Early clinical trial shows anti-depressant prevents hospitalization from Covid

Read what the title says and read the short paper. It has zero references to results of use in patients other than referring to a news release. There is link that it is being used in clinical trials, but no results.

We know HCQ does not do anything for Covid after hundreds of studies. It is time to move on. Focus on other potential treatments.

Consider reading the IDSA (Infectious Disease Society of America) guidelines. They get updated fairly regularly and are composed of the boots on the ground infectious disease specialist physicians who are trying to help people.

https://www.idsociety.org/practice-guideline/covid-19-guidel...

Unfortunately, HCQ became politicized which added a bunch of noise. There are a lot of people who are invested in being right for various reasons rather than trying to find the truth, and many of these websites are biased.

For what it's worth, I am a physician who prescribed HCQ to patients in March (with appropriate informed consent from pts/families) when he had no other idea of treatment options based on the original study which purported to show decreased viral load. It became obvious that it didn't matter whether patients got it or not in my experience (some got better and some died whether or not they got it), numerous studies then confirmed this. Most if not all hospitals were trying it with the first wave back in Jan-March and then we stopped using it when data came out that it didn't change anything. Then, things got crazy because it became promoted by certain politicians (this happened when any physician with experience had already realized it was a placebo) AND then there was a big scandal where a paper was published showing increased mortality that based on falsified data and later retracted.

If, however, you want to tell me that I should be using it now, because of a proposed mechanism and theoretical benefit, by using that logic why shouldn't I be giving my patients all other vitamins/supplements/medications that have been variously proposed and have their own believers?

Aside from HCQ+zinc, what other cheap, low risk interventions do you propose be given and studied?

(edit: additional thoughts) If you don't have any others, than I suggest you reevaluate why you think HCQ+zinc is unique (it's not). If you do, then you'll have a list of them and probably a list of reasons for each and a ranking of which are the most promising and which are the least. When you do this, it forces you to critically think about how best to rank these and how that ranking might change with evidence. Then it forces you to study the evidence.

In an above post I mentioned that I did give HCQ to patients in the hospital back in March when it was the only thing that had ANY evidence (and the evidence was poor, but it was all they had). It made no difference, and it may have caused some deaths due to QTc prolongation (personally I believe it is very safe and I've taken it for malarial prophylaxis before).

edit: (I removed a snarky line, apologies)

Deficiency of vitamin D is immune system dysfunction.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/vitamin-... https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/people-at...

> Just over two-thirds of Canadians (68%) had blood concentrations of vitamin D over 50 nmol/L -- a level that is sufficient for healthy bones for most people. About 32% of Canadians were below the cut-off. About 10% of Canadians were below the cut-off of 30 nmol/L -- a level that is considered a deficiency.

In Canada, everyone is advised to discuss it with their doctors in relation to the winter season. My doctor tests it with my routine blood work. Many people take a supplement over the winter, especially those with darker skin. And people over 50 have a blanket recommendation to take a 400 IU dose daily year-round.

Oral vitamin D has been shown to be ineffective at this point, but this isn't surprising: it takes a long time of sustained oral supplementation to raise levels.

Then there's a whole lot of evidence showing correlation, but as you point out, low vitamin D is an indicator of frailty. This is much weaker evidence.

I think it's likely that taking oral vitamin D before infection probably improves outcomes somewhat.

Half true, you can take too much [0], it's just that it either has to build up over a long time or be from dosages far larger than you can buy without a prescription.

[0] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-side-effects

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541280/#:~:tex....

Doctors correcting vitamin D levels are finding 10k IU is a good starter dose and that is often insufficient to arrive at optimal levels.

It pretty much is a slam dunk solved problem to say "If you are deficient in X, redress that." We know how to redress a vitamin D deficiency pretty confidently, simply and in a straight forward fashion.

I lost several dress sizes without trying by redressing other things, primarily nutrient deficiencies. I focused on eating an aggressively nutritious diet to redress a long list of deficiencies rooted in a genetic disorder that causes gut dysfunction.

So my experience fits with the general idea that "Solving obesity is harder than it looks and the solution may be something non obvious in any given case." Maybe our mental models of what is going on there will evolve and what I am saying will be "the obvious answer" to future generations, but it's not what is currently believed to be what works to solve obesity.

The current mantra is "Calories in. Calories out." and leads to metrics like "Eat less and exercise more" and some people find that wholly unworkable or unsustainable for various reasons.

In this situation, I would say that anyone who is high risk and has no affirmative reason to believe Vitamin D is contra indicated should consider trying to take a small supplement and/or get some sunlight regularly.

For optimal absorption, you need to take Vitamin D, Vitamin K and Calcium together. Some Calcium supplements include those two vitamins.

For optimal results, do not consume calcium and iron together. This means if you are trying to improve your nutritional status via diet, do not eat high iron foods (like beef, broccoli) with high calcium foods (like cheese, milk). They interfere with each other in terms of absorption.

If you are in a really fragile state of health, all these details and more (such as bioavailability) matter a helluva lot. If you are not in a really fragile state of health, you may find that you don't need to care so much all these pesky details.

Anyone who is really interested in their own welfare can and should start a food and symptom journal and read, read, read about health stuff (and learn how to sort the wheat from the chaff). If you do that, you can get to a point of noticing symptoms of deficiency at an early stage.

I do this regularly and adjust my diet accordingly.

But these are not answers people want to hear. They want a pill, a shot, a surgery, a solution with a really big and obvious and immediate change so they can look at it and go "I did a thing and got a result." They don't want to hear "You need to track it over time and see how you feel in a week or a month to have any real idea what helps."

It's also inherently hard to isolate nutritional stuff. If you make any change at all to your diet, you have probably made multiple different changes.

The way to isolate it is to start with supplements, stick to your normal diet, make no more than one change per week and keep a journal so you can track it and see what happens.

Anything that has any health benefit will have side effects. Antibiotics routinely cause diarrhea and that's one of the more common side effects of alternative remedies, yet if I tell people that many of them will use that as an excuse to say "Oh, it has side effects. Nope. That's a big fat nope for me. I'm not doing that." even though it's the same side effect that antibiotics have and they wouldn't hesitate to take those.

There's a lot of ignorance and prejudice and inherent resistance to resolving medical things nutritionally. In spite of study after study after study saying "Nutrition and exercise mitigate every known deadly medical condition ever in the history of human kind" when the rubber hits the road, people hand wave off nutrition as not important and "not something that will cure cancer, you dumbass!" and stuff like that.

But zinc is another thing that looks promising from what I gather.