Prof. Jack Lambert admitted the very first COVID-19 patients in Ireland for treatment at the Mater Hospital, Dublin. From the very beginning he began tracking their recovery. As a consultant in infectious diseases and genitounrinary medicine he is well aware of the long term impacts of viruses in the body.

He epitomises a refreshing common sense approach to medicine that starts with the very basics. Despite his wealth of experience he reads everything everyday. You get no sense of ego just a guy who really knows what he is talking about. Walk into most medical appointments as a Long Covid patient and the chances are you know more than the doctor in front of you because for what ever reason they have not done any of the reading.

In a wonderfully deep Scottish accent he tells us, “it's not rocket science. If you're a good scientist, you have to do a PubMed search and if you do a PubMed search, you look up the literature and you find it! ….people are not looking at the science and people are not looking at previous experience of other coronaviruses…. there's lots of literature on this condition called Long Covid.”

So many of our guests on the TLC Sessions surprise us with one thing or another. We sought out Prof. Lambert because of his expertise with Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) and the fact that he is treating Long Covid patients with it. He has used it in the past in treating other chronic diseases like Lyme and HIV. Lambert is joyfully plain speaking “I would say 80% of people respond to LDN and 20% of people don't respond at all,” sounds like pretty good odds to those of us on this now three year journey.

What really excited us during this conversation was the fact that he is a man with a plan. Drawing on his work in Lyme disease, HIV, Ebola and Hepatitis C, Prof. Lambert has devised a protocol for treating Long Covid patients that relies on tried and trusted medication and supplements. In this week’s episode we spent some time talking through his protocol, along with his understanding of the disease and what it has done to our body.

You can read Prof. Lambert’s protocol here.

He is truly a man of the people, empathetic and kind. He is vocal about how we can be helped right here and right now. Not a cure all (he has had some patients recover) but at least some relief using some gentle treatments.

‘I think we need safe options and I think LDN is one of those that I think the UK Government the Irish government should take on board the data available and makes it available, free of charge to people. I think NAC (N-acetyl cysteine) should be available free of charge to people. Melatonin should be available free of charge to people. Hyperbaric oxygen should be available for people with chronic fatigue. We need to have people on top making decisions who have the experience and knowledge and we need to have more patient input into the decision making, and that unfortunately is truly lacking in Ireland.’

And it seems the rest of the world.