Dr. Roger Seheult from MedCram on COVID-19 Vaccines, Vitamin D, and Heat Hydrotherapy

Dr. Roger Seheult is the co-creator of MedCram Videos. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, MedCram emerged as a beacon of insight, providing continuing coverage and perspectives in an environment almost defined by information scarcity. What particularly excited me about the unique opportunity of this interview is that apart from Dr. Seheult being a unique voice of public scholarship during the early days of the pandemic, he's also a quadruple board-certified pulmonologist with deep experience working on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In other words, when it comes to COVID-19 for Dr. Seheult... it's personal. He has worked tirelessly not just to help people find their way back to wellness as a critical care provider, but he broadcasts the insights he has gained realtime to the 1 million subscribers listening to his medical lecture platform he co-founded with physician assistant Kyle Allred.

Listen to this episode to hear Dr. Seheult's thoughts on:

00:06:20 - How MedCram Videos got started and the future of medical education from Dr. Seheult's standpoint. 00:09:37 - What to do when life is on the line and the usual hierarchy of evidence doesn't exist, as in early emergency COVID-19 treatment. 00:12:46 - The crucial differences in treating early vs. late-stage COVID-19 illness. 00:14:40 - How doctors would've treated COVID-19 one-hundred years ago. 00:18:13 - How increasing ventilation may powerfully impact COVID-19 disease transmission and why airplanes have surprisingly little disease transmission. 00:20:28 - How masks are virtually universally beneficial in the pandemic regardless of type. 00:21:32 - Vitamin D and COVID-19 00:22:22 - How the steroid chemical structure of vitamin D confers qualities on vitamin D that other vitamins ("vital amines") do not possess, such as membrane permeability that provides access to the nucleus and broad gene regulatory effects mediated by a specialized vitamin D receptor element. 00:23:24 - How calcium homeostasis, which was the early and exclusive focus for scientists and doctors that were trying to determine the ideal vitamin D levels, may have caused the RDA to be set too low since we now know vitamin D regulates around 5% of the protein-encoding genome and have much broader effects. 00:24:23 - How the hormonal role of vitamin D confers on it properties more similar to other hormones like testosterone and cortisol rather than those of ordinary vitamins. 00:26:21 - The surprising level of overlap between COVID-19 positivity and groups most affected by vitamin D deficiency and the surprise finding of how less than 50 ng/mL blood levels of vitamin D associated with greater likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 positivity in the hospital. 00:30:27 - How scientists are able to interrogate the effects of low vitamin D levels through genetic research, a type of study known as mendellian randomization. 00:34:20 - The gene regulatory effects of vitamin D and the implications for the scale of its biological impact. 00:35:49 - How Vitamin D's ACE2/renin-angiontensin-promoting effects may be mechanistically involved in the effects observed in vitamin D COVID-19 studies. 00:42:00 - Why ameliorating vitamin D deficiency in one large monthly bolus might be less effective than daily or weekly doses. 00:43:23 - How a prescription-only form of vitamin D known as Calcifediol might have an advantage in acute care for COVID-19. 00:47:06 - Why skin synthesis of vitamin D from UV B radiation can be extraordinarily unreliable when compared to supplementation. 00:53:43 - What the safest dose range for vitamin D is that should also address deficiency in most populations. 01:06:15 - The beneficial circadian effect of early morning sunlight. 01:07:38 - How sleep deprivation is meaningfully implicated in profound and immediate impairment of viral immunity. 01:12:08 - Dr. Seheult's suggestions for how to achieve the highest quality of sleep. 01:19:18 - How a century old sanitarium technique used during the Spanish flu era massively boosts interferon by up to ten-times using heat exposure. 01:22:38 - How genetic and antibody-induced failures of the interferon system underpin up to 14% of all severe cases of COVID-19 and why interferon is so vitally important for viral response. 01:26:43 - Why treating the symptoms of fever during the spanish flu turned out to not be a good idea, immunologically speaking. 01:31:58 - Dr. Seheult's on-going research into using hot hydrotherapy as a viral immunity booster. 01:47:00 - COVID-19 Vaccines

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