As we're heading into fall, kids are going back to school, they're going to get exposed to each other and all kinds of things they're going to pass around, whatever. So I want you to be prepared for what to do, what to have on hand if and when the kids are exposed. So I'm going to start with a couple things to do in preparation for this and hopefully you're not watching this too late. Vitamin D is very important just like it is for adults. It's difficult to know what the kid's level of vitamin D is. I mean it's easy to do a blood test on an adult. You can do a blood test on a child, but you can reason with some children better than others and I certainly understand that. So if you can get your child to sit for a vitamin D blood test, ask your pediatrician for it or call us, we'll put in an order at Lab Corp.

(00:53)
You can go by and get it done, but then you would know their numbers just like an adult. You want the child's vitamin D level number one to be above 55, anything above 55 and you're getting into a range where they can probably defend themselves fairly well. 60 to a hundred, 70 to 90. Those kinds of ranges are kind of kicked around in functional medicine circles and I agree with those as being optimal ranges. 100 is not necessarily a hard top end. A lot of people get very nervous when vitamin D levels get it all above a hundred. I don't think it's all that bad. I don't think you need to drive it that high, but if it accidentally gets a little bit over a hundred, I don't really think that there's any big deal. I've had patients come in as high as 300 or three 20, which we don't recommend.

(01:41)
I think you're wasting some vitamin D at that point, but there really weren't any side effects to speak of that happened more during COVID when people were kind of freaking out about some stuff. But anyway, so vitamin D levels for your child above 55, 60 to 170 to 90, something like that would be the sweet spot. Make sure they're getting good sleep. Don't overload 'em with sugar. Make sure they're washing their hands when they come home from school. Remind them to wash their hands during the day. Those are all important preemptive measures if you will. And then I talked about this on the adult video for immune support and I'm going to talk about it here and that's doing a nasal spray. You can do an iodine nasal spray or if you know your child has issues with iodine, you can do a colloidal silver nasal spray.

(02:31)
Now personal opinion, I think the iodine nasal spray is more effective. You can get the same nasal spray you would use in an adult, use half the dose instead of two sprays per nostril. Do one spray per nostril. You can even open that up, dump a little bit out and get yourself some saline nasal rinse and pour a little bit of that in there and that'll dilute the iodine nasal spray. Now when you dilute the nasal sprayer, you're going to lose some of its effectiveness probably yes. However, if the original nasal spray, if they weren't going to use that, then it's 0% effective. So even if you dilute it and it's 50% effective, it's better than zero. So I understand that when you dilute that, it may not be as effective, but it's still going to be more effective than something that your child won't do. So there you go. You can also do a colloidal silver nasal spray. I don't have one that I particularly love.

(03:31)
Designs for Health makes one called Silver Sein. It's in a regular pump sprayer. It's not in a sprayer that's easily done in the nose. It would be easily done on the back of the throat. You could probably pour that into a nasal sprayer. You can get empty nasal sprayers on Amazon, super cheap. You're going to have to buy a bag of 50 of 'em probably, but they're not going to be expensive. Share 'em with your friends, whatever. So anyway, those are some options. Herbal throat spray that goes in the throat. If you know that they got exposed and you can't do a nasal spray, at least do a throat spray or if they start to say, I think I've got a sore throat, but I'm not sure, hit the back of the throat with that herbal throat spray. See if you can't knock this out before it really gets a foothold.

(04:16)
The problem is a lot of these respiratory infections that we get this time of year get back in the back of what we call the nasopharynx. Right up in there. It curves and goes down the back of the throat. So at that curve up there, it sits there and incubates for a day or two kind of gets its act together and gets organized, multiplies a bunch of times and then it starts moving into the respiratory tract to cause a real infection. If you can kill it off while it's trying to get its act together, you may negate the whole thing before it even starts, right? That would be ideal. So if you've got a kid that's young enough that you don't trust them to be washing their hands properly or they suck on their fingers or mess with their face or whatever, then hit 'em with that nasal spray every day when they come home from school.

(05:00)
Now on weekends if they're not around a bunch of other kids skip it, give 'em a break. But when they come home from school, one shot in each nostril, two, if they're a larger kid, if you've got some fifth, sixth, seventh grader that's 110, 120 pounds, give 'em two shots in the nose, right? Because not but two nasal sprays in the nose, they're almost an adult size, they can handle that, but that's a really good preventative. Once it comes in, you knock it out quickly, it never really becomes a full fledged infection. Other things you can do to kind of nourish their immune system so they're better able to respond should they get exposed. Bury liquid. Now this is more for the little kids once they're kind of a adult size, go watch the adult video. You can play with the dosages a little bit, but when they're closer to adult size, skip some of this stuff.

(05:53)
Go to the adult products as soon as they can swallow pills, but in the kids that can't swallow pills yet, immuno barrier, liquid that's designed for health, really good for supporting the immune system before an infection to prime them. Any kind of elderberry stuff generally does fairly well as long as it's not loaded with sugar. But bearing liquid is one that we trust here at the office. If they get an infection and it seems to really be taking hold double or triple the dose on the immuno barrier. Liquid children's immune from standard process, it's a wafer they can chew. I don't think it tastes great enough that they're going to be craving it, like they're not going to ask for it like candy, but it's certainly not bad enough that they can't chew it. Like you're not going to get too much pushback on this.

(06:35)
So children's immune, couple of those a day from now until Christmas, just keep their immune system happy, keep it fortified, keep it ready to react and hopefully you don't have to deal with much. And then of course we talked about the nasal sprays and the throat spray as kind of preventative measures. Now what do you do if they get sick? Well, for one thing, whatever you were doing for prevention, double it when they're sick. So that's one thing you can do if they get a fever, if you can let them run a fever for a couple hours. I know they're uncomfortable. Many times when my son was younger and he would get fevers, he got high fevers, 104 or whatever, we let it run for a while, but then when we needed him to sleep at night, we would go ahead and medicate it and let him sleep it off.

(07:23)
Sometimes we felt like the sleep was more important than the fever. If he had a fever most of the day we'd give him a break and let him sleep at night, right? It's kind of a judgment call, but if you can let the fever run at least a little bit, I think that's probably helpful. Most of the things that we get infected with live within a narrow temperature range and when our body temperature gets above that range, it doesn't like that and it becomes much more vulnerable to our immune system or it just dies off because it can't stand that. So fevers, especially when they kind of undulate run a fever and then it'll break and then they'll run a fever and then it'll break. That's a great time to let their body go ahead and do their job and kill off whatever they're infected with.

(08:06)
Now, I'm not saying to go beyond reason, but don't immediately medicate a fever. The fevers are there for a reason. Now there are fevers that just keep going up, don't, there's no cycling on and off. It keeps getting higher and higher. Medicate that, go to urgent care, make sure everything's okay with that. There are some bacteria they can get infected with that put off a toxin that force your fever to just go up and not come down. It doesn't happen all that often, but every once in a while it does. But for a kid to spike a fever and then the fever breaks and comes back down, keep in mind, I think I did another video on this a while back when they're cold and shivering and wrapping up in blankets, that's when the fever's climbing, right? The thermostat has been set to 1 0 4, they're sitting at 98 or 99 and their body's like, oh my God, I'm freezing, and it makes a bunch of heat to try to get up to 1 0 4.

(09:02)
Once they hit 1 0 4 and kind of level out, they feel, I mean they feel terrible, but temperature wise they don't feel necessarily hot or cold. But then their body will reset down to 99 and all of a sudden they're like, oh my God, I'm way too hot. And that's when everything starts coming off and they're sweating and they turn red. That's when the fever is already broke and it's coming back down again. So keep in mind that there's a thermostat in or hypothalamus that kind of works like the old school thermostats for your air conditioning and heating. You would slide the little switch up and then the house would warm to get up to that and then you'd slide it back down and the house would cool until it met that. That's kind of what their bodies are doing. So when they're shivering and all wrapped up, that fever's climbing when they're hot and red and just like you can put your hands up to 'em and feel the heat coming off of when the fever's coming back down, it's already broken at that point.

(09:58)
So that's the fever discussion when they're sick. Chewable conga complex. Now I talked in the adult video about Conga Complex. When in doubt you take a whole bunch of conga complex, you can do somewhat the same thing with the kids. They do make a chewable conga complex or you can open up the adult capsule into a little bit of flavored applesauce or something and get it in there. It's not terrible, but Conga complex is one. You can do herbal throat spray even once they have an infection. It's great to do that in the back of the throat. It also, because it has a little echinacea in it, it can numb the throat and so that can give 'em a little bit of relief if you need to do that so that they'll eat or drink. It's a good option for that too. You can increase their immuno liquid.

(10:42)
You can double even triple the dose. It's very safe. You've got a lot of leeway on that. And then there's a product called Kid Cold, which is alcohol based because that's a lot of times what it takes to really pull the herbs or the active components out of the herbs is you've got to have a solvent and that ends up being alcohol. And so it's got a little bit of a bite to it. So the kids don't necessarily love it. It's not syrupy like the immuno barrier liquid, but it works very well when they've already got an infection. I don't know that I would go to the trouble of trying to use this for prevention, but it's great once they've already got an infection. So Kit Gold from Weed botanical is one that we use for that. We've got a few other tricks up our sleeve here at the office.

(11:25)
But for things that you can keep at home that give you an opportunity to maybe jump on this right away and never need to come in, that's what we're looking for here because it's always going to happen on a Friday afternoon and you got to get through the weekend, so do what you got to do. But these are some things you can do. Keep on hand, keep in place, keep in their regimen so that they are less likely to get a significant infection. Now in kids, especially the toddlers, we don't look for them to never get sick, but the goal would be when they do get sick, they get sick, they get puny and wimpy and they don't feel well, and after 24 to 48 hours they kind of come back out of it and life goes on their immune system, recognized it, responded to it, killed it off, or did what it needed to do.

(12:14)
They came out the other end of it and they're back to normal. That's what you want to see. You want to see them do that over and over and over again throughout their early years as their immune system learns to fight infections. If every time it gets an infection, somebody jumps in with an antibiotic and finishes the job for them, their immune system never learns how to go all the way through that process it's supposed to. So you don't want to torture them with infection. But if it looks like they're getting a handle on it on their own, you kind of let it run. Let their body do the job. Just like if they were trying to build a little structure out of blocks, you wouldn't always run in and finish it for 'em. Let them figure it out and make some mistakes. And once they kind of go all the way through the process, a few times they've learned it and they can do it as often as they like.

(13:03)
Same kind of thing with their immune system. It's in the process of learning. So have a little bit of patience, not too much, but have a little bit of patience and see how they do on their own. Okay? If you are vaccinating your child, do not give Tylenol around their vaccinations. I know for a while that was kind of like, oh, I'll give 'em Tylenol. They won't feel their fever, they won't feel any inflammation in their arm or whatever Tylenol drops or decreases their ability to make glutathione. And glutathione is a major antioxidant protector when there are toxins coming into the system. So if they get a vaccine and it happens to have some toxins in it, which a lot of 'em do, you don't want to decrease their glutathione levels at exactly the same time. So do not premedicate with Tylenol. I definitely would not recommend that.

(13:56)
So I know a lot of my patients don't vaccinate. That's awesome. I have no problem with that. A lot of my patients do vaccinate. It's fine. You do whatever you need to do, but just don't premedicate with Tylenol. Right? That's kind of a no-no for that one. Alright, that does it for the kids video. If you have questions, email us, call the office, leave some comments down below. I'll try to keep track of 'em and let me know and I'll answer the questions. If there was something on here that was not clear, but oh, the nasal spray that I like, the iodine nasal spray that I like is called Nasomin, N-A-S-O-M-I-N. And we get that on Amazon, but I'm sure you can find it at your local pharmacy or you can find something equivalent if you want to do that. I do not have a preferred brand or product name for a colloidal silver nasal spray, but I'm sure you can find them out there. They're all over Amazon. Do your best to pick one that you feel comfortable with, but that's another option. I think that's about it. Alright, I will see you guys soon. If you're an adult and you just watch the video for the kids and you're wondering what do you do for you, there is an adult oriented video for the same thing, what you would do for yourself. So go find that video. If you can't find it, let us know. We'll email you a link to it. Alright, have a great one.