Doc7505
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- Feb 16, 2016
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Give Hydroxychloroquine a Chance
https://www.americanthinker.com/arti..._a_chance.html
April 8, 2020 ~~ By Spike Hampson
Controversy swirls around whether hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin ("H&A") should be used to treat people who have the Wuhan virus. Setting aside for now all the qualifications that for good reason are used whenever discussing the question (qualifications like "after consultation between the patient and the doctor" and "administered according to a well established protocol"), the core issue is whether or not to use a treatment that has shown positive results for some and has not shown obviously negative results for any.
Given the standard medical diktat that the first obligation of a health care worker is to do no harm, there is a case to be made that H&A treatment should be withheld until properly designed clinical trials have established to a high level of certainty that the treatment has a significantly more positive effect on patient health than it does negative. There are, however, two good reasons to challenge this well established approach in our current circumstance.
The first reason is that the current circumstances are abnormal. Virtually everybody understands this, so there is no need to discuss it in detail. Suffice it to say that the widespread suspension of people's rights to move about freely has already established the unusual nature of the world in a pandemic. If things are bad enough to justify keeping people home bound, they are bad enough to bend the rules regarding use of medicine.
~~SNIP~~
Historical evidence indicates that the more intensely controlled a study and the larger the number of cases it uses, the more reliable it is likely to be. This is not a rejection of smaller, less well controlled studies.
To give an example, President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on an expedition to the west coast so as to find out what conditions exist in the vast territory of the Louisiana Purchase. Relative to the task at hand, this was a small and poorly controlled study of the newly purchased land. It discovered that west of the Mississippi, there existed a great and relatively dry plain extending to a zone of high mountains that had to be surmounted before reaching the biotic abundance of a Pacific coastal zone. What a pity it would have been if President Jefferson and the rest of the country rejected the findings of Lewis and Clark because their investigation was insufficiently thorough, their sample size too small, their method of measuring things not as refined as was being done back in Massachusetts and Virginia.
Comment:
A nasty problem exists here: the word “anecdotal” carries a negative connotation. It implies that people recovering from the Wuhan virus with unexpected frequency after having received HCQ, Azithromycin and Zn treatment is mere perception and is, therefore, not science. This is wrong. Anecdotal evidence is not hearsay evidence; it is evidence from direct observation. Anecdotal evidence compiled by somebody with an agenda other than saving lives might be readily dismissed, but doctors who are in the business of treating Wuhan virus patients are motivated to find what works best.
Right now there are politicians on the Left that are claiming that this is now the new normal and the quarantine should last another 18 months. That is a lie... The number of infections have plateaued and we should soon see a down turn. Granted the cities (mainly Blue) have been hit the hardest. In North Carolina the total number of cases presently is less than 3,500 and the number of deaths at 43. Again the two hardest areas are Charlotte and the Durham/Raleigh areas.
More and cases of the infection have been successfully arrested by the use of HCQ, Azithromycin and Zn treatment. The latest is 96 year old man with cardiac and diabetes complications.
