Dr. Jordan Vaughn discusses his groundbreaking research into iliac vein injury after Covid and Covid vaccines. In some patients, it’s the cause of mysterious symptoms other doctors cannot figure out. But there is help.

Transcript below. Please note the transcript is AI generated and may contain typos.

0:06

Hi everybody, Sharyl Attkisson here.

Welcome to another edition of the Sharyl Attkisson Podcast.

Today we continue our groundbreaking interviews about long COVID and long backs, which are already impacting millions of people.

Though many may not know it, we’ll hear about a subgroup of injuries involving the body’s iliac vein.

0:25

Why is that important?

Well, it can apparently give you all kinds of debilitating symptoms that are likely to be misread by your physicians who are using pre COVID-19 knowledge and tests and scans.

So we’re going to hear from Doctor Jordan Vaughn who’s conducting leading edge research and making important discoveries I anticipate will soon be published.

As long as the establishment medical forces don’t step in to quash it.

Stay tuned for Doctor Jordan Vaughn and Iliac Veins.

Dr. Vaughn: So I am Jordan Vaughn.

1:02

I’m a physician that is basically just your, what I would call your average internist, your independent physician that for the most part was basically spending most of his day treating patients, basically listening to them and trying to come up with solutions to their problems.

And in many ways, that’s where I started out.

As somebody that wanted to try to figure out some of these complex things, and in many ways that’s what COVID provided with me.

Provided me which was a brand new disease with a lot of interesting symptoms.

And then from that disease, not only kind of figuring out how to treat it appropriately in the acute stage, I was kind of forced as somebody that knew a lot about COVID to also see people that continued to have symptoms after COVID or after the vaccine.

And so that forced me to even dig deeper and try to figure out exactly what was going on in these otherwise previously healthy people who now were having life changing symptoms that really were upending their entire life and really what was going on.

And again, for at the time, the medical establishment for the most part was saying, well, there’s nothing wrong with you, there’s nothing we can do for you.

And sorry for the most part as we can tell that.

Most of the studies that we look at say that you’re otherwise normal.

And so that’s what really kind of made me dig in my heels, dig deep and try to figure out what was actually going on in these people that really had no reason to be telling me something that wasn’t true.

And also had physi physiological signs, symptoms that their family members, their spouses would tell me are definitely different than they usually were, as well as what would.

Be useful in terms of diagnosing them as well as fixing them.

And I guess that would be kind of a very broad look at what it is.

And that really led me to COVID being a disease of the vasculature.

And the vasculature, not only from the standpoint of the inside the tubing which we call the endothelium, but also things that are inside that tubing which are.

I call them microclots or sludge or fibrin aggregates, but a fancy term for saying just like your house, when it’s full of a lot of things in the piping that makes the, you know, the faucet not work right or or the shower not come out right.

In a similar sense, that’s what we were looking at with COVID, especially not only in the acute phase but in the persistent or long phase.

3:30

So that’s kind of a short, I guess couple paragraph explanation.

Sharyl: Well, this is what makes you not average.

I think you said you started out as sort of an average position and I think you’re not in terms of most doctors when approached by patients and they’re probably millions of them from what you’ve discovered who are having long COVID or Long VAX problems, Most doctors either don’t have the time and I can understand that in some cases to figure out what’s really going on or don’t have the interest.

And they are like you said, I’ll, I’ll use the word brushing off patients who are seriously ill and do and have things that can be helped and can be fixed, but nobody’s doing so.

And I partly will blame the medical establishment and public health officials and the government for not researching or pushing along this, you know, area of thought and theories so that people can be helped.

They will talk about long COVID to try to promote the vaccines without telling people that the vaccines are creating or maybe even exacerbating more these problems that can happen with COVID.

So that’s just sort of my take on you.

But you’ve you’ve discovered some important things.

You’ve been treating, gosh, how many over 1000 patients now for this sort of thing?

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah, we’ve probably done about 1500 between me and my.

A nurse practitioner kind of works alongside me, Katie Taylor.

It’s it’s been a really cool thing.

I mean, again, as you say, I mean I’ve become an expert at something that I would have never really wanted to be an expert.

You know, some people go into specialties and they that’s what they want to do.

In many ways, my specialty was just listening to patients and trying to figure out what the heck was going on with them and I end up here becoming somebody that has.

A lot of expertise in something that I would have never drawn off or imagined in my I want to be this when I grow up so.

Yeah.

Sharyl: So for more on that, because we’ve done a podcast, we’ve done Full Measure TV show on this, on my TV show, Full Measure and we’ve done an hour town hall on these topics.

5:44

And you can access that and some other great resources if you want to go to SharylAttkisson.com and under the Health, I think it’s health and medical tabs, something like that. You’ll see long COVID, Long VAX Resources, you click on that.

And I’ve tried to compile everything from Doctor Vaughn’s foundation that he started to try to generate more research and fundraising for this effort, to the stories that we’ve done so far and all kinds of other critical resources.

But what I wanted to talk about today was something we didn’t have time to talk about in these other forms.

There’s so much, there’s so much really to discuss.

But you are discovering a pattern with a, tell me if this is right, a pattern within a subset of these long COVID, Long VAX patients that has to do with iliac vein injury.

And this could be very important for a lot of people.

So talk to us, break it down in really simple terms.

First, what’s the iliac vein?

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah.

So first what what I want to back up and say is that.

You know, again in the midst of treating a lot of these patients and again I think the the term long COVID is or vaccine injury or long facts probably doesn’t give it justice.

I mean what what a lot of these terms usually do is kind of group everybody together that says, all right, this person had COVID and they aren’t back to normal and they feel that there’s something going on is wrong.

The problem is, is that really kind of divides up into what typically medicine we would call phenotype, meaning like kind of.

There’s there’s like these little subclasses of hey this person has very similar symptoms, very similar pathology and they probably have similar issues but they’re they’re they’re thrown into the same bucket and So what a lot of times in medicine it’s it’s kind of dividing that bucket up and what we found in this bucket is that there’s a a part of this bucket that’s probably about 20% that seem to follow a very interesting pattern that has to do with.

7:43

What we would call typically venous disease and the veins don’t really get a lot of play in medicine.

I’d be probably the last time you heard about veins was, oh, I’ve got spider veins or varicose veins and I’m going to go to the surgeon and he’s going to strip them out.

But for the most part, veins are a lot more important than that now.

Interestingly enough, medicine is really focused on the arteries.

Now don’t get me wrong, if you block off an artery, there is hell to pay.

And I’m meaning you know, if you block off the artery to your finger, your finger doesn’t work anymore.

You know, if you block off the vein to your finger doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to fall off or not not work anymore.

But in the same way blocking off veins causes long term issues.

The other thing is is.

Your arterial system contains about 17% of your blood.

Your venous system contains about 70% of your blood.

And it’s really where the capacitance of all the blood in your body really sits.

And the other thing is, unlike your arterial system, it doesn’t have a pump.

Your arterial system has a pump.

8:52

It’s called your heart.

Your venous system doesn’t.

Your venous system relies on you moving throughout the day and actually having pumping of your legs and muscles in your body to have passive return.

I wouldn’t call it a sewage system exactly, but similar to the difference between water coming to your house, which is high pressure.

It comes there, it gets, but then you know you really don’t think about what happens when the when the water goes down the drain and the drain is much more passive.

It goes toward the sewer and eventually gets back where it kind of.

Re Whatever, you know, clean is cleaned and brought back, so I mean…

Sharyl: Let me ask questions along the way.

A few little quickies while you continue.

Hope I don’t distract you too much.

Dr. Vaughn:: No, no, no at all.

Sharyl: Is it accurate to say that typically a big problem with an artery may cause an acute and really recognizable disorder, like a like a heart attack versus if something’s wrong with your veins, it might be more chronic or something that you’re not going to see necessarily as a major event that happens in one day or is that not right?

Dr. Vaughn: No, 100%.

So now, I mean, there are some things, if you close off, you might get some swelling in your leg or something like that.

But if you close off an artery, especially in your heart or your arm, I mean, you’re going to visit the ER probably that night, get hospitalized and have some kind of intervention if you get a vein blocked off.

You’re probably going to have some weird stuff that happens within 48 to 72 hours, but it’s not going to be something.

It’s more something, hey, that you’re going to ask yourself, hey, something’s going on, Something’s different.

You might visit the doctor, you know, especially in the clinical setting, maybe even the ER after five to seven days of something being abnormal.

But it isn’t something exactly like you’re talking about.

The 2nd that an artery in your heart closes off, You can trust me.

You will be going to the ER because you will be “I’m acutely aware that there is something wrong.”

A vein blocks off–It’s more like, “hey, that’s weird.”

And you know, you might go on with your day and then eventually say, hey, this this hasn’t gotten better.

I’m going to visit, you know, the doctor.

So yeah, exactly.

Sharyl: I think that’s a.

Very good way to put it through do the doctors and the normal imaging and checks tend to check your arteries and not so much your veins.

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah, exactly.

Most of the cardiologists that you know, again I, I love cardiac cardiologists are hugely important.

But again, most of when we talk about heart disease, when we talk about coronary disease, when we talk about atherosclerosis, we are talking about the arteries.

Again, arteries are important, but they’re not the only thing involved in your circulation.

So yeah, you’re you’re correct.

But most of medicine.

Is focused around the arterial side.

I mean most cardiologists when you start talking about veins really want to move on and you know, you know really want to talk about something else.

Does that make sense?

Sharyl: Yeah.

And so continue on to the journey to the iliac vein here.

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah.

And and so in treating a lot of again what we would talk about this kind of the clotting disorders that go on in the microvasculature, which is again what we were talked about kind of last time.

What we realized is when we would intervene and put people on a lot of things that would really help with her symptoms.

You know, some of the major things that would go on.

Meaning I could get somebody like Hannah, who we’ve talked about, you know, from 10%, literally bed bound up to about 70%, you know, where she’s up and doing stuff.

But she still wasn’t able to do stuff that would have caused exertion and meaning, like where she could run, where she could, you know, exercise.

Those kind of things.

Now she was definitely happy to be a, you know, being able to take care of her family, but there was something else going on.

So that really led me to really trying to figure out what was this root cause that continued to cause issues and.

Sharyl: That let me let me let me slow you down Sorry you’re.

So smart.

You’re a fast talker, man, so again, if I, as I synopsize, correct anything that’s not quite right as always.

But Hannah’s a patient of yours and

We did more on her and some of these previous stories, but so people can follow now.

She was very sick, went to Mayo Clinic.

They couldn’t fear what was wrong with her.

She had COVID and vaccines or vaccines and COVID and you figured out that she had one of these after effects from COVID and COVID vaccines with various problems with micro clotting throughout her body, I guess in the veins.

And you were able, you’re saying, to get her a lot of improvement, but go ahead, continue.

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah, and from but not improved to where she could go run or those kind of things. So there’s still something again as the weird doctor I am, it was like, OK, we got you better, Hannah, but there’s still some stuff.

That you’re not working like you did prior.

And so that kind of led us down the path of venous insufficiency.

So what I will say is when we talk about microclots, for the most part we’re talking about the ability for the arterial system to deliver oxygen to your tissues.

Sharyl: OK.

Dr. Vaughn: So that really is an arterial issue, Cheryl.

And so improving that is important, but you got to understand also when you get finally oxygen to the tissues through the arterial system.

Somebody’s also got to take the venous blood or not somebody.

But your vasculature, your veins have to take your venous blood back to be re oxygenated again.

And if there’s an issue with getting your venous blood back to your lungs, and one of those issues could be a mechanical obstruction or a big venous issue like iliac vein, iliac vein compression, or may Therner syndrome.

14:35

That is a problem as well.

And so a lot of times that’s what we’re seeing is in this subset of people that we get better on the arterial side.

Again, probably 80% we get better on the arterial side.

They don’t have any of these Venous issues, but about 20% have the Venus issues.

And the Venous issues are the kind of thing that basically keeps them from getting back to doing a lot of the stuff they used to do.

And a lot of these people are very athletic to begin with, so they’re used to wanting to run 3 miles a day, they’re used to wanting to go pump me again, pump iron or whatever those people do.

I mean, these people are very active, so they want to get their cardiac output up.

But if their venous return, their ability to get blood to their heart to pump out to begin with is compromised, then they never really get there.

And so that’s why you can take somebody from 10% to 70%, which 70% would be, hey, I can kind of.

You know, I can cook, I can go to work, I can sit and do with the typical stuff I do, but I can’t really get out and do the, you know, two mile run that I used to like to do 5 * a week anymore without feeling awful.

Or you know, the the the, the shortness of breath that comes up with that is still there, Jordan, what am I going to do about it?

And that’s what really LED us to the Venous part of this.

Sharyl: Where is the iliac vein, Is it only on one side?

And how big is it usually?

Dr. Vaughn:: Yeah.

So typically in your pelvis, and this is pretty much in everybody, your aorta, everybody’s heard about that.

16:02

When your aorta gets to the base of your lower spine, it splits and that is your arterial system.

It splits in right and left.

And so interestingly enough, I’m not really sure why God designed us this way, but your arterial system, which is high, high pressure.

So again, think of your blood pressure as being between 1:20 and 70 normally, OK?

Again, the heart providing the pumping or the pressure for that.

On the way back you have the iliac vein, so you get right and left iliac artery, which is blood going down to your legs, and then you need the blood to come back and so the veins bring that blood back and that iliac vein travels, especially on the right iliac artery in the left iliac vein.

The left iliac vein travels under the right iliac artery and compresses it against most not everybody’s, but a lot of people’s spine.

And so that creates an area that the actual tubing of this area is.

Is compressed just like you would having a hose that you kind of squeeze and it basically limits the amount of blood they can get or water they can get through that hose.

17:13

Does that make sense so?

Sharyl: Well, if you ask me a little, just because we don’t have graphics and yeah, So what side of the body is, Is the iliac vein, does it go around the body or is it on mostly?

So it goes.

Dr. Vaughn: So the actual what I would call the compression area is where the right artery passes over.

The left and right iliac vein.

So a lot of people for the most part, most of their symptoms initially can be on the left side.

So a lot of these people have left sided discomfort.

They have left sided heaviness in their legs, but eventually.

17:52

And we can, again, this kind of goes into a little bit more deep, but it can also cause issues on the right side too.

And so a lot of these people, these typical people like Hannah would say, you know, when I try to do something, when I stand up, first of all, I get, you know, kind of lightheaded.

My heart races, But especially when I try to exert myself, my legs feel really heavy and really heavy, meaning almost like lead, like, like.

What the heck is going on?

And usually the left leg is worse than the right leg, but again everyone’s anatomy varies a little bit.

So even the right side can be predominant as well.

But usually the symptoms that I like to tease out are, hey, you know somebody’s.

A lot of times these patients have been diagnosed with kind of POTS like symptoms, which is basically Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia syndrome, which is a fancy word for saying hey, when I go from sitting to standing or I try to do something, my heart races feel.

18:49

Short of breath and then I almost feel like I’m going to pass out.

And that is a good example of this subset.

But in this subset, a lot of people say my legs also feel really heavy.

They almost feel like they’re going to fall out from under me.

A good example, even Ellen, who’s also was on the show, she’s a good example of her first issue with the vaccine was the fact that while she was at a cross country race, she felt like her legs wouldn’t move.

And when your legs wouldn’t move, they had to lay her down on her back, lift her legs up above her for her to feel back to normal.

So again, that is another signal that something’s going.

Sharyl: Remind us, She’s only, gosh, she’s like 19 years old, right?

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah, exactly.

So again, a lot of these people are very athletic, very active, and then all of a sudden they go from being very active to almost they can’t do anything without significant discomfort in their lower extremities.

They’re heart racing and then feeling very short of breath compared to what they’re used to, so it makes sense.

19:51

And these are very fit people.

I mean, they’re not deconditioned at all.

It’s like they have a very sudden change in their ability to do things.

Sharyl: When you started looking at this trying to solve the puzzle, is there any literature you know that’s looking at iliac vein compression or injury in post COVID or COVID vaccine patients?

Dr. Vaughn: There isn’t.

Yet, and now I will say that you know me and there’s a cardiologist at Emory named Alexis Kutchins who I can really thank for really opening my eyes again.

A lot of medicine.

Sharyl really is doctors that are very smart, that are open minded.

Talking to each other, being Alexis, being the smart one here and just sharing patients and trying to come up with the answers instead of knocking each other’s ideas down, trying to utilize the information and expertise we both have to come up with a answer to the the patient’s symptoms.

20:47

Sharyl: I mean that’s really people are listening to a researcher now and doctor Jordan Vaughn, that’s this is as cutting edge as it gets.

This is I just keep thinking about when AIDS happen and all the discoveries of everything was so new, it was so unchartered or uncharted.

We’re kind of like that now and you’re one of the ones doing something.

This isn’t because someone funded a study that wanted to find a medicine that was profitable.

These are, this is just trial and error on your part and I assume you’ll be publishing on these cases in the near future.

I hope you well.

Dr. Vaughn: And actually and we’ll talk about some of the ways we’ve helped.

But yeah, the 1st 25 people so far that we’ve done it, the outcomes have been really amazing.

But the idea of Venous issues is not new.

And in fact, I would tell you that the person that actually intervenes on these people for me would say that most of our patients previously were people or women.

You know again probably 99% women prior to COVID that had.

What we call pelvic venous disease and that’s basically if you block off the highway out of the pelvis.

So imagine that, imagine that you have a highway and this is the way that the venous blood gets back to the heart and you block it off.

22:06

Well, the blood for the most part is going to look for our alternative routes and those all alternative routes are going to go through things like.

The bladder, which again is what you urinate out of the uterus, your ovaries, your GI tract and then what we call your sacrum, your spine.

So a lot of these women historically, especially around pregnancy initially for people that had had, you know, women are a little different and we can talk about that.

In general, women are different than men.

That’s, you know, debatable in the current administration’s world.

But the women have, you know.

Vasoactive hormones, progesterone and estrogen, they also have uteruses.

They also have babies.

And so that can actually create issues with this vein to begin with because it sits literally back kind of at the area that the uterus would sit on the lumbar spine and actually classically would be associated with women that had a lot of swelling during their pregnancy in their legs.

So imagine that.

Are you putting pressure on this thing that I’m talking about?

The iliac vein is what causes these women to have significant swelling during their pregnancy, so it’s the similar pathology here.

Sharyl: Well, they would, I assume, perhaps even be more susceptible to injury after COVID or COVID vaccine, right, if they go in with a precondition or susceptibility.

23:30

Dr. Vaughn: Exactly.

So one of the questions that I ask a lot of these women is when you were pregnant, did you have?

Swelling and over.

They’re like, Oh yeah, of course it did, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I mean it’s again, swelling is not that abnormal.

It’s part of pregnancy.

Most obese would tell the woman, no, it’s just it’s normal.

But it is a good example that they have an area that is susceptible to pressure or what I would call already you know, have some compression meaning some some some narrowing or an area that can be narrowed easily.

And so yes, you’re correct.

A lot of these women, especially the women that have had children before, some of them haven’t obviously that that is what they will say.

The interesting thing is is now and This is why I think COVID we know as well as the vaccine is changing, this is just as many men are having to be helped as women in my practice.

And so again, we’re talking about something that.

You know, the girl that intervenes on these patients would say, you know, Jordan, I’ve done 3000 stents in my life and maybe three men and you’ve sent me 15 men in the last two months.

24:40

And so again, men don’t get pregnant, men don’t have uteruses, men don’t have a lot of progesterone and estrogen.

Men get COVID though as equally as women do.

So that again that’s another kind of what I would say.

Criteria that says something is changing and COVID vaccine just briefly, I guess we just people can again look at the previous reporting we’ve referred to.

Sharyl: But something about the spike protein in COVID, or the spike protein that the vaccine instructs your body to make, is apparently the trigger to these problems that we’re talking about.

Dr. Vaughn: Right, exactly.

And I think that’s, you know we, we talked a lot in the previous program about how it makes this abnormal fibrin.

25:25

And so the abnormal fibrin is hard to break down.

But the other thing is we know that COVID and the vaccine, the spike protein target the endothelium and the endothelium is a fancy word for saying the lining of the vessel.

So it’s like the inside layer and that inside layer.

And the layer behind it called the Intima are involved not only in how the vein contracts, reacts, those kind of things, but it’s also involved in the structural integrity of it.

So if you damage that and you already have a vessel that may be compressed, architecturally it’s not as perfect, then you’re setting it up for more likely being damaged, compromised, compressed, all of the above.

Now again, going back to the fact that we don’t have as much information about.

The veins, as we do the arteries, one of the things that we’re trying to do is trying to get a lot of good arterial, venous, venous path specimens, meaning we need to be able to look at what the vein is doing during vaccine and during COVID.

Again, medicine focuses on the arteries.

So most of the studies and most of the pathology we have is from the arteries, carotids, coronary arteries, those kind of things.

Not much specimens of the veins.

Now, thankfully, my patients aren’t willing to donate their veins because they’re still alive.

26:46

But what I would like to do is get some veins from people who aren’t.

And again, that’s that’s more of getting some kind of academic research facilities to start looking at the veins themselves.

Because hopefully I will keep my patients alive and will none of my patients will be donors to that endeavor.

Sharyl: Much more after a short break.

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Sharyl: Well, so let’s say you, you treat your patients, you find they’re helped by this, I guess combination therapy you do which involves triple anticoagulation and maybe other stuff.

28:19

And then you find some of them have this persistent problem and maybe I’m guessing you image them and you see, Oh my gosh, the iliac vein.

Take it from there.

What do you do?

Dr. Vaughn: Again, the iliac vein.

A lot of people would would think that, oh, the iliac vein being closed, it’s it’s not a big deal.

But what I would argue is that your ability to get blood back is important.

Not not just because you need to work out or do stuff, but it’s also important because your venous blood which doesn’t have oxygen in it.

It’s more inflammatory, which is a fancy word for saying it’s kind of nasty.

It’s got a lot more coagulable factors in it, so it’s more likely to clot.

Again, these people with May Thurner or iliac vein compression are the classic people that on a 14 hour plane ride would have clots in their legs.

Does that make sense?

So that so the actual just stasis, the fact that this blood stays there and is unable to move back into the regular circulation sets it up for being more inflammatory and more.

Coagulable, meaning more likely to make a clot and on top of that, that means that in a many ways that that person has to deal with this blood that is for the most part not like the blood you would want.

Meaning it’s more because it’s more inflammatory.

A lot of these people feel flu, like when they put their feet on the ground in the morning, they feel like they have a lot of weird.

Reactions, changes in their skin, throat, fullness, globus sensation and in their swallowing, eye pressure, headache, those kind of things.

And so a lot of them go to the doctor about all those things, including their heart racing, and they’ll get a typical cardiology workout.

They might see a neurologist.

The neurologist will say everything’s fine.

And the truth is, yeah, their heart does look fine.

Yeah, their brain MRI does look fine.

30:14

But the problem is again, kind of like the clotting issue, it’s it’s systemic, it’s everywhere and it’s more of an issue in how your body’s responding to things.

It’s one of the the term we use a lot of times for that kind of thing.

It’s called mast cell activation, MAST mast cells.

And the The funny thing is a lot of people would say, well let’s just treat the mast cells, let’s just calm them down.

But in medicine, one of the greatest things that you can do is find a root cause.

So the question is, is why is this inflammation happening?

And the inflammation is happening because the circulation or the ability for the body to get the venous blood back to the heart is compromised.

So if you’re able to get that highway again, highway being the iliac vein back open, you basically allow the body to work as it normally would.

And so in a sense, that’s, you know, the root cause and curative, and that’s what’s so cool about this finding.

Is that you can take somebody who is debilitated, has terrible lower extremity discomfort on exercise, has crazy heart racing, has shortness of breath, has, you know, brain fog, has weird skin issues, has urinary urgency, has back pain, has terrible menstrual cycles, has, you know, GI symptoms and hemorrhoids and with one thing, get all of those things.

You know, for the most part solved.

And that that’s why I think the, again, kind of the drive here is what’s the root cause.

And I think that that’s where that’s where this has LED us now.

Sharyl: I just don’t want people to think that if they don’t have all of the symptoms, you just said that they’re clear, ’cause I hear that a lot when I’m trying to spread the word about what you’re teaching me and what I’m learning from other researchers, someone will go, well, I I have this, but not those other four things, and it it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have the problem, right?

32:18

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah, you know, I would say everyone is built a little different.

And I think a good example would be that some women have had hysterectomies and when they get a hysterectomy.

Obviously the venous system is going to be changed again, not in a bad way from what your surgeon did, but it means that maybe you don’t have the the pelvic pain, you don’t have the back pain, but you sure do have the urinary urgency.

You sure do have the left leg pain.

You sure do have swelling, you know, and you sure do when you try to, you know, exert yourself, feel faint, your heart races and your short of breath, you know, again.

So yeah, you are correct.

I mean, the well.

Hannah didn’t look swollen to me on her legs, but she had this right.

Sharyl: And she white legs or white limbs, they were.

They didn’t look right, but.

Dr. Vaughn: Exactly.

Yeah.

And so, and actually the interesting thing was the and Hannah doesn’t care about.

I share this.

I mean, what the day she got this opened up, her left leg looked normal.

Finally, for the first time in forever, her right leg eventually looked normal too, which again goes to the fact that it’s not definitely affects the left.

More than the right in most people.

And that was in terms of her color, like her color.

They weren’t, they weren’t big.

Sharyl: She’s very thin, but.

33:34

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah, exactly.

And so a lot of people associate this with, hey, I’ve got to have big swollen legs.

And no, the the fact is, is that especially in these young, athletic, skinny people, the venous issue is going to be actually in the the muscle tissue itself.

So a lot of people’s symptoms are, you know, I don’t have any swelling.

But you know what?

My my calves and my thighs, they feel like full and heavy.

And you know, it’s just like doesn’t.

Those are the kind of typical descriptions I get.

It’s like I feel like they’re just like, you know, bulging out and I feel like, you know, they’re heavier than usual.

They’re not working.

They’re always aching.

A lot of people have you know kind of restless leg type symptoms where they feel like their legs hurt at night and they may not have swelling in what we typically a lot of times when we think about swelling in the legs, we think about our 80 year old.

Grandmother with those big thick legs that you could literally like put your thumb in and leave a mark and that’s not what we I mean again if you have that that’s probably useful to also you know look into, but you know in your typical you know healthy 3020 you know 20 year old, you’re not going to have that.

Instead, it’s it’s that their legs feel heavy, that they feel.

Their muscles feel tense.

They feel kind of bloated.

So those are the typical symptoms, Yeah.

So Hannah would be a good example of that.

All right.

Sharyl: So we will start to draw this to a close by saying is the treatment for that when you discovered usually are always, if it’s collapsed, putting in a stent or sort of a tube to open it back up again.

35:10

Dr. Vaughn: So we don’t know yet.

I do know that in people that have significant closure and have pretty.

What I would call life changing symptoms that for the most part you’re going to need an intervention that involves some type of stenting.

Now I would give the caveat that my hope as well as what I am trying to research is how can we get the veins to heal and work again on their own.

And as much as my plumber probably doesn’t like that for their, you know, their job security, that should, she’ll be fine.

35:51

But, you know, and she would agree because again, I mean you not everybody needs to walk around with the stand.

And I will say some of the people that we have that have this and we have intervened in a, you know, again using things like.

Anticoagulants, things like antifibrinolytics like nattokinase or peptase, especially in the young people 1415 years old, they have done remarkably well without that kind of intervention.

Sharyl: Can the iliac vein repair itself if it’s collapsed?

Can it kind of grow back or whatever?

Dr. Vaughn: Well, that’s what we don’t know and I would say that that’s that’s that’s where a lot of research needs to be done because you know.

The question would be, and again I debate this with my plumbing counterpart who says, Jordan, they’re born with a lot of these narrowings.

36:43

And I agree that, you know, you have a lot of these women.

And men would say, you know, historically they were the people that, you know, if they sat there at the desk too long, their leg might go to sleep OK.

And so they had something that was like, Oh, no big deal, but they definitely probably didn’t have the same Venus, what I call Venus capacitance or Venus return that somebody.

That doesn’t have those issues dead, but something with COVID or the vaccine has changed that.

So my argument is that, well, we’ve got to find out how to get them back to where they were before.

And the answer is we don’t know yet how to do that, but we can find a way.

And I think that’s where again, people need again, it’s life changing for the 25 people that we’ve done already, but there’s so many people, young and old.

That, you know, instrumentation like that isn’t, isn’t really what I would want to do.

So definitely medical therapies help.

37:38

You know, there are things that actually help open up the the iliac vein to begin with.

Things like, you know, intermittent compression of the lower extremities can help.

Funny enough, again, this is just me, my conjecture.

But a lot of these people, you know, like Ellen, like Hannah, like a lot of people, I see.

They were big athletes and runners for a good portion of their life.

And a lot of them, if you talk to runners or talk to people that like to do things, they feel better when they do it, OK?

And guess what your Venous system does when you’re exercising your Venus system, that is its pump to get Venus blood back.

38:20

So one of my conjectures is, is that a lot of these people that find out they feel great when they run or exercise and yada yada yada.

They’ve probably found a solution to something that they might have had an issue with to begin with, which was that their Venus capacitance wasn’t as good as other people.o

And so they’ve said, hey, you know, if I don’t run every day three miles, I don’t feel good.

Or if I don’t walk, you’ve met those people, Sharyl, that like I’ve got to walk five, you know, every day.

And that’s actually one way to deal with Venous insufficiency or Venous disease.

And they’ve actually kind of figured that out.

The problem is, is COVID or the vaccine comes along and then they can’t do that and then it kind of spirals downward.

So again a lot of these people and even prior to COVID a lot of the kind of what I would call pots or the the kind of you know, women that pass out community.

39:10

If you actually look back at their history, a lot of these women were very active in high school and did a lot of stuff, did, you know, walk, ran, cheered, whatever.

Then they get to college and that’s really where a lot of the onset of this disease happens is in college.

And it’s because a lot of them stopped doing the activity level that they had in high school is not equivalent to the activity level that they had in college.

39:31

And so they’re what they were doing to compensate for their venous insufficiency is halted.

And they didn’t even know that they were doing it.

Does that sound?

And so again that’s more just looking at this from kind of the 30,000 foot view, but I think that’s why a lot of these people are the athletic people and they probably had venous issues.

They were a little more hyper mobile, a little more flexible to begin with.

This was probably made of athletes and then they basically they get COVID of the vaccine.

They have this Seminole event that all of a sudden they can’t even really run anymore.

And the response to that is, well, I can’t run at all, so I’m going to not do anything.

Sharyl: Well, this is fascinating, such important information and always so interesting to talk to.

And I want people to know we’re recording this kind of late in the evening.

Doctor Vaughn works all day, spends so much time doing the stuff, researches, speaks to other doctors around really around the world at night.

It’s just incredible what you do in the time that you give, and I hope people will consider donating.

Is it the Microvascular Research Foundation?

Dr. Vaughn: Yeah, it’s called the Microvascular Research Foundation.

And it’s really, I mean it’s devoted to really kind of figuring out these answers.

And some of these answers aren’t going to be, again, some of the solutions aren’t necessarily as as you probably will realize, they’re not big pharma solutions.

40:58

And so from that standpoint some of the best solutions may not be the things that were that what I would say the market is going to research.

And so I’m hopeful that we can get good research out and get some good funding to have that research done without needing the influence of big pharma to kind of intervene and and and and force force their force their heavy hand into how to take care of things.

Yeah.

I mean, that’s what’s so important.

Sharyl: My new book will be on April called Follow the Science.

It’s about the scandal of these sorts of things, including the fact that some of the most critical research that needs to be done today isn’t getting done because if it doesn’t result in a profitable pharmaceutical product, who’s going to fund it?

41:44

And it’ll explain in the book why the system’s grown this way.

So people like Doctor Vaughn are doing stuff without any help, you know, from the federal government or from the usual.

Funding sources where the money comes from, federal government works hand in hand with Pharmaceutical industry and it it’s really hinders getting at the truth and getting at root causes of many of these things.

So again, it’s important to support this kind of thing when it’s being done.

We’re really on the doctor.

Vaughn’s on the leading edge of some important study.

Sharyl: What’s the website?

SO it’s MV research.org.

MV SO Microvascular research.org.

Sharyl: Well, thanks so much for your time once again.

I’m sure we’ll touch base again soon.

I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast and that if you did, you’ll leave us a great review, subscribe and share it with your friends.

Check out my other podcast, Full Measure After Hours.

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43:32

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43:49

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