I believe that medicine’s potential is much more than the version we see in the world today. A doctor should be an educator with the goal of bringing patients to a place of deeper understanding of who they are in the world. To me, medicine is ultimately about self-empowerment through self-knowledge and growth.
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Cases are are at all time lows. There have been basically no cases in the county by my reading of the state’s website. Even if that is lagging, there are minimal. Nationally we are reporting the lowest case totals (16,000 daily positives) since March 2020…when we had an infant testing program. In other words, we have reached an absolute low point since the start of this pandemic. The state of emergency is over. It’s smart to be careful, even if vaccinated, but it’s a relief to anticipate low COVID activity for the summer.
What about India and the other parts of the world where it’s not over?
I’m glad you asked. Cases have plateaued in India. Keep your eyes on 2DG, recently approved by India’s Drug Agency because it is being shown to reduce oxygen need and speed recovery in sick, hospitalized patients.
2DG is 2-DeoxyGlucose. It is a glucose-like moleculeand has exciting antiviral properties, and it is cheap and well tolerated.
Its chemical structure is so close to glucose that the body allows it on the same pathways as glucose. The body’s most active cells (infected cells) readily absorb 2DG. If 2DG is present it blocks glucose from coming and providing energy for the cell. 2DG itself doesn’t get broken down into energy like glucose. 2DG acts as a fake glucose and starves those active infected cells, and viral replication falters. It effectively pulls the plug on the energy source in the infected cells being turned into virus factories.
The studies are incomplete but it’s joining the ranks of ivermectin which is being used a lot now in India. Thank heaven for re-purposed drugs!
A lot of doctors feel that the efforts (or lack thereof) in our country with re-purposed drugs, which have had no governmental advocacy in America, was a huge mistake. Tens of billions of dollars were spent on new drugs and vaccines, which is fine, but the re-purposed drugs were treated unfairly and not given a chance, in the opinion of many.
SAME OLD STORY? The positioning of a drug seems like a ruthless competition. If you don’t have a mega advocacy team to position the product, it seems like a lost cause. There are only individual drug advocates. No one is advocating for people and for health, it seems. Many doctors are disillusioned by this. It’ll be one of the legacies of this period for a lot of us.
There is another huge legacy item, which may have implications for generations to come. There just may be no single story as big as what’s going on with the WUHAN LAB that will be part of profile we compile to configure best policy when it comes to censoring information. And a group of independent citizen researchers is to thank.
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” (Sermon on the Mount)
We need to acknowledge our fallibilty, in science and in society. Studies indicate that more than 10% death row inmates were wrongly sentenced. In the last 50 years, nearly 175 prisoners (roughly 10% of the total) who have been executed in this country had subsequent DNA evidence emerge which exonerated them! It wouldn’t take a whole lot more than 1 mistake for me to remove all support for a system such as this, which has such grave implications for an error.
Here is a prevailing viewpoint on censorship (from a news article this week):
“The conspiracy theorists are still a minority of Americans overall. The best hope for refuting such disinformation, based on political science research, is for public officials and the media to stop spreading it and, when it does pop up, correct it. But the spread of disinformation is a much thornier problem that society at large is still coming to terms with as the internet and social media have made it so easy for people to proliferate lies and myths — and it will take a while to really get a handle on this.”
You could substitute “kill it” for the words “correct it” in this scenario.
Disinformation implies an accepted norm. Anything against the accepted narrative should be sentenced to death, is the viewpoint. Be wary of this, many people now are saying.
This viewpoint is losing steam in recent medical opinion pieces, thanks in large part to the crumbling of the wet market theory for the source for the novel infection. Re-enter attention on the Wuhan biological lab right down the block.
From Medpage:
“Last week, Facebook removed its ban on posts discussing the laboratory escape of the virus as a possibility. How could this happen? What was misinformation yesterday is something that needs investigating today?
Limiting debate is dangerous.
If we learn anything from the shift on the lab-leak theory, it is that curtailing free expression and limiting reasonable debate is a mistake. That’s especially true when information is dynamic, and you are making unprecedented decisions. In human history, we have never asked so many people to deprive themselves of social interaction for so long. We have never closed schools for so many kids and for so long. Naturally, these policies will spark disagreements, even fierce ones. Restricting the bounds of what’s appropriate — particularly with the brute force of platforms like Facebook — is a fool’s errand.“
And from the Guardian:
“If the (WUHAN origin) hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise.“
Censoring is as dangerous as the death penalty and its legacy of wrongful execution. In censoring of information the entities that benefit from certain ideas being mainstream (regardless of truth) can work to form society’s body of accepted thoughts. It risks becoming a game of who’s powerful enough to create society’s narrative and determine who gets censored. Could money and power crowd out truth? Umm, of course.
You have to have a spot in your heart for the underdog. I highly recommend this article from Newsweek this week describing how renegade researchers built the no-longer-ignorable case implicating Wuhan lab’s involvement and cover up, which for anyone who cared to look closely knew there was major circumstantial evidence from day 1.
The narrative was broken open by independent thinkers! They are true heroes, it seems at this point. Their work should have a lasting legacy on how we frame the debate on this topic in this country. They overcame strong cover up attempts from powerful entities as well as a non-questioning tendency by much of the mainstream media. I always appreciated the David and Goliath story!
D. Conclusion
It’s comfortable to have an accepted understanding of how the world works. We need that. We welcome that.
We also need for that to be disrupted. We need to allow for that. There’s rest in comfort but there’s no growth. Growth is how we stay in touch with what’s is true. An allegiance to comfort, to the status quo is the enemy of truth.
The body continually breaks down and builds itself back up. It spends just as much time in each cycle. Take the example of our bones. There are cells that are constantly breaking down bone and cells that build it up. It’s a type of breathing that goes on their. It keeps the bone strong and fresh and resilient. Our body of knowledge needs the same mobility and remodeling. It’s what we need to stay true.
