Posted on 04/25/2020 7:17:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
According to CNN, we are "jerks." In some states, we may be criminals.
Our infraction? We are doctors who have prescribed hydroxychloroquine, a generic autoimmune medication, to ourselves and our patients in an attempt to prevent or treat COVID-19.
Each of us had a child diagnosed with the disease. Neither of us contracted it ourselves, despite close contact.
Whether HCQ is effective at preventing and treating COVID-19 is beside the point. Some studies suggest that it helps. Others indicate that it does not. Although its effectiveness can be debated, physicians' right to prescribe it, or any other medication they see fit, must not be violated. This applies even if there hasn't been time to conduct randomized, blind, controlled studies.
Medicine should never be politicized, least of all during a public health crisis.
Across the country, some doctors like us are taking HCQ as a prophylactic to try to stay healthy so that we can keep treating our patients. Some of us would like to prescribe it to our patients working on the front lines, including paramedics, firefighters, and hospital workers, who are not only most at risk of catching the disease but also the most important soldiers fighting it.
For this clinical perspective, we've faced unprecedented derision. "Don’t be jerks. Don’t hoard this medicine, doctors, this is not for you," said CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen — a perspective shared by the president of the American Medical Association.
At least 20 states have enacted HCQ restrictions, even up to forbidding prescriptions to patients who haven't tested positive for COVID-19. An Ohio pharmacist told us that she's been instructed to report doctors who write such prescriptions to the district attorney's office. This restriction ignores the Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization for HCQ, which is based on data showing therapeutic and prophylactic benefits. It also ignores the reality that test results for COVID-19 take several days to come back. Doctors should be allowed to prescribe medications if their patients show symptoms, even if they are still awaiting diagnostic confirmation. To force physicians to wait for test results before treating the disease may cost lives.
It seems like scarcely a day goes by without a news story about the supposed risks of taking HCQ. Every drug has side effects, and HCQ is no exception. Yet for healthy individuals, HCQ is safe. The World Health Organization puts it on its list of "essential medicines" — the most "efficacious, safe and cost‐effective" medicines in the world. Physicians have prescribed it (as well as with cyclosporin and ivermectin) safely for decades. We know what side effects to expect.
With more than a dozen formal studies in the United States already underway, definitive answers regarding HCQ's effectiveness will come soon. Yet its safety profile is known, which is not the case for new intravenous drugs like Gilead's Remdisivir. Researchers at NYU Langone and the University of Washington are conducting a randomized control trial to examine whether HCQ limits the chances of contracting COVID-19, with results expected this summer. We already have data from less rigorous observational studies.
But with roughly 2,000 people in America reported dying every day from this disease, we don't have the luxury of waiting for definitive results. We should be allowed to try to help our patients without ridicule or unjustified laws designed to stop us. Doctors have at least 11 years of training. We take an oath to "first, do no harm." We are better positioned to determine the risk and reward profile of medicines than are bureaucrats or pundits.
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Marion Mass, M.D. and Marlene J. Wust-Smith, M.D. are pediatricians in Pennsylvania. Dr. Mass is the co-founder of Practicing Physicians of America. Dr. Wust-Smith is the founder of Physician Outlook.
Thanks for publishing. The idea of withholding meds because of Fauci’s word is an abomination.
I think the politicization of HCQ is the most sordid chapter in this whole sordid mess. Hate to imagine what generations in the future will think when they look back on this.
This needed to be written....
The media needs to do some serious reflection after this is over on how/why they politicized a drug that has been prescribed for decades with very low risks of side effects.
I know I am asking for too much here. I have read and listened to arguments for and against it. The arguments for it appear to be based on solid anecdotal evidence that it has helped many people. The arguments against it appear to be centered around “Trump.”
Life’s of reason
Everything is political in this country. The cure suggested by Trump is political. The actual disease is political. They have twisted his unfortunate comment about bleach into something that he didn’t say.
Do not doubt that the entire hysteria and insanity over this stupid bug is to Get Trump.
The left is doing nothing to help. In fact, they want more people dead and the economy shut down. Then, no matter what happens, they will use everything against Trump and blame him for the deaths and the recession.
It’s presidential election campaign time, and the left isn’t going to let the massive deaths go to waste.
Once upon a time in America the “County Medical Society” was the arbiter of “What is acceptable.” That produced a “patchwork of policies.” Areas like the region around, let’s say Kirksville, Missouri were dominated by Osteopaths because the largest Osteopathic Med School was there. Osteopaths spent decades earning the trust and confidence of their community. Curiously, an “Allopath” couldn’t even START a business there.
Other places Osteopaths had a great deal of difficulty even getting recognition from their County Medical Society. There were places where they wouldn’t even let them join. But what a “County Medical Society” provided was “protection for the public”. If you had an inclination to provide a treatment that was NOT “usual and customary” one KNEW you had to earn the approval of your peers. You had to make a presentation of your idea, your method, your results, your complications, all of it. Having successfully done so you “earned peer approval” even if there were some skeptics.
Having failed to make your case you were ASSURED that your peers would contact the State Board and your license would be pulled. Once upon a time that was the way things worked. Nowadays it appears things are a “free for all”. We have FBI agents doing the job of the County Medical Society and the County Medical Society has only a small portion of the local physicians even know there is such a thing.
“Everything is political in this country. “
Not necessarily or because it’s absolutely necessary?
Self reflection in media? Please
This past Monday I called my Dr to get a script of Hydroxychloroquine with a Z-pack (already have the zinc) to have on standby in my medicine cabinet. Doc had no problem at all giving me the script I simply asked for over the phone but proceeded to inform me that either calling it in to my pharmacy or even me taking a written prescription personally that the pharmacy would not fill it unless it was accompanied by a positive Covid19 test result.
I pressed the matter somewhat harping on the fact that since when is it up to the dang pharmacist to make any determination over a Dr’s.
Anyway, Dr ended up giving me a personal supply from her own stash she was holding onto for herself and employees.
That right there tells me a lot.
1) pharmacy’s are holding onto it having either limited supplies or simply holding onto what they have for bonafide cases and expecting its use.
2) even the Dr knew enough to hang onto a stash for herself and employees just in case.
Tell Fauci and his researchers to spend their time studying this disease that they know nothing about. Then maybe they can find a vaccine or a cure. But for treating the patient in the here and now leave the practitioners alone ! Let them prescribe and share results and outcomes with each other. And stop waiting till the ventilator is rolled in to try something. This isn’t about science. It’s about Medicine.
>>Hate to imagine what generations in the future will think when they look back on this.<<
Well, if the present ongoing studies of HCQ, which hopefully wrap up soon, support its use against Covid-19, then it’s going to be fun to imagine what voters think of the following:
—Leftist media figures who worked overtime to disparage its use
—Governors who forbade its use in most cases
—Doctors who refused to prescribe it even when asked by patients without contraindicated conditions
—Doctors of nursing home patients who refused to even try it.
And I would bet that 95% of the members of those four groups, including the doctors, are liberals who vote Democrat. Hopefully, if HCQ proves highly effective, voters get the connection, along with viewers and readers of the leftist press.
And you can’t get a test unless you have symptoms. These stips are coming from the Governor. Since when is a governor a doctor for the state? Insane.
Good story. We have to remember that even the revered docs are merely cogs in a great big wheel, too.
I know. I am asking for a miracle.
Seriously though, the media is doing great harm to our nation and government. The nation is caught in hyperbolic news cycles of hysteria and the government responds by spending billions we don’t have on a problem that requires millions and some simple coordination (like ventilators).
The need to start calling it by the brand name Plaquenil, and interview the RA, Lupus, Sjogren’s. Venus Williams might give the idiots a interview as she has Sjogren’s.
My niece takes it for both Lupus, Sjogren’s, and the Veterinarian gave it to her dog the other night for seizures.
The need to start calling it by the brand name Plaquenil, and interview the RA, Lupus, Sjogren’s. Venus Williams might give the idiots a interview as she has Sjogren’s.
My niece takes it for both Lupus, Sjogren’s, and the Veterinarian gave it to her dog the other night for seizures.
Anyone who gets turned down by a pharmacist could just choose to “share” with that pharmacist...
It is way past the time for Fauci to go. His association with Gates and Big Pharma says it all.
REPLACE THE GOVERNOR ASAP...............
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