I am impressed by your growing awareness that some of the medications being tried for your post-COVID issues may themselves contribute to your impaired health status.

I was already seeing a pain/rehab doctor when I developed long COVID, and because she was expanding her practice to include functional medicine at the time, she offered to try to treat my new syndrome (upper respiratory) in her new capacity. I pondered this, because I was unsure whether she was well trained in the integrative aspects of functional medicine, and so I deferred a decision for a while.

I also already knew, at that time, that all 5 of the medications that I had been relying on for anywhere from 1.5 to 20 years had the potential to cause or worsen the respiratory problems that followed my COVID infection, and so I when I read the list of medications my rehab doctor was considering for me, as a new functional medicine patient, I knew that not proceeding with her at this time was a good decision. Several of the medications she had in mind did turn out to carry the risk of causing chronic upper (and lower) respiratory problems, and so I changed course, and began to work, with my primary care doctorś approval, on finding a purely nutraceutical set of solutions. The tricky part is that not all of my medications can easily be replaced by others that carry no respiratory risks, and so decisions on whether I will actually be able to depend on nutritional therapies as a full replacement for my various medications are still pending. But I have already discontinued 3 of the 5 meds that might have been making my post-COVID syndrome worse (with my PCPś knowledge and approval), and the therapy I have settled on (B1 repletion and supplementation) has some decent potential to enable me to drop the last 2 of my meds, if all goes well. I am blessed to have a very wise and cautious primary care internist making sure that I move carefully and pause to evaluate progress closely.

I like the idea of your considering an Integrative Medicine specialist, but over a period of about 40 years, I have had very mixed experiences with clinicians in this area. Some have abandoned science-based medicine altogether, and actually use, for example, pendulums to diagnose disorders. (I have a friend whose integrative physician, an M.D. Board-certified in internal medicine, uses ¨muscle testing¨ alone for diagnostics, and who has decided that my friend has Lyme Disease, all without ordering any blood work to confirm this. The result that my friend is now taking patent combination homeopathic and herbal products that any layperson could select on Amazon, e.g., just on the basis of spurious claims made on these products´ labels.)

There are some integrative clinicians who care deeply about evidence-basing in medicine, though, and these are the ones to look for. Dr. Derrick Lonsdale was one of them. He initially conducted a massive amount of very serious, peer-review-published research while he was at the Cleveland Clinic, and for some decades before his recent passing, he operated a private functional medicine (which he described as orthomolecular) practice in which he emphasized B1/thiamine therapy. His body of work is astonishing, and none of it comes from what some would call ¨New Age¨ thinking. It is all about hard core scientific analysis of thiamineś role in all the metabolic pathways that govern the operation of our various body systems.

I am quite sure that Dr. Lonsdale, btw, did not, as a routine matter, ask his patients to suspend their medications while they were under his care with B1 therapy, because he understood that recovering metabolic-level health via thiamine supplementation takes time, during which process the lungs, heart, and other organs may need steady suppressive or stimulating support. So if you are seeking out a functional medicine specialist, another important feature to look for is that practitionerś willingness to work alongside the physicians who may, of necessity, need to keep some of your more traditional treatments going for some period or even indefinitely.