Hydroxychloroquine Tied to Deaths, Heart Risk in Covid Study
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
And...why don't the study authors control for zinc use as well? "Hydroxychloroquine is a zinc ionophore", explains one paper.
I don't agree with overly-broad conclusions and I certainly don't agree with wasted time spent approving and writing up underscoped studied.
Medical consensus on Covid treatment amongst professionals is overwhelmingly "we're not confident enough to develop changes in our practices based on current science and research. We need to see other professionals we trust, beyond journal editors, use the current science and research before we'll use it."
The first such study just appeared today, from India. Of course it works as advertised and is now recommended prevention in India. https://www.icmr.gov.in/pdf/covid/techdoc/V5_Revised_advisor...
Wait, where does it say that in the study? The study specifically says it controls for disease severity (amongst other things), and that it only uses data for people given the drugs within 48 hours of diagnosis.
> Wait, where does it say that in the study? The study _supports_ the idea that sicker patients get hydroxychloroquine more frequently than less-sick patients. The study's raw figures show that sicker patients get hydroxychloroquine more than healthier patients.
The study states that besides age and BMI, "all other [control] data were treated as categorical variables in the model."
It's clear the study's authors don't sensitively control for patients' angiotensin-renin-aldosterone system health.
There's strong subject selection bias in "initial disease severity" as well when some subjects die at home and others go to the ER mistaking mild Covid for heart attack symptoms.
So unfortunately what we have here is a textbook example of people falling for a cargo cult surrounding a drug whose efficacy wasn't confirmed at all. Even if a drug seems safe and has few side effects, you should never self-dose or listen to people without medical consensus.
And by definition, innovative medicine doesn't have medical consensus yet.
I think I can understand where these sentiments come from.
People are dissatisfied with medical consensus because medicine doesn’t really speak with a unified voice. A doctor in one hospital might treat a condition differently from another — sometimes radically differently — and your family doctor might say something different from either of them. And anyone who’s been paying attention has seen authoritative recommendations from one decade be retracted a decade or two later.
The discipline is still waiting for a lot of discoveries that would dramatically change both mundane and more rare scenarios. A lot of competing theories show up in practice, which is natural for innovation.
Unfortunately, there are a number of cargo cults that have been medical consensus for many years.
It's hard for me not to empathize with this mindset in others when I see agencies like WHO spreading dis/misinformation on the pandemic to control some political narrative.
It isn't like you can just pick this stuff up at the grocery story, you would still need a prescription from a doctor.
If you are in the risk group. Otherwise the chances are extremely low.
The problem is that the people hyping it through either desperation or greed have a lot more time to spend promoting an idea than, say, medical professionals during a pandemic — a dynamic which got much worse when the full weight of Fox News and the President of the United States jumped on board the hype train.
I think people should resist politicizing this because they are for our against Trump. It is normal for both medicine and the scientific process in general to have a multitude of voices with diverse opinions.