Misinformation All Over the Place

I find the tendency to toss out the epithet misinformation and assume you are righteously correct to be disconcerting. And worse, the term misinformation is used to give the impression you know what’s right and everybody else is wrong. We must remember there are two sides to every story.

Unfortunately, anything labeled misinformation is not free from contradicting information. Tossing the term misinformation around does not mean the actual misinformation has been defined, or even if the term misinformation is correct.

The Washington Post recently headlined a long investigative article by Lena H. Sun, Lauren Weber, and Hayden Godfrey asserting that medical boards are allowing doctors who espouse “misinformation” about Covid treatments to go unpunished. To their credit, the reporters did extensive research into medical boards, contacting all 50 state boards to gather data for their article.

There are many assumptions in the Washington Post article titled “Doctors Who Put Lives at Risk with Covid Misinformation Rarely Punished.” Any dissemination of “misinformation, it is inferred, should require medical boards to sanction the doctors and take away their medical licenses.

So, when the reporters talk about the Wisconsin doctor who in 2021 prescribed ivermectin to a patient who later died of Covid disease, the reporters assume the association of Covid and ivermectin equals causation.

The reporters discuss the Massachusetts doctor who prescribed “unapproved” Covid treatments, including ivermectin, to a patient who died. Many patients who received Remdesivir or other other on-label drugs also died. To my knowledge, no research study collected the data on patients who received Remdesivir for Covid and died.

The reporters also cite the Idaho pathologist who “falsely promoted” the effectiveness of ivermectin over coronavirus vaccines on social media has not been disciplined “despite complaints” from fellow physicians, that his “dangerous and troubling” statements and actions “significantly threatened the public health.”

Glaringly absent here is the denominator. In other words, how many patients who got the so-called “orthodox treatment” died? And worse yet, how many patients died because they came in too early, as they were told the “standard of care” was to stay home until they got really sick or because they weren’t vaccinated and therefore couldn’t get treatment.

Supplying the missing information would make this article more objective and more scientific. While I only have four years of medical school and four years of residency and do not have any other particular science background, I do understand what is objective and what is not objective, as well as what is and what is not scientific. Science and scientists dare to ask questions, and they dare to get answers. Dr.Fauci labels those “misinformation spreaders” who question both his science and his objectivity as anti-science. He seems to have forgotten that scientists ask questions.

There is a big difference between propaganda and science. As I said above, in science you get to ask questions and you can expect to get answers. With propaganda, you are not supposed to ask questions. You are supposed to blindly follow those who claim to know by calling themselves experts. As now revealed by the release of White House papers, Andy Slavitt claimed the First Amendment rights don’t apply to Covid or the Covid vaccines. 

I will say that the authors of this Washington Post article have little understanding of how medical boards work and their obligation to ensure public safety. Medical boards have a very wide and deep range of authority, and they can act in almost anyway they want to act because they act “in secret” and call it due process. Medical boards err by not discipling physicians who should be as well as by punishing those who shouldn’t be. Both errors are dangerous to the public.

Remember the appointment of these boards is political. In most states they are appointed by the governor, so if you happen to be of the same political party as the governor, you have a better chance of getting a board appointment and if you have contributed to the governor’s campaign, you are a shoo-in. Of course, if you belong to a large clinic you will certainly have an even better chance not only to get an appointment, but also an excellent opportunity to protect yourself and your colleagues from any negative board actions. Money and politics. Politics and money.

The reporters also chastise physicians for using off-label medications. Off-label medications have been used safely for many years. There is nothing illegal, unethical, ineffective, nefarious, or immoral about the use of off-label medications. These medication’s have been proven “safe and effective” for patients before they were ever brought to market. Generally speaking a drug companies only want to go through approval process one time because it is expensive. If they think they can’t make a lot of money on the medication by getting further approvals, they don’t bother to get it approved again for another use.

Depo-Provera was originally tested and approved for use in controlling heavy, benign uterine bleeding. In the 70s, it began to be used “off-label” for contraception. A multidose vial could be purchased for a few dollars. There were approximately 20 doses in that vile, so the patients could get good birth control by injection for $20.00 four times a year. After the drug company went through the effort of getting Depo-Provera approved as a contraceptive, the first thing they did was to begin to offer a single dose vile which was developed ostensibly to improve patient safety. The upshot was that the price for this birth control went from $80 a year to $3000 a year.

Much of that money has come from our federal government so once again, we have our own federal government “carrying water” for big Pharma. Unfortunately, this process is not new. The government “carried water” for Wyeth, Premarin, and Provera for 60 years when the FDA accepted the drug companies own investigations about how wonderful their medications were. The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study 60 years later found out how dangerous Wyeth’s drugs were. There was no punishment for Wyeth at all.

So, there’s nothing wrong with off-label use of medications. We know ivermectin and hydroxiquinoline have been on the market for years and we know that they both have very good safety profiles. The question before us is whether they have been effective in some cases of Covid, and there are some studies which show that they can be useful in treating Covid.

The problem is that research studies about any issue are not 100 percent correct all of the time. Physicians know that vitamin D plays an important part in a body’s defense against viruses. Yet some of the studies of vitamin D with Covid indicate vitamin D didn’t help improve recovery. But unless you read the research study, you will have no idea how the researchers arrived at their conclusion. In other words, the media takes the conclusions of research studies and declares the generalized conclusion correct. Unless the reporter reads the research study, the reporter will not be able to discern the problems which can be introduced into research studies, biasing conclusions.

Physicians do not practice medicine by fiat. Every patient is an individual. The research results for the herd, as the public health profession is so fond of citing, may or may not apply to an individual patient. The physician actually works with the patient to sort out options, and those options may not be the health department recommendation for the herd. I am relieved to see that some state legislatures have begun to pass legislation to protect physicians from the renegade behaviors of some medical boards.