I have made a most distressing discovery. Our medical establishment is apparently terminally broken. A little background: most of you realize that my wife suffered for 40 years with multiple sclerosis. She was fortunate/unfortunate enough to have lived through having no specific treatments for the disease through having a choice of over a dozen injectable or oral treatments.
One of the problems with trying to tease out effective treatments was a tremendous placebo effect, your belief in the treatment created a placebo effect that really did make the disease seem to be receding. It was virtually impossible to do a double-blind test with for instance bee-sting therapy.
Above is the 2015 list we used to manage her medications. We used the list as a discussion point at her doctor’s appointments. You can see she was taking Tecfidera (Dimetyl Fumerate) for MS, but she was also taking Prozac and Ritalin, off-label, as ancillary drugs that seemed to help with MS symptoms. In the times BT (before Trump) physicians, especially specialists, could prescribe virtually anything in the formulary that, in their judgement, might help with the disease process.
AT (After Trump) things changed. He mentioned two drugs, in particular, that might be helpful with COVID-19: Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Although some doctors were successfully treating patients there were two specific problems: They were well beyond the patent expirations and were available for low cost as generic drugs; and they had been endorsed by Orange-Man-Bad and thus were “Double-Plus-Ungood”.
When the podcaster, Joe Rogan came down with COVID-19 he took a number of drugs, including getting a prescription for (human) Ivermectin from his doctor. He was excoriated by CNN and other mainstream media for taking “horse de-wormer”. See HERE.
As of the Winter of 2021 it is well nigh impossible to get a prescription for Ivermectin in most parts of the country. In hospitals it will not be prescribed, sometimes even when ordered by the courts. See HERE and HERE. I have inquired of my doctor and she indicated that she is unable to prescribe it.
There are some studies emerging (like HERE and HERE) that seem to have significantly robust results. So why is it not possible to get a double-blind, placebo controlled study? Sadly, I think that it is that none of the major drug companies will fund it because Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine are both generic drugs.
There is some data out there. There is a doctor who analyzed a massive international study HERE. The presentation is information dense, but reminds me of many of the presentations of data for various MS treatments. Remember that this study was done before April 2021. This is not, as referenced by the media, a wack-a-doodle drug that has shown no positive results for COVID-19. I personally think that the deliberate obstruction of the use and investigation of this drug is criminal.