That's another thing I've wondered about. I asked one of my doctors about it over the phone. She went silent long enough for me to wonder if the call had been dropped, and then said, "That's very interesting." And like Poe's raven, only that and nothing more.
I think we're talking about the same line of reasoning, anyway: If we assume for the sake of argument that people who survive to advanced age are more likely to have robust immune systems, does that person's immune system's habit of aggressively responding to new pathogens make them
more likely to experience bad outcomes due to hypercytokinemia -- the so-called "cytokine storm" -- that can cause respiratory distress and multi-organ failure?
The medical implications of that would be above my pay grade. But it does make me wonder, firstly, whether medications (or herbs, like the aforementioned "cat's claw") that seem to moderate immune response should be considered as routine therapeutics for symptomatic cases; and secondly, whether vaccines for this virus might be more risky than is generally the case. Could a vaccine trigger iatrogenic hypercytokinemia and kill a previously-healthy patient? I really don't know. But as a person like yourself who "never gets sick," I do wonder about it.
As for the aforementioned cat's claw, I started taking it many years ago for mild arthritis on the advice of a former girlfriend who was a physician with a keen interest in herbal medicine.
Fast forward to a year or so ago, when I was treated at an ER for a slip-and-fall accident. The follow-up exam revealed arthritis in my shoulder severe enough that three providers (two physicians and a PA) were flabbergasted that I had normal range of movement and zero pain. I could (and still can) feel the crepitus (as could they), but it is neither painful nor motion-limiting. I also know that if I stop taking cat's claw, I start experiencing pain in my shoulder and in the joints in my fingers after a few days to a week.
Their shock didn't surprise me as I've been taking and following research on cat's claw for decades. It's perhaps the most-studied herb in the jungle.
There are actually two species of cat's claw that seem to be of particular interest to researchers,
Uncaria tomentosa and
Uncaria guianensis, with hundreds, or maybe thousands by now, of published studies between them. It's been investigated for practically all inflammatory and autoimmune conditions (it contains pentacyclic oxindole alkaloids that are believed to help regulate the immune system and tame the autoimmune response), as well as osteoarthritis, HIV, Alzheimer's (where the
research is especially promising), and most recently, cancer.
The only suspected side effect that I know of is a big one: Because cat's claw seems to have at least some anti-tumor properties, it's possible that it's also a teratogen, as many anti-cancer drugs that act as cell-division traffic cops are. So it's definitely not something that pregnant women or nursing mothers should take.
With those exceptions, however, I can't shake this nagging feeling that some researcher in some lab somewhere really needs to be looking at cat's claw as a possible therapeutic for the hypercytokinemia that seems to be the actual killer in many or most COVID-19 cases. I'm not a physician, so I can't go as far as to say they should be
prescribing it; but I do think they should be
looking at it.
And at least one scientist is. I read the article. But now I can't find it in the sea of search results. The problem is that since I read it, practically every science site in the world, along with altogether too many non-science commercial sites, have added COVID notices, links, or banners; so doing a Boolean search for "[literally anything in the world]" AND "COVID" yields bazillions of irrelevant results.
Rich