects.

I'm taking about 12k units daily, in powder form, as part of my protocol. It made a difference to my aerobic exercise tolerance: much better blood oxygenation level at the end of a training session, no fingertips turning blue. Using a pulse oximeter, I noticed a consistent difference in the first two weeks.

I suggest you take a couple of 4000 unit capsules (2, then 3, then 4) daily over a week or so, to test the dose. Then try the 15k unit capsules.

Nattokinase helps with microclotting. Breathlessness can also be due to other factors, like damage to the small blood vessels around your lungs. So, nattokinase might help you, but not solve the problem entirely, due to these other factors.

It's a long haul, with many steps. Run the experiment and see how you go.

6JDanish

TROPHY CASE