4
votes
Hydroxychloroquine: "Extra-scientific factors overrode clear-cut medical evidence"
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- The key to defeating COVID-19 already exists. We need to start using it | Opinion
- Published
- Jul 23 2020
- Word count
- 1258 words
The reason several cancers that were death sentences in 2005 are now readily cured is the rigorousness of the scientific method.
The way to cure even more cancer isn't by following hunches and "extra-scientific factors." It's by strong studies with robust designes that will teach us something new.
However, in health care, our motivations differ than many other areas of science. An individual is willing to spend absolutely any amount of money or resources to save them or their loved one specifically. There is no cut-off where the potential benefit would just cost too much to consider.
This has led to warped studies of experimental treatments for cancers to save me as an individual patient, that have little or no scientific value because of study designs.
Those same arguments are just as applicable when a new disease spreads, whether it's a pandemic or not.
But study designs in medicine also have other moral issues. How could we condemn someone to die a certain death because we know current treatment can't save them? Is it moral to give a placebo knowing that person will die without treatment?
Similarly, do we condemn those who are unlucky and get hit in a pandemic first, for the sake of best treatment for those that will follow?
Where do those lines go? In the real world, these are all matters of degrees.
How much money (and other resources) should we spend on an unproven treatment while we're in a gigantic pandemic situation and the production of medical supplies is limited while need is extremely high?
Those aren't questions for scientists alone. In representative democracies we've chosen people to make all these sorts of collective decisions on our behalves. And we've chosen the rules for how we can make these sorts of decisions as individuals for ourselves.
We vote for more than the person who's got the "right" view on issues. We vote for the best person to make all sorts of unknown decisions on our behalves to the best of their abilities while they're in office. This time, it happened to be a medical issue.
I thought the scientific evidence weighed against the use of Hydroxychloroquine, but this article makes convincing points to the contrary. Anyone have any additional information?
My understanding is that the consensus is that hydroxychloroquine has not been shown to measurably improve patient outcomes regardless of when it has been administered. There are some studies that show it can help when administered to high risk individuals, and the author of this editorial led one of those studies. There are other studies that do not show the same improvement.
I think the weight of evidence is that it does not help. Unless I am mistaken, Fauci has advised against it’s prescription, multiple health orgs have advised against it as well.
Regardless of what we eventually find out, the Newsweek editorial pages is no place to be doing science and I am confused why this doctor chose to write this piece. Surely there are better ways of communicating to other doctors in his field, and this makes me suspicious.
I’m obviously not a doctor, but this whole hydroxychloroquine saga seems to me to be people wishing for a magic bullet to beat this thing.
My spouse was offered this drug for a non-COVID issue a year or two ago. She also knows several people who have taken it for symptoms similar to her. Some of them have suffered the side-effects listed in the Wikipedia article:
Having talked with people who actually suffered these issues, they weren't just some warning on a label that happens to 1 in a billion people. Ultimately she decided not to try it because of how people she knew were affected on it. She didn't want to risk getting similar effects from it.
Here's a response specifically to this Newsweek article and some of its claims by David Gorski (Orac): Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch defends hydroxychloroquine in Newsweek—badly
It has links to other articles criticizing the specific studies that Risch is citing, and also includes discussion of some more hydroxychloroquine studies that came out just before/after the Newsweek article that seem to be almost exactly the type of studies he wanted, and they show no significant benefit.