The mistake I made with supplements for long covid recovery

On this site, I review the strategies that helped me recover from long covid and chronic fatigue syndrome. See all long covid recovery posts.

This is for information purposes only and nothing I share should be considered medical advice. What works for me may or may not work for you. Please do your own research and consult with your own trusted medical professionals.

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What didn’t work for me

When I got sick, I turned to supplements first. I spent much of my limited energy visiting a functional medicine doctor and a naturopath, as well as researching supplements online. I took many new supplements at once, changing what I did weekly.

This was a very tiring and expensive process. The research rabbit holes I went down were likely more harmful due to the stress they caused than any benefit the supplements may have given me.

If I could go back in time, I would skip it all. My supplement obsession was driven by the understandable but unhelpful desire to get better with a simple fix. (Spoiler alter, there was no quick fix.)

I wish I had gotten the big recovery pieces in place first — things like relaxation, brain retraining, expressive writing for chronic symptoms, somatic tracking, sleep and gentle nutrition. Perhaps I would have skipped supplements and alternative medicine practitioners altogether.

But if for some reason I felt like I still must try supplements, I would have methodically tried one at a time. I would give it at least a month to see if the medication did anything positive or negative for me before moving on to the next.

What worked for me

Remember if drugs or supplements can do something positive for you, then they can also have side effects or drug interactions. Talk with a trusted healthcare professional about what’s right for you!

With that said, here is what I tried that might have worked for me. It’s really impossible to know for sure.

• NAC for brain fog: At the time of writing this, I don’t believe there is any research supporting NAC for brain fog. But a naturopath recommended it to me. My long covid specialist also recommended it to me. After I tried it, my brain fog substantially improved, but it also could have been a placebo.
• Antihistamines: A lot of people with long covid have MCAS and antihistamines significantly improve symptoms for them. They helped my shortness of breath while I was treating the root cause through breathwork. After I was established in my breathwork practice, antihistamines didn’t do anything else for me and I stopped taking them. I also tried MCAS triple therapy, but it didn’t work for me.
• B12 for energy: A simple blood test from the doctor can determine if you are deficient in B12. I eat mostly vegetarian diet, so this one was based on diet rather than the alleged miracle power of vitamin B.
• Iron for energy: Same as above. Deficiency can be determined from a simple blood test and is something I take due to my diet. You don’t want to overdo iron supplements.
• Vitamin D: I live in Canada with limited sun exposure, and this is something doctors often recommend for everyone.

Here are some supplements I took but I don’t think did anything but empty my wallet: magnesium, NADH, coQ10 and fish oil. Some of these I started taking because I had debilitating migraines and evidence shows supplements may help. They didn’t help my migraines at all. (But the Curable app sure did, and it’s way cheaper than supplements!)