I saw that too, but I wasn’t going to dig that far into it.
I’m curious what their end game is here. Assuming they’re not in a position to make money off Ivermectin of HCQ, which I don’t think they are (plus they’re both generic at this point I think), my only guess is they’re hoping one of these therapies actually does work and they’ll have gotten in ‘on the ground floor’. They can claim they invented it or were early adopters or whatever and people will flock to their clinics.
Are they risking anything in the process though? If, for example, these unproven, unstudied, untested therapies start killing people, are they at risk of malpractice suits or losing their licenses? What about in cases where they weren’t directly responsible? For example, if my doctor put be on Ivermectin because he read their reports.
At this point, it appears to be grifting off of the backs of the rubes. Sort of the “Sidney Powells” of the COVID world. At the very top of their home page is a call for donations, below which I think is the key phrase that speaks to their target audience:
The question I have is how harmful treatment with HQC or Ivermectin is. At the start of the pandemic, I tried to sell my brother on taking a vitamin D supplement. I sent him a bunch of articles suggesting it might be beneficial. He compared the evidence to that then being published about HQC. I told him that if HQC was as safe and cheap and available as vitamin D, I would be taking it, too. But it showed risks early on, and of course isn’t a cheap OTC supplement. In contrast, I was recommending a dose of vitamin D that pretty much every dermatologist suggests to their patients after telling them to stay out of the sun, and there’s tons of data that it’s safe (and beneficial to many) to take that much vitamin D.
But there’s a scary illness out there with a dearth of good early treatments, and I don’t think it’s crazy to try stuff that looks promising in vitro, or in a few small studies. So long is it’s not harmful.
I get the impression that the dose of Ivermectin recommended IS dangerous, so it seems unwise for those who aren’t already critically ill to be taking it. But I don’t actually know what the risks are.
IIRC, @Qadgop_the_Mercotan said at one point that even if HCQ was highly effective against covid, he probably still wouldn’t prescribe it, because the side effects are usually worse than the disease.
I’d be shocked if they’re not charging significant fees for “consultations” or “office visits”. If they’re administering the ivermectin themselves, they’re almost certainly charging service fees for that. Even if they’re just prescribing the ivermectin, it’s a pretty good chance that either they have an onsite pharmacy, or they refer patients to a pharmacy that they have a relationship with. Another common grift is to also recommend various vitamins and supplements that they just happen to sell onsite, or to refer patients to an associated business that sells them.
Plus the donations.
And there’s also a non-trivial chance that they honestly believe in the quackery, and genuinely think they’re performing a public service. (Of course, motivated reasoning being what it is, grifting and genuine faith in the remedy aren’t mutually exclusive.)
Doctors who promote dubious therapies aren’t necessarily profiting off sales of the drugs they use. There’s lots of money to be made by those who sell themselves as brave mavericks bucking the system at great personal risk, because they’re willing to take on the Vested Interests. Those distrustful or paranoid about mainstream medicine and the government, and/or who’ve had less than stellar outcomes of treatment of their chronic conditions often flock to such practitioners.
As for the physician treating the hospitalized Ohio patient getting ivermectin by court order, the following statement appears on his website:
“The Lung Center of America is (sic) treats the root cause of conditions such as asthma, COPD, bronchitis and emphysema.”
The idea that mainstream physicians merely treat symptoms, while we get to the root causes of disease is a big selling point for naturopaths, homeopaths, chiropractors and myriad other quacks. That claim should be a huge red flag.
I don’t recall saying that. I prescribe HCQ for my folks with appropriate rheumatologic conditions and they manage fine on proper doses. If HCQ was effective for other conditions, I would prescribe it with caution, same as I do with other meds.
To be fair, it’s quite likely that you will no longer be suffering from COVID if you do this. Of course some might argue the side effects (death) are perhaps a bit extreme - but you would no longer be taking up a hospital bed.
Doctors should use medicines which are shown to have benefit in humans. In tougher cases, they should use medicines that have a reasonable probability of benefit. In extreme cases they should avoid treatments where harm greatly outweighs benefit.
I am unaware of why deworming medicine should help with Covid or of authorities that I trust which recommend this. I do not consider myself an expert on this treatment and in the setting of a recommendation by a local specialist would feel more comfortable. Intravenous medicines in general are pretty expensive but this is not the major concern. There has not been a shortage of therapeutic possibilities but most have not been very helpful. I assume the patient believes in the treatment and has been misinformed as to its chance of helping. I do not blame the patient for this, but it is wrong to offer false hope and the quackier the intervention the more this is true.
There are claims that ivermectin has “demonstrated anti-viral activity”. To the best of my knowledge, this has been demonstrated solely in vitro, where a lot of substances demonstrate anti-viral activity. I’m not aware of any real evidence that it has any anti-viral activity in vivo. There are also claims that it has some anti-inflammatory activity, which in theory could be useful in treating severe cases of COVID. But I’m also not aware of any real evidence that it actually has therapeutically useful anti-inflammatory activity in people.
It is, in theory, possible that a dewormer could also have therapeutically useful anti-viral and anti-inflammatory activity in people. But there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason to think that ivermectin actually does.
The claims, such as they are, is that ivermectin isn’t just a dewormer, but that it also has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory activity. But those claims don’t seem to be backed by much more than wishful thinking.
Now I’m really curious whether there are different laws in Ohio and Illinois, whether the judges interpreted laws differently, or whether there are differences in the specifics of the cases that led to a different outcome.
The next time someone asks a judge to order the administration of ivermectin to a hospitalized patient, it’d be advisable not to bring up this study.
"But there are signs that at least some of the experiments — as written up in a paper published in November — didn’t happen as advertised. After BuzzFeed News raised questions about how the study’s data was collected and analyzed, a representative from the Journal of Biomedical Research and Clinical Investigation, which published the results, said late Monday, “We will remove the paper temporarily.” A link was removed from the table of contents — but was reinstated by Thursday. The journal’s explanation, provided after this story was published, was that the author “informed us that he has already provided the evidence of his study to the media.”
“The numbers, genders, and ages of the study’s participants were inconsistent. A hospital named in the paper as taking part in the experiments said it has no record of it happening. Health officials in the province of Buenos Aires have also said that they also have no record of the study receiving local approval.”
“And the researcher overseeing the project, Hector Carvallo, a retired endocrinologist and professor of internal medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, has declined to widely share his data — including with one of his own collaborators, emails show.”
I do wonder if there are some people with an undiagnosed case of parasites, which could be suppressing the immune system, and taking the anti-parasite medication kills off the parasites, strengthening the immune system.
