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Drugs That Work on Corona
Recent information from China (from here) suggested that drugs for rheumatoid arthritis worked a treat on the virus. People on death’s door got up and walked away a few days later. China’s willing to experiment on people. The theory was that the primary danger isn’t the virus, but the response. [Supporting data here, here, and here.]
(I’ll bet you haven’t heard that anywhere.)
By suppressing the immune response, the threat was lifted.
This might be why children are safe. Their immune response is relatively weaker than their organs. In the elderly, their immune response is relatively stronger than their organs. Same goes for smokers.
Okay. This is a data point.
So, a US company that makes a leading drug for rheumatoid arthritis, which is fundamentally an auto-immune problem. They’ve decided to start testing it. They laid out their emergency timeline. Two weeks to start the test. And then a few months to gather data. And then they can use the drug.
Why not accept the Chinese data?
Well, it wasn’t controlled and it wasn’t double-blind so it isn’t statistically valid. In addition, the Chinese data overall has proven to be highly suspect.
All of this is true.
But this drug company plans to take a few months to do their testing. In a few months, the whole situation will probably be over. If the virus is bad it will have run over people and economies alike.
Clinicians on the front lines already have a good idea of what a normal process looks like. They can assess those at a very high likelihood of dying. And they can see abnormal recoveries. They don’t need a double-blind study to assess whether a drug is working in an emergent situation.
This drug is already on the market. It is already reasonably safe for generally healthy older people. So, forget the traditional study. Provide the drug, no double-blind, to the sickest patients. Compare their recovery to data prior to the drug – even anecdotally. Assess how it looks in the space of a week or two.
Forget the stupid regulations.
Published in General
Ultron,
This is the result of a culture that has come to believe that “facts don’t matter only the narrative matters”. There are two completely different uses of vitamin C. The first is what everyone is familiar with the nutritional use. Having a supply of vitamin C regularly at or above USRDA is good for your health generally and will help you fight off the common cold. The second use is completely different. Massive doses of vitamin C are injected into the bloodstream. The vitamin C is a direct virus killer (not by pumping up your immune system but the vitamin C is doing the killing directly). The super high dose vitamin C also helps with the extreme inflammation that is causing the lungs to shut down which is the main way that corona kills people.
People think that when you start to talk about vitamin C you are talking about nutrition. The important use relevant to corona, is vitamin C used directly as a drug at extreme doses that must be injected to keep from damaging your stomach lining. This has nothing to do with nutrition!!!
The next woketard that I hear say “the facts don’t matter only the narrative does” should be shot. Just a suggestion.
Regards,
Jim
The important use relevant to corona, is vitamin C used directly as a drug at extreme doses that must be injected to keep from damaging your stomach lining.
I’ve taken close to 50 grams a day orally, as sodium ascorbate, which has a neutral pH.
Ultron,
That’s good & smart. The problem is an idiot media/gov bureaucracy that can’t follow a complex scientific argument. They’ve confused nutritional vitamin C with this clinical application from the start. It looks like China, probably from desperation, simply smashed the log jam with brute force. Tons of vitamin C shipped to Wuhan!
I hate media geeks and lame government bureaucrats. No brains – no guts!
Regards,
Jim
I wonder if this Vitamin C story is what happened to my wife. Yesterday she barricaded herself in the bedroom, forbid my daughter to step out of the house, and imagined she had corona virus. Now, the only instances of Corona virus in our city have been from out of town and identified only that day. She most definitely did not have corona virus.
But she had some weird symptoms, and in an effort to be able to get into the bedroom to change clothes after I got home from work, I convinced her to go to the hospital. She was told she was having a vitamin C overdose and to go back home.
The house is saturated in bleach, which in normal times is forbidden to be used because she hates the smell.
The media have succeeded in completely terrorizing this lady. My poor daughter is quite confused.
Certainly we should be careful, but we also should not be self-diagnosing or self-prescribing based on what we read in the interwebs. I think it will take a long time to get her to calm down. I’d like to go shoot some of those woketards myself.
She was told she was having a vitamin C overdose and to go back home.
I’ve never heard of a Vitamin C overdose. A case of the trots would happen well before that is even conceivable orally.
Yeah, that was her symptom. I didn’t want to get into too much detail.
In a different thread, @michaelkennedy wrote
auto immune drugs
is your neighbor a pharmacologist?
Yes, a professor of pharmacology. Sadly, he’s no longer at UT, he’s now at UNM. He’s a really nice guy.
A pharmacologists says that pharmacologists are more knowledgeable than doctors regarding pharmacological effects on patients. Shocking.
And I’m sure he is unbiased too.
Of course. That was the point. I was perhaps too subtle. I was saying that iWe is not a doctor and not even doctors know how drugs work, making iWe at least two steps removed from being knowledgable. One step is sufficient.
what does a pharmacologist do?
does a pharmacologist interact with patients?
Medicine is about what works. Input, output. Whether the black box in the middle is understood or not has no bearing on whether or not it works.
In this respect, pharmarcologists and doctors alike are similar to the users of a smart phone. They know how to make it work. They might even be able to break it. But the actual workings of the smartphone are, beyond a few key principles, a mystery to both of them.
My doctor is well informed. She reads papers, and follows recommendations. Without exception, the key part of any paper or study is does it work? And that much does not require an expert.
There’s a lot of hubris in there. There’s a reason these people are both extremely intelligent and spend years and decades understanding medicine, learning how to deliver it, and how it works. Sometimes appeal to authority is apt. This is one of those times.
Sez who?
there is a lot of hubris in your comment and your neighbor pharmacologist
The more urgent and pressing the situation, the less we can rely on authority. Your accusation of hubris is extremely fair. But right now, I would argue that we need hubris more than we need authorities.
But then again, I’m a doctor. So I’m always right. Screw the authorities.
Seriously, though, I’m not sure that running this through our typical channels is terribly helpful right now.
Let me treat this to the best of my ability. Let 10,000 other docs do the same thing.
You never know what we might come up with…