What Toxic Wildfires Can Teach Us About COPD and COVID-19

• The 9/11 illness — One of the most impactful instances of an airborne illness occurred in New York on 9/11. Due to the Twin Towers having a variety of toxic substances within them (e.g., asbestos), their sudden collapse caused all of those substances to be released into the air, creating a dust that an air pollution expert and University of California Davis Professor Emeritus described as “wildly toxic.”

At the time, despite knowledge to the contrary, the government (e.g., both New York City Mayor Giuliani and Bush’s EPA) insisted the air was safe, and many of the first responders did not even wear masks, let alone proper respiratory equipment.

Many of them are now permanently disabled (as the medical system can’t treat them), often being gaslighted in the process (as their injuries were frequently ascribed to simply being PTSD), and the process to get them compensation or support is still ongoing (as many parts of the government resisted doing anything to help them).

Many developed cancers, and more people have died from 9/11 illnesses than from the attacks themselves.

Some of the most common conditions certified by the World Trade Center Health Program were rhinosinusitis, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), asthma, sleep apnea, cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, respiratory disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), depression, and anxiety disorder. The most common cancers were skin cancer and prostate cancer. A longer list of the covered conditions can be found here.

One of the noteworthy things about the 9/11 illness is how many individuals described continually experiencing air hunger even though their respiratory function was intact.

An integrative physician in New York (after testing their blood), in turn, concluded the air hunger was due to their mitochondrial respiration being impaired (I never worked with these patients, but I believe a case could also be made for blood sludging — discussed later in this article — creating the air hunger).

• Vog (Volcanic smog) — Due to how the Hawaiian islands formed, the newest (and largest) island has an active volcano that regularly erupts. Since Hawaii is also a highly desirable area to live in, it provides a unique window into what happens from regular exposure to volcanic smog.

Some of the most common effects of vog are headaches (thought to be due to heavy metals in the vog such as mercury, selenium, arsenic, and iridium) and sore throats (considered to be due to acidic sulfur compounds which primarily compose the vog).

Many are not bothered at all by the vog, some have lungs that are more sensitive (likely to the sulfur) but can give or take tolerate it, and over the years, I’ve heard of many people who had to leave the island because they could no longer tolerate the vog.

In the areas where the vog is the worst (this is primarily Kona), those with asthma or COPD often have exacerbations of their existing pulmonary (lung) conditions. Some of the other conditions friends have heard of vog causing over the years include:

Numerous approaches exist for dealing with vog, and many of the most popular ones are various things thought to eliminate heavy metals.

Note: Vog is primarily an issue when the lava flow becomes obstructed (leading to it smoldering and smoking), something somewhat analogous to the diseases that onsets within the body when a fluid flow is obstructed).

• Everyone has a critical threshold. Before that point, their systems can essentially compensate for the stresses already on them and new ones added on later. However, once they pass the threshold, symptoms rapidly develop, tiny additional stressors can significantly increase their symptoms, and it can become very difficult to walk them back to where they were before they passed that threshold.

Two common (but not the only) things that push patients past this threshold are impaired fluid circulations (e.g., due to poor zeta potential) and impaired detoxification pathways.

Note: This dynamic can be analogized to “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and also applies to many other ailments (e.g., ones that are unrelated to inflammation).

• When an inflammatory illness passes that critical threshold, it disproportionately affects the weak points in the patient’s system (which will also typically be where their symptoms initially arise).

• The Kendrick model — Malcolm Kendrick has made a convincing argument that heart disease arises from inflammatory or mechanical damage to the protective lining of the blood vessels (the endothelium). This then requires blood clots to form to patch that damage, and over time, those clots transform into the atherosclerotic plaques classically associated with heart disease.

Because of this, he believes factors that damage the endothelium are the primary cause of heart disease and argues for reducing them in parallel to providing factors that protect the endothelium and supports its production of nitric oxide (which dilates the blood vessels, allowing adequate blood supply to the body).

One of the noteworthy things about COVID-19 is that the spike protein excels at creating the vascular damage that Kendrick has long argued causes heart disease and strokes (this subject was discussed further here in relation to what causes Alzheimer’s disease).

Note: Kendrick’s model also considers stress to be a primary contributor to heart disease.

One of the things that is known to increase the risk of heart disease is exposure to particulate matter. Kendrick, in turn, argues that this is due to the particulates damaging the endothelium. The pieces of evidence he collected to support this hypothesis were as follows [the cited quotations are directly from Kendrick’s book]:

• The Klinghardt model — Dietrich Klinghardt is considered by many to be one of the pioneers in the integrative medical field and has treated many challenging patients with complex illnesses over the decades. Many of my friends trained under Klinghardt and his work has greatly influenced the direction of integrative medicine in the United States.

Klinghardt views chronic illnesses as often resulting from a confluence of factors that need to be addressed (e.g., EMFs, root canals, surgical scars dysregulating the autonomic nervous system, heavy metals, and unresolved generational conflicts in your family — all of which my mentors and I have also observed to be amongst the most common root causes of chronic illness).

Since Klinghardt focuses on heavy metals, he frequently emphasizes treating them before directly treating a chronic infection as he believes infections (e.g., candida) are often compensatory response to a metal overload.

When the wildfires happened, I remember Klinghardt proposing that much of the toxicity we were seeing came from the fact that the trees gradually stored heavy metals in the environment and were expelling them into the environment by being burned. Thus, we were effectively giving a gradual but continual heavy metal exposure to people whose systems were already near their critical threshold (a situation not that different from the vog in Hawaii).

I asked my California colleague if they agreed with Klinghardt’s assessment. They did, but acknowledged they did not have patients where they tested heavy metal levels before and after the fire. They also added that due to all the previous mining in California (e.g., a lot of mercury was used for gold extraction), the trees have a significant heavy metal burden.

Furthermore, they directed me to examine the EPA’s own research showing that wildfires disperse mercury in the environment. This is exactly what the science has found, especially during the hottest wildfire and my California colleague noted that the 2017/2018 wildfires were so hot you frequently saw cars that had been melted.

Note: My colleague also believed some of the fire’s toxicity came from all the human structures (e.g., houses) that burned down and dispersed their contents into the atmosphere. I also suspect many of these buildings were old enough to have had various now-banned building materials like asbestos and lead paint.

• Negative ions and zeta potential — One of my hobbies is digging up old books on medical subjects I have no familiarity with, reading a few pages to see if the author seems knowledgeable, and if they appear to, reading their whole book.

One such book I had that experience with was The Ion Effect, which tells a detailed story about how positive and negative ions in the environment significantly affect you (with approximately 20% of the population being noticeably sensitive to changes in weather from positive ions).

Like Earthing, it was immediately apparent that most of the beneficial effects they attributed to “negative ions” and the harmful ones from “positive ions” matched what I would expect each to do as a result of altering zeta potential (which determines if things in fluids clump together or separate).

More importantly, I was struck by just how much strong evidence existed in so many different fields supporting the value of negative ion exposure. Nonetheless, this discipline has been completely forgotten and is erroneously viewed as being akin to pseudoscience.

Note: I wrote a bit more on the subject of positive and negative ions here and will soon publish a more detailed article on that topic.

Many of the beneficial effects attributed to negative ions matched precisely what I would expect from the a zeta potential improvement wherever the negative ions contacted (while the opposite held true for the harmful positive ions).

For example, burns were shown to trigger severe blood sludging throughout the body, and early investigators concluded this sludging was likely why burns created so many complications for patients. In turn, extensive research showed that negative ion therapy was miraculous for burn patients.

Note: Blood sludging describes blood cells clumping together and then separating from plasma. This phenomena is a result of an impaired zeta potential (which normally prevents the cells from clumping together) and reduces their movement through the circulation.

Another area where negative ion therapy also benefitted patients was for all sorts of conditions within the lining of the respiratory tract. In each of these, a negative ion treatment appeared to soften and rehydrate the fluid flow to those tissues (something that would result from restoring zeta potential) and thus reduced many of the symptoms within them.

Conversely, I have also found that breathing positive ions (e.g., those produced by ventilation systems while sleeping) often dries out and irritates the respiratory tract.

Although there is a great deal of research on the benefits of negative ion therapy and a few remarkable devices have been developed for using negative ions to treat airway conditions, currently, the only accepted use for negative ions is for air purification systems.

Here the negative ions “work” because they bind to positively charged particulate matter that is suspended in the air, causing it to lose the positive charge that keeps the particle suspended and thus settling it to the ground.

For this reason, along with the fact combustion removes electrons (and thereby the negative charges) from what is burned along with the clinical signs of wildfire smoke inhalation, I have suspected a significant part of the problem with wildfire smoke are the positive ions I think the smoke contains.

Note: I am still looking for a study that supports or refutes my hypothesis that wildfire smoke is full of positive ions.

All of the research on blood sludging essentially showed that as zeta potential became more impaired, sludging worsened and obstructed the circulation in larger and larger blood vessels until it was eventually fatal.

This was best shown by observing the course of an untreated malaria infection in monkeys (e.g., through microscopic examination of their blood vessels) and that providing heparin (which, in addition to being an anticoagulant, through its extreme negative charge effectively disperses blood sludging) prevented the monkeys from dying until far later in the infection. Furthermore, this observation was also shown in various other studies (e.g., in burn victims).

What I found fascinating about the progression of blood sludging was that it matched many of the traditional views within homeopathy (relating to Hering’s Law of Cure) and those within Chinese medicine. Additionally, Chinese medicine has a classic diagnostic pattern known as blood stasis, which for all practical purposes, mirrors the blood sludging discovered by Western researchers.

Note: The models of “blood stasis” and “blood sludging” attribute many adverse changes in the body to obstructed blood flow, whereas I believe in some of those cases the actual cause is obstruction of a different fluid flow (e.g., lymphatics), an overlap which occurs due to both circulations being affected by impaired zeta potential.

Both of these systems (Chinese medicine and homeopathy) have observed that diseases tend to enter the body superficially (at the smallest vessels) and then penetrate deeper and deeper into the body as the disease worsens.

As a result, a significant part of their diagnostic model is based upon determining how deep a pathogenic factor has penetrated, and their treatment is based on reversing that process to expel it from the body. In contrast, Western medicine often does the opposite (e.g., by suppressing fevers or rashes).

My overall sense from observing the wildfire illness and COVID-19 is that the diseases initially enter the airway tract (where they create symptoms correlating to fluid stasis) and as it penetrates deeper, enters the lungs, then the smallest blood vessels lining the lungs, and finally the larger vessels of the body.

In turn, you can observe people at each stage of this progression, and individuals who have a chronically impaired zeta potential (e.g., the complex patients with chronic inflammatory conditions my colleague saw) are typically the most vulnerable to wildfire exposure — much in the same way those patients were also the most vulnerable to spike protein injuries (a COVID-19 infection or a vaccine reaction).

Note: One of the many side effects of positive ions was that they slowed the movement of the cilia (tiny beating hairlike structures), which the respiratory tract uses to clear particulate matter from it. Tobacco smoke plus positive ions was found to slow their movement by 3 to 10 times, whereas subsequent exposure to negative ions reversed this suppression of the cilia.

This progression from the superficial to the deep vessels (frequently beginning with the lungs) is also identical to what I and others have observed with progressively worsening COVID-19 infections and vaccine injuries.

This, for example, I believe, explains the curious COVID-19 phenomena where patients often have low oxygen readings (which are measured in the smallest blood vessels in the fingers which sludged blood has difficulty reaching) but simultaneously do not clinically appear to be oxygen starved because the blood circulation is preserved in their larger vessels.

• Do treatments that restore the physiologic zeta potential of the body. Additionally, one aspect of restoring zeta potential is drinking deionized water (distilled or reverse osmosis water), and having a sufficient amount of that water seems to be particularly important when addressing wildfire injuries.

• Intravenous Vitamin C (when administered early, it greatly helps with wildfire-induced inflammation).

• Treatments directed at the fluid obstructions within the lungs.

• Treatments directed at treating the underlying chronic inflammation in the patient (i.e., what existed before the wildfire smoke exposure).

• Nebulized Glutathione (discussed below).

• Heavy metal chelation (assuming it is applicable to the patient).

• Inhaling negative ions. This is ideally done with one of the medical devices developed to treat the respiratory tract, and less ideally done with a good negative ion generator (which are hard to find) or going to an area in nature with a large amount of negative ions (e.g., a forest with waterfalls and granite [which releases negative ions] or by the ocean).