Dr. Richard Neel and his team at Little Alsace and Uvalde Urgent Care clinics are busy as ever, treating COVID patients from all over the area, looking for treatment.
“Between our two clinics, Little Alsace and Uvalde Urgent Care, we are testing around 20 people for suspected COVID -19 every day, some days even more,” stated Dr. Neel.
We are happy to report that another group of clinics have also started using the melatonin in COVID with great success.
“Right now I am working with another doctor who is treating a group of COVID patients in a nursing home in South Texas, and they are responding well to the melatonin,” Dr. Neel said.
See separate story with details on that group of patients being monitored for their progress by Will Thompson, PA and the team at Hometown Healthcare clinics.
The numbers of patients who are sharing their stories are also mounting, wanting to let others know that there is something you can do to treat COVID at home.
Dr. Neel is happy to discuss the regimen of high-dose melatonin, Vitamin D and Vitamin C, and share his results with other doctors in the medical community.
He began treating his first COVID patients in March. For the first couple months, nearly all patients reported making fast recoveries on the regimen…with fevers breaking in less than 24 hours and other symptoms improving over the next couple days. Now that he and his team have treated over 400 patients, there are a few patients who continue to struggle with the illness.
“I knew that nothing would work for everyone, but it is working for the majority. It is amazing what melatonin is doing for most patients,” Neel said. “However, people seem to be sicker, and it is taking them longer to get over the virus. Asthmatics are having the toughest go of it.”
One of those patients who is still having a tough time is 65-year-old Mr. Paul Camacho of Devine.
“This virus has attacked me from all angles. I am a diabetic, I have asthma, and I have high blood pressure. Just a couple years ago I was paralyzed and in a wheel chair due to having Transverse myelitis, so I had several things that made my body weak going into this. But my doctors, Dr. Neel and Dr. Windrow, they are not giving up on me. If these doctors hadn’t been helping me, I wouldn’t be here today. I am now taking 150mg of melatonin every day, and also doing breathing treatments every three hours. This virus started affecting me on June 28th. For several days I couldn’t even get out of bed and take 20 steps. I lost 25 pounds. Now I am able to talk and walk a little again. At one point my glucose went up to 462, and now it is down to 179. What is helping me is a combination of a lot of things, melatonin, vitamin D, vitamin, C, and breathing treatments. This virus just attacks all your weak points, and I had a lot of them, and that’s why it has been so hard on me. On the other hand, my 15-year-old grandson who has really, really bad asthma was up and walking again after 3-4 days on these medicines. He was one of the worst hit when it began. We had 8 people in our household, and we were all hit hard by this virus at the same time. I am really grateful there is an angel in Medina County, and he is taking care of a lot of people,” Camacho said.
Why are things so different in the more recent COVID cases? Dr. Neel has cited articles and research that there are different strains of the virus and that it’s apparent in his patients.
“I am also seeing more patients who have gastrointestinal symptoms and/or really bad nausea. I am seeing that in my patients, and I’ve also heard that from nurses at area hospitals,” Dr. Neel said. “I definitely am seeing more young people with COVID than I did in the first three months as well. Many of them have more of the gastrointestinal and nausea.”
Having treated mostly adults in the first three months of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Neel is now seeing several pediatric patients come down with high fevers, as young as 11 months old, and is happy to see the melatonin helping them too.
“I have read several things that they were doing surveillance of several different strains of the virus in the Houston area, and that a majority of cases were of a different strain at least in that area,” Neel said.
According to the Houston Chronicle published July 4th, the newest prominent strain is also thought to be more contagious.
“Baylor College of Medicine is finding the mutated strain in as many as 80 percent of viruses it analyzes. Houston Methodist researchers reported the strain was prevalent in the Houston area in a paper in mid-May. The paper said 70 percent of the specimens examined, taken from COVID-19 patients treated at Methodist from early March to March 30, showed a mutation to the spike proteins the coronavirus uses to attach to and enter human respiratory cells.”
Little Alsace Urgent Care has rapid testing available, but patients are encouraged to schedule a tele-med appointment beforehand. Testing is more accurate if patients wait a couple of days. If you are symptomatic please reach out to the team at Little Alsace or Uvalde Urgent Care clinic.
Dr Neel is a true pioneer in treating COVID-19 patients, one of the first in the world to hit on the idea that melatonin might be the answer for treating the horrible virus. We first interviewed Dr. Neel on March 20 as he explained his rationale on why and how melatonin could work.
By early April, he began treating patients with melatonin here in Texas. Around the same time, doctors across the world in the Philippines were also conducting a small study in the Manila Doctors Hospital, where clinical trials are set to begin in a wider range of patients.
Meanwhile, here in the US, we are excited to see and hear more doctors study this treatment and begin offering it to their patients, as well as learning that some Texas hospitals are using melatonin and we will continue to look into that and report those results when they are made available to us.
See the RESEARCH Yourself:
More and more research supports the rationale for melatonin fighting COVID-19, including these research papers worth reading….
The following research paper cites that “No toxicity was found in phase 2 trials of 1400 women taking 75mg daily for 4 years!”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340361908_Can_melatonin_reduce_the_severity_of_COVID-19_pandemic
This is a research paper written about a clinical trial of newborn babies who suffered from deadly septic infections, and were treated with 20 mg melatonin. All survived.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11726736/
This is a recent hospital study of 10 patients given 36-72mg/day in the Philippines, showing great impact on recovery:
http://www.melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/article/view/88/600
By Kayleen Holder
Editor