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COVID-19 A Talk with My Doctor About HCQ
(Hat tip to @mrbitcoin for the graphic)
I had my annual physical the other day. It was an opportunity to talk with my doctor about his approach to treatment in the event I were to present with symptoms of COVID-19. He is an HCQ+ skeptic based on the latest results published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the fact that California hospitals have removed HCQ from their treatment protocols. He is dismissive is Yale’s Dr. Risch and the other doctors that have come out in the media in support of HCQ.
I was feeling him out on whether he would prescribe HCQ for me if I got sick. The answer is clearly no. He apparently did have a patient in the past few months for whom he prescribed HCQ but later progressed to a ventilator. I did not seek more details about that case and I suspect he would not have related them to me in any event.
I don’t think he is in the thrall of Dr. Fauci but he is influenced by the medical literature. And that literature, reinforced by his own single data point, is decidedly against HCQ. He believes that there are other treatments that can be used. He does not have any patients with Lupus for whom he prescribes HCQ.
He did pull out his phone and show me the list of side effects for HCQ. Of course, I am familiar with them, particularly the heart-related ones that have gotten so much play in the press. He frequently refers to his iPhone in medical visits, using Siri to call up medical codes and such. This is interesting because those codes are then set down in pen and ink on paper and he produces voluminous handwritten notes — no computer. He is a boutique physician who runs his office as he always has. He is not “connected” electronically with the major health systems. His patient records are physical.
So his ideas are not determined by superficial medical fashion, but by his own assessments and reading. That does not make him right or wrong. I have observed him suspecting certain medical conditions that testing has not proven out. Kind of like a real-life Dr. House who, for all of his medical acumen, was proved wrong time after time until he was proved right. His manner is quirky at times. But he is the doctor to whom other doctors refer their relatives. And he is accessible in ways that too few physicians employed by health systems are these days.
So HCQ is unlikely to be prescribed to me in the future. At least by my doctor. But thankfully there is no need to discuss therapeutic options for me or anyone in my family. For now, at least.
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
That may be the key to his reluctance.
In fact, looking at the global map, I wonder if the use of HCQ follows the geography of diseases and disorders. In areas with a high malaria incidence, for example, the doctors may be more comfortable with it or with something biochemically close to it.
This just out:
Lots of negative tests and positive tests with no symptoms are bad for the narrative. Better that we remain masked, marginally employed, and uncertain.
At my recent twice yearly visit, my Doctor acted similarly to yours. He is within 2-5 years of retiring, and works for the major hospital group practice here. He mentioned his concern over lawsuits for anything that happens to his patients. I think that’s the main reason for denial.
Your illustration on state HCQ availability is interesting. In my state of Indiana, it is fairly difficult, yet in Ohio, with a more activist (Republican) governor, it’s supposedly available. Arkansas and Mississippi are red, even with a higher percentage of Black Americans that need help with COVID.
Nothing makes any sense..
The past few weeks I’ve been telling myself that the art of medicine has now become paint by numbers.
My daughter-in-law works for a giant medical firm that owns hospitals and controls many physicians. She tells me that the company used COVID as a way to institutionalize more remote contact with patients because it is quicker, shorter wait times and fewer missed appointments. She has also had to reach out to doctors who her printouts say are taking an average of as much as 6-8 minutes per patient more than expected by the system given the diagnosis and history. The docs hate her (she does not blame them) and the company and many say they are quitting medicine because they are treated like bots.
Thanks for graphics Rodin, they’re great.
I am deeply skeptical of any doctor that refuses to treat with HCQ.
How many have died from HCQ versus how many have died from doctors refusing to prescribe HCQ or a viable alternative? I believe in real world talk, the answer is that tens of thousands of Americans have died from behavior of Doctors’ like yours. He is sworn to do no harm. By refusing the best treatment available (HCQ), he is doing great harm. Without question. I have a friend that died from this ridiculous behavior. He should be alive today were it not for doctors like yours.
How many people have died from HCQ? Where are the reports of these deaths. If there had been any, the reports would have been plastered over the media by now, but there are no reports.
This behavior by these doctors is simply unconscionable . I know one doctor who is not a GP but has a Doctor friend who is treating over 3,000 patients for lupus and had not had a single problem. Not a single problem. The evidence for HCQ is simply overwhelming. If he or she refuses to proscribe HCQ there are alternatives like Quercitin (also with zinc) which work similarly but of course the Karen ninnies in the Med World are against that too. The Karen Ninnies of the World appear to believe that it is better that people simply die.
Not a problem, because the medical schools seems to be producing young doctors who are willing to be bots in the system.
We should all remember to thank Obama for this state of affairs. Not that he can take all the credit for himself, but he has done more than any other single person to bring it about.
Once we see how what used to be a health system has rapidly become a “patient monetization situation” we should wake the hell up and realize our medical treatment opportunities are nearly extinct..
Any doctors and nurses who are part of a system that preaches that a 8 to 9 minute health consultation is acceptable are by their very involvement with the system extremely negligent.
Two exceptions seem to exist – people who have had some type of super duper heart remedy, like a bypass surgery, and also cancer patients. People in those two groups tend to rave about the decent treatment experience they had, at least the part of it that did not involve a nursing home. An individual’s Big Insurer will pay 80 grand plus to have heart surgery. Then the hospital admins throw the recovering patient into a nursing home, where the overworked personnel will give the anti-infection regime to the roommate by mistake. Oops!
Of course, cancer can now be treated far better with by those doctors who understand CBD oil.What has been very impressive here in Calif is the number of terminally ill people whose doctors told them the thyroid cancer, or stomach cancer, or even brain cancer was terminal and to prepare to die. Instead, those patients came to Calif and ended up going into remission. CBD oil can also minimize the numbers of seizures someone suffers from.
Thank you for sharing that information. (I ran past the 500 word limit in my original reply to you.)
Try Blink Rx if you need a prescription for HCQ.
It’s like Good Rx but much better
Another option is my friend in Los Angeles purchased through a friend who has lupus.
This could be a great way for lupus patients to stock up and make some money.
When all this began, I called in prescriptions for HCQ for my diabetic paramedic son and his family and under indications I listed “Malaria prophylaxis.” I’m not sure it would work again but my kids are all prepared. My wife has taken it for Rheumatoid arthritis for years and, in June, had an illness that was probably Covid that was aborted by the HCQ. Her internist and the hospitalist agreed it was although her pcr and ab tests were negative.
This is nearly universal. When I was still working part time I was talking to young MDs who were mostly doing shift work at Urgent Cares and none was happy in practice. I am glad I am not teaching anymore as I might find it hard to encourage the students to run up enormous debt, as they are mostly doing.
I think a lot more doctors are Democrats these days as few set up small practices anymore. They are mostly employees and vote like employees.
This article has a nice discussion on the money behind HCQ battle.
Very good questions. I am not opposed to pharma funding research with appropriate researcher disclosures plus other institutional actions to ensure unbiased results. Researchers must not become captives of their funding sources, but uninterested sponsors do not fund all the research that needs to be done. The question, therefore, is what safeguards (if any) ensure the reliability of the results?
Thanks for posting the link to the quoted article & the several informative paragraphs.
Few people realize that in the 1980’s, when doctors allied with AIDS patients & then met with Fauci, their primary goal was to seek his approval for an inexpensive med, bactrim, that would have offered immediate benefits to AIDS patients. Instead Fauci mentioned his devotion to clinical trials as he held himself to a “gold standard.”
Like HCQ, bactrim was an item that had been used in the US and across the globe with great success. But it was cheap, and the pharmaceutical companies wanted a solution that was not.
So 17,000 AIDS patients died, while AZT was developed.
We Americans will probably never know how many of our citizens lost their lives on account of the withholding of HCQ. Plus above & beyond those lives, the ability of Fauci to engineer that this illness is so ghastly, with the only solution for people to be on vents, has repercussions many times the order of those who’ve died from COVID. The staggering economic losses, the psychological scars, all is on Fauci for the half million future deaths resulting from his destroying our society.
In 2017, HCQ was prescribed 5.66 million times
Members of NIH should not consult private companies?
There are enough experts in the private sector
I remember an M.D. drug researcher who told me, repeatedly, that the same top experts in the field are those who also do the research. It’s a bind. Big Pharma pays the top researchers, and the top researchers are also the top experts in their field to explain and give advice. But then when they do, they’re demonized as being in the pocket of Big Pharma.
Do these researchers consult or do they work for a government agency?
No need to wait until you are ill. Quercetin, in combination with zinc and vitamins C and D and melatonin, is part of a prophylactic cocktail devised by some doctors at Eastern Virginia Medical School. Like HCQ it is said to operate as a zinc ionophore. I recall that their treatment protocol originally used HCQ. Hard to know what exactly is behind the substitution, but it is harder to object to quercetin.
https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_medicine/Marik-Covid-Protocol-Summary.pdf
Yes, I think my doctor mentioned Quercitin.
The ones I knew were MDs, either paid by companies (including pharmaceutical companies) or funded by NIH grants. Some were perhaps dually funded by both, but that I don’t recall.
The funding by NIH can create political conflicts of interest.
Being paid by private companies is a feature not a bug.
As far as being in the deep pockets of Big Pharma, would it be better for Big Pharma not to consult medical experts?
The Big Pharma stigma is deceiving.
Most prescription drugs are generic. Profit margins are low for generic pharma companies.
Don’t blame big pharma for high drug prices, instead blame the FDA
That’s the bind. These MDs were wanted for their expertise by both sides, the public and the private sectors. And often the private research gave them a great deal of the expertise to actually be the experts that people want to be completely independent.
Well, one study was the efficacy of a moderately old known generic drug in replacement for specific usage for a another older generic drug whose use was funded by the the government. The company producing the test drug was set to market it if it could be proved more effective than the other. In this case it was at least for a good cause.
I stumbled on this excellent topic of Rodin’s for the second time.
Isn’t it particularly heinous that we ahve now had a supposed second surge of COVID, yet the one thing that hasn’t happened is having this remedy for the illness.
Over 3,000 health workers who had the new vaccine during the past week have either collapsed or had other adverse reactions preventing them from reporting to work – at a time when we must all mask up, stay home and avoid spending time with families so our hospitals won’t be overwhelmed.
Of course there is no possibility of insisting on people getting the vaccine if HCQ is approved. Because its emergency approval is dependent on there being no other remedy available, and the language in the US Civil Code regarding a Fed vax mandate is very similar:
What I suspect of doctors who are in the category that Rodin’s doctor seems to be in is they rely on all the published material from the “normal” medical journals. Which was fine some 20 years ago. But as it is now, these publications have been captured by the big monied interests. Since HCQ is so cheap it is never going to be supported by Merck or Pfizer or any other major pharmaceutical company.
HCQ is prescribed over 5 million times annually since 2017