Fascia Insights – Adapting to COVID-19 Conditions: An Interview with Wiley Patterson, MD

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Year: 2020
ABSTRACT In this interview, conducted in early October 2020, Dr. Patterson offers what this COVID-19 moment looks like to him as a Rolfer and as a physician. Patterson outlines how he is working safely with integrated public health practices and also how he is caring for his own health. The conversation touches on recent literature with regards to the value of vitamin D and melatonin when individuals are facing COVID-19 infection.

ABSTRACT In this interview, conducted in early October 2020, Dr. Patterson offers what this COVID-19 moment looks like to him as a Rolfer and as a physician. Patterson outlines how he is working safely with integrated public health practices and also how he is caring for his own health. The conversation touches on recent literature with regards to the value of vitamin D and melatonin when individuals are facing COVID-19 infection.

Lina Amy Hack: Thank you for meeting online with me to talk about this COVID- 19 moment we all find ourselves in. I’m curious about what your practice looks like these days and how has it been this year?

Wiley Patterson: When COVID-19 hit, it slowed down to about 25% of volume. Now it’s probably up to about 60% to 70% of previous volume. You know, I learned a long time ago at medical school, during hospital training, illness is like the Amazon river, the river of illness never stops.
I have a medical practice and I have a manipulation Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) practice, the manipulation part of my work is half people who say, “I want you to do

Rolfing [SI],” and the other half say, “Fix my shoulder.” So, I decided to stay open, not because I’m that noble necessarily, because I just wasn’t as scared of it. We took on precautions way before it became out there. I ordered masks way back when. I started taking supplements that support the immune system. And of course, we wipe down, we changed the way we scheduled. I have fifteen minutes between each client now. We send questionnaires to people the day before their appointment, and we have a policy that’s up on the wall about how to take care of your COVID-19 hygiene before you come, what to do. There is never more than one person at a time. But also, people that are sick in that way don’t come to see me.
I have a friend [who is a medical doctor] here in town who has a clinic, he’s treated over 500 people with COVID-19 so far, and I don’t think I’ve had any. Each of those 500 people that he’s treated, he’s used melatonin in a really large dose of milligrams per kilogram per day (Castillo, 2020; Mercola, 2020).

What I’ll say first is that all viruses run their course. They come and they go.

LAH: Wow. I hadn’t heard about that treatment avenue with COVID-19.
WP: So, say we have a 220-pound guy, according to the Castillo protocol, the doctor prescribes 100 milligrams of melatonin every day. My friend says they all state they begin to feel better the first day, most of them are well in a week. The people that have refused to take the melatonin have an unusual fear in that they say, “I hear when you’ve got COVID-19, you die in your sleep. I don’t want melatonin to put me to sleep so I die in my sleep.” Otherwise, everyone else takes it and they’ve done really well in his clinic. Zero deaths.
LAH: What is your sense of the tissue damage that COVID-19 is doing in the body?
WP: COVID-19 affects some people with rampant, out-of-control inflammation in a given tissue that can lead to local organ dysfunction and, if even worse in magnitude, to death. Elderly and comorbidities are the best predictors of the seriousness of the illness. I’ll send you a reference so your readers can review the main histopathological findings in COVID-19 (Vasquez-Bonilla et al., 2020).
LAH: What is the most important thing you’d like to communicate to our colleagues who are Rolfers in this COVID-19 era?
WP: What I’ll say first is that all viruses run their course. There hasn’t been a single virus that just persists and persists and creates this much havoc forever. They come and they go. So, it’s inevitable it’s going to slow down.
Spanish flu [the 1918 flu pandemic] lasted three years. It was way worse than this thing is probably going to be. This thing’s going to run its course. It’s going to kill the susceptible. It’s morbid sounding, but it is. And you can social distance and wear a mask and all it’s going to do is slow things down and spread [it] over time. The best thing to do is just make sure your immune system is right.
LAH: It is nice to think about a post- COVID-19 era.
WP: It’s inevitable this will end. You know, you’ve heard about vitamin D’s effectiveness, right? There’s a pretty good study from Germany talking about vitamin D’s effectiveness, 780 patients, all COVID- 19 positive, have you heard of that study (Borsche & Glauner, 2020)?
LAH: No, what draws your attention to it?
WP: They correlated how sick patients were to their vitamin D levels. The researchers investigated 780 definite COVID-19 positive people, and they measured their vitamin D levels to correlate with how sick they were. They found that if the patient’s vitamin D was above 80ng/ml, all of them had zero symptoms. If the vitamin D level of the patient was above 60ng/ml they had symptoms of flu. Between 34ng/ml and 60ng/ml, people were in hospital; if their vitamin D level was below 17ng/ml, there was 100% mortality. That was the standout thing, below 17ng/ml. So, taking vitamin D, smart.
Also, getting sun. You can see I’m a little bit tan. I swam a lot this summer on purpose. Everybody wanted me to tell them how many minutes they should be in the sun. The rule is never burn. As a rule of thumb, you can create 1000 units of vitamin D in your body with four minutes of sunshine, something like that. Higher latitudes, you have to take supplementation, you can’t get enough sun.
LAH: For the clients that you’re seeing, of course you engage with COVID-19 procedures, is the work in the treatment room changing?
WP: I know my Rolfing SI doesn’t change. I’m definitely wearing a mask and I ask them to or not, depending. If it’s a head session they take their mask off. I wear a mask and face shield at times – this virus is small airborne stuff. The science is already there, we just have to learn it and pay attention to it. It floats through the air. Like a person I know who plays the piano at a church choir, and that church pastor insisted that their choir keep going. So, they all sang together, now half of them are COVID-19 positive. That’s just the rules of airborne viruses.
LAH: Do you find that working with a mask changes the social engagement? Any change in therapeutic relationship?
WP: Some people really object to them. Other people tell me that they can’t understand me with my mask on. But there’s a lot of people who leave their mask on, who want it on, and would be offended if I asked them to take it off. So, I’m pretty open. But yeah, it changes things.
LAH: Do you monitor for COVID-19 population rates in your area? Do you have any advice around local infection rates and should that change anything for our colleagues? For example, if the infection rate in a Rolfer’s city is greater than 250 people per 100,000? At what rate should it affect how many clients a Rolfer sees?
WP: Right, should that practitioner behave differently than the practitioner who’s facing 10 infections per 100,000? I think they should. Look at my choir example, I’m sure not one of those people who went thought they had COVID-19, and now half of them do, right? So, somebody there was asymptomatic.
Clearly, if it’s a really dense population area, like how bad it was in New York initially, how could you assume anything other than the next guy has got it? But also now, different from before, rural America, places like Wyoming, are getting hit. It just took a while for the virus to get there. Again, it’s going to spread its joy all over, so to speak, and it’s going to get the susceptible. If you’re living in a higher COVID-19 density area versus a low-density area, of course that should affect your thinking. I couldn’t pick a number to decide from, there’s no way to know that. I thought of such things early on, and I realized that’s just numbers, that may or may not represent the actual chance I’m looking at of getting sick.
It’ll come in waves. The Spanish flu did, there were three different waves of it over three years, each at a different level of severity. The second one was worse. The

Once structural integration takes hold, it gets better and more deeply installed in clients’ structure, they’re healthier, they don’t get sick as much, and they all know it.

last one was geographically isolated and not as severe.
LAH: What do you think our greatest challenge is right now as Rolfers, to execute our work?
WP: I don’t think anybody’s lost one bit of Rolfing acumen or skill. Even if you haven’t been as busy. So that’s not changed, right? So, I think as people’s confidence comes back, people are going to want to come in. Rolfing SI certainly isn’t going to cure any COVID-19. But people who come to get Rolfing SI work are generally, not always but generally, healthier. They realized it’s doing something for them that’s good and they live at a higher level of health once that happens. Once structural integration takes hold, it gets better and more deeply installed in clients’ structure, they’re healthier, they don’t get sick as much, and they all know it.
LAH: That’s great. Thank you so much for your thoughts at this time.
Dr. Wiley Patterson is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and a physician specializing in addictions, practicing in San Antonio, Texas.
Lina Amy Hack is an Advanced Rolfer practicing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. She is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of this journal.

References
Borsche, L. & B. Glauner 2020. “COVID- 19: More Deaths? More Lockdown? More Suffering?” Available from https:// borsche.de/res/Vitamn_D_Essentials_ EN.pdf (retrieved 11/9/2020).
Castillo, R. 2020. “How to Use Melatonin on COVID-19 Patients.” Lifestyle- INQ [website]. Available from https:// lifestyle.inquirer.net/368256/how-to- use-melatonin-on-covid-19-patients/ (retrieved 11/9/2020).
Mercola, J. November 23, 2020. “Clevland Clinic Identifies Melatonin as COVID-
19 Treatment.”

Available from

https:// articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/ archive/2020/11/23/clevland-clinic- melatonin.aspx?ui=2528641421232a787 69819efda123dc215017dfb1c84df4f7a6 7dc56f736304&cid_source=dnl&cid_ medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid
=20201123_HL2&mid=DM727370&rid=1018112440

(retrieved 12/4/2020).
Vasquez-Vonilla, et al. 2020 (Aug 2). “A Review of the Main Histopathological Findings in Coronavirus Disease 2019”.

Human Pathology 2020 Aug 2, 1-10. [Epub ahead of print] Available from https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC7395947/(retrieved 11/9/2020).

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