The Epoch Times Mushrooms, long valued for their medicinal properties, are being explored as tools to boost immunity and fight viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Gordon Saxe, director of research at the Centers for Integrative Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine, is the principal investigator of three studies evaluating whether mushrooms are therapeutic for treating COVID-19.
During the early days of the pandemic, Dr. Andrew Shubov, director of inpatient integrative medicine at the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, said he was frustrated by the lack of effective treatments for COVID-19. “People were taking increasingly toxic drugs, and nothing was working,” he told JAMA.
Saxe, Shubov and colleagues believe mushrooms and Chinese herbs may be the answer, given their strong antiviral properties. One type of mushroom, agarikon, was also previously found to inhibit two types of influenza (H1N1 and H5N1) as well as herpes. These immune-enhancing effects is part of what triggered Saxe to choose mushrooms in their studies against COVID-19….
