Battling Winter's Triple Threat

Nurse practitioners Nicole Baldwin and Kelli White share crucial insights on preventing and treating RSV, flu, and other respiratory illnesses during this intense illness season. They examine current symptom patterns, effective prevention strategies, and post-exposure protocols based on their clinical experiences.

• Current flu strain presenting with high fever, fatigue, and body aches rather than vomiting
• Lysol products don't kill RSV - bleach, vinegar solutions, or medical-grade wipes needed
• Secondary bacterial infections occurring 7-10 days after initial viral infection
• Antimicrobial mouthwash and tongue scraping as effective preventive measures
• Vitamin D, C, zinc, elderberry, and possibly coffee as immune-boosting supplements
• Balance rest with movement to prevent pneumonia development during recovery
• Start antivirals within 48 hours of symptom onset for maximum effectiveness
• Partners of flu-positive patients should receive prophylactic Tamiflu treatment

This is not considered medical advice and does not constitute a patient-provider relationship.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Seasonal Illness Surge
• 1:36 Current Flu and RSV Symptoms
• 3:10 Secondary Infections and Hydration
• 5:08 Preventing Infections Before Exposure
• 8:52 Post-Exposure Prevention Strategies
• 10:14 Sleep, Movement, and Episode Closing

Transcript

Nicole: 0:02

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Tattoos and Telehealth. My name is Nicole Baldwin. This is my friend and colleague, kelli White. We are both board-certified nurse practitioners and we're just having some girl time just chatting about things, and today we wanted to talk about how to best prevent RSV, the flu, all the things. We are both seeing a significant increase in illnesses, and so we just want to touch on those things today. So I'll let you get started, kelli.

Kelli: 0:32

Wonderful. So our attorneys make us say that this is not considered medical advice. This video does not constitute a patient provider relationship, so we're just here to chit chat. Yeah, so, like Nicole was saying, I have seen so there for the longest time. I was seeing a lot of COVID and it, you know, really wasn't terrible, but I just saw a lot of cases.

Kelli: 0:56

I'm seeing a ton of flu come through right now and, nicole, I don't know, I don't know what population of patients you're seeing with the flu or what symptoms that they're experiencing, but what I'm seeing, unlike what we've seen in past years, the flu used to be high fever, nausea, vomiting, like you couldn't even get out of bed fast enough to throw up, like you just were vomiting all over the place, and this would go on forever. It seems like I don't see a lot of vomiting right now. I'm just seeing a lot of really high fever. That's the key indicator. Some coughs, some upper respiratory junk and just significant body fatigue, just overall body aches and pains. But that high fever and body aches, that's the dead giveaway. That seems to be what I'm seeing. And then a ton of RSV. Unfortunately, flu A is the bug that I see right now. The great thing is they now have those over-the-counter test strips that you can get COVID, flu A and flu B so you can do that yourself at home. And that makes our world so much better, because in telemedicine they can just show up with their little positive test strip and be like. You know, here I'm positive and we can get them treated pretty quickly.

Kelli: 2:03

But one of the things that I want to hit home with is when a patient comes in with the flu, we need to be sure we're treating their partner with prophylactic Tamiflu as well. Um, they're either going to get it, they've been exposed to it, they need to be on it. Um, because flu is so contagious. The flu is so contagious and what a lot of people don't understand is that Lysol doesn't kill a lot of stuff and it doesn't kill RSV. So if you have RSV in your home and you're just Lysol-ing everything down, you're not killing it.

Kelli: 2:35

If you're using the little Lysol wipes, you're not killing RSV. So if you have a kiddo in your home, you have elderly people in your home and they have RSV, spraying Lysol and wiping things down with Lysol is not getting it done. You're going to need to use bleach or vinegar, combination of one of the other, um cavi wipes. So if you're in healthcare and you have access to cavi wipes, um, but yeah, just using Lysol doesn't, doesn't get the job done. So is that kind of what you're seeing right now?

Nicole: 2:59

Yeah, yeah, exactly, not a lot of that. Some of the symptoms that I'm seeing a lot of is the sudden onset like sudden, like I was good five minutes ago and now I'm not, and that's very, very indicative of a flu, of a viral attack. And so it is important that when you have that acute attack, that you're reaching out, because getting started on antiviral within the first 48 hours of symptoms is super important. So you want to make sure that you're reaching out for that. I'm having a lot of diarrhea, too, with patients that are really getting this virus and it's just, they're just having lots of diarrhea. So hydration with that is going to be super, super important.

Nicole: 3:35

But it is rampant. It is rampant. I mean everything we touch. You know everything. It's. I mean the doorknobs, your keyboard, like all those things you know it's like. Then you go touch something else and you come back and it's, it's just, it's, it's awful, it's just awful. And especially if you have young kids, I mean they're just little walking Petri dishes, right, because they're in school, and all the things, and it's definitely just rampant. And I thought it would be slowing down by now, but it is just not. And everybody is super, super sick and they're really struggling. They're really, really struggling. And then they're getting the secondary bacterial infection. So they're going through some viral stuff and then they're coming back saying I have all this green stuff and my chest is full, and so it's turning into just a monster.

Kelli: 4:23

Yeah, it really is. So last week and over the weekend I made I don't know how many house calls with patients that were doing just that. They had had a little bit of flu, upper respiratory virus stuff, and then seven, eight, 10 days later they were down for the count. They had junk in their chests, you know, coughing up nasty crap. Their chests were heavy, they couldn't keep. I mean, it was just awful. But secondary bacterial infections, um, I hung a few IVs on my patients, made several house calls. People were just sick.

Kelli: 4:52

Um, so yeah, hydration is the name of the game, trying to keep yourself very hydrated. So, having said all that, as we've scared everybody to death, lots of information about preventing the infection before you've been exposed. So let's talk about that first and then we can kind of talk about you know what to do when you do get sick, or if you've been exposed, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a few things that you can do Antiseptic, antimacterial mouthwash. Guys, I know Nicole just said children are petri dishes. So is your mouth. I don't mean that to be ugly, but gargle twice a day, don't swallow it. Gargle twice a day with a good antimicrobial mouthwash. Choose a mouthwash that contains chlorhexidine. You can look this stuff up combinations of eucalyptus, menthol, thymol, uh, something like that, to really really clean your mouth out gargle, spit it out. My, my mom was always really, really hyped on the warm salt water with a little touch of vinegar. We would gargle with that and spit it out as kids and that just keeps anything that is not supposed to live in your mouth out of your mouth so you don't inhale it, continue to breathe it, swallow it and get yourself ill.

Kelli: 6:05

Vitamin D y'all have all heard me on my functional medicine soapbox talking about keeping your vitamin D levels, you know, towards the high end of normal. That presents a higher serum concentration level to keep you healthy. Vitamin C the recommendation is about 500-ish milligrams twice a day. If you can Zinc, anywhere from 20 to 50 milligrams a day, that helps to boost your immune system. Melatonin, elderberry syrup supplements, gummies Be careful with gummies. Sometimes there's a lot of sugar in those guys, so be real careful with the gummies. But If you take elderberry in any form syrup supplements during high periods of transmission of these types of viruses, you're going to start to see that it'll help increase your immune system, boost your immune system, um, to make it be able to fight these things off a little bit easier.

Nicole: 6:56

Yeah, be sure to brush your tongue too, or get a tongue scraper. Those work amazing. The tongue scraper I tried it for like the first time. I hadn't done it in like probably a decade. I did it the other day and I was like well, that's.

Kelli: 7:11

Yes, the first time you actually do it after a while, you're just like, oh, that was seriously in my mouth. Um, one of the things that I found really interesting when I was doing some research was one of the preventions that they can use. That they call to use is one to two cups of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee per day. Coffee.

Nicole: 7:35

I'm on that.

Kelli: 7:36

I'm all over that, I'm pretty sure I just got permission to drink coffee all day. I know it said one or two cups, but more is more is better, right? Oh yeah, more is always better, more is always better, more is always better. And then, of course, ivermectin, and there's a ton of research out there about ivermectin. We've talked about it just a little bit and there's a lot of information about there, and in abundance, about natural immunity and how to use that medication to help boost your immune system, and even what ivermectin does on the cellular level. I could bore you to death with the science behind it, cause I think it's fascinating, truly. I think it's fascinating, um, but that medication does some fascinating stuff on the cellular level, and what it can do to cells that are aggressively attacking your body is just incredible. It really is.

Nicole: 8:24

Absolutely.

Kelli: 8:26

Yeah, and the the interesting thing about a lot of this stuff is most of these are things that we probably should be doing anyway. Right, like we, we should be brushing our teeth at least twice a day. We should be using mouthwash. When we brush our teeth a couple of times a day, we should be brushing our tongue we should be, you know, we should be taking these supplements to stay healthy, washing our hands, et cetera. Tongue we should be. You know, we should be taking these supplements to stay healthy, washing our hands, etc. And so, after you've been exposed, nicole, what do you recommend patients do to prevent infection once they know they've been exposed.

Nicole: 8:56

Definitely, if you're not up to par on your vitamins and your elderberries, definitely jump on that right, right away. Right away, cleaning everything, like Kelli said. You know, don't, don't add to the mix, trying to clean, get everything as as clean as possible and then just making sure you're keeping moving, keep those lungs working right. It's when we're sedentary that the fluid likes to settle in our lungs and that that's what leads to pneumonia. That's why a lot of hospital patients get pneumonia because all they do you're, you're laying in the bed, right, you're attached to all these monitors and you have a bed, and so patients get pneumonia in the hospital because they're not up moving around. And so keep moving, even if you feel kind of crummy. You're starting to feel crummy. Keep moving, work those lungs. Add the mucinex if you can.

Nicole: 9:37

If it's, you know if it's okay with your, with your, your prescriber, um, you know you always want to make sure everything goes well with the current medications that you're on, but keeping what's in your chest thinned out. But if you've been exposed, reach out. If you've had a direct exposure, reach out to your, to your health care provider, see if you can get a prescription. If your partner, like she said, if your partner tested positive for influenza, you know um, go ahead and get on it the sooner the better with those antivirals, for sure. For sure.

Kelli: 10:09

I think something else that people don't consider is that sleep is incredibly important. When you don't feel good, that's your body's time to recover, your body's time to repair itself, to fight off infections. When you're sleeping, that's why you find yourself, you know, laying around, laying in bed, laying on the couch and, like Nicole said, again, that's when pneumonia can settle in. So it's almost like you're you know it's working against you. Yes, we want you to rest, yes, we want you to lay down and we certainly want you to get plenty of sleep, because that's when your body can care for itself. But, again, that's that fine balance between, you know, keeping things moving around and and getting plenty of breath. So, yeah, that's all I have.

Nicole: 10:47

Nicole, that's good. No, that's it. That's good, short and sweet. We don't want to make things too complicated. You know, take the long way to the bathroom, do one lap around the house, you know per day whatever you can do to keep those lungs moving. Otherwise, I hope you guys stay safe and let us know if you guys need anything. You can find me at Hamilton telehealth. com and you can find Kelli at Chari health. com C, h, a, r I health. com. All right, reach out to us if you need anything. We'll see you again. All right, guys, you