The World Health Organization said on Monday that the transmission of COVID-19 from an asymptotic person is “very rare.”
Wait a minute! What?
Asymptomatic people aren’t driving this pandemic?
Wait… then they retracted, and said it’s possible, and we don’t know yet.
Hmmm….
Politics are everywhere, and human errors in judgment are everywhere. Even the experts are subject to those factors.
How about hydroxychloroquine?
Even which drugs to use became a political issue. Are you for the drug that Trump backed?
That’s literally a frame people used to make medical decisions. Then we jumped on the first available data and used it like it was concrete fact.
A few days ago, The Lancet retracted a study it published on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, because the data was suspicious. A lot of people made clinical “evidence-based” decisions based on that study.
I’m not saying it works, and I’m not saying it doesn’t work. New data seems to suggest hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help COVID patients. I don’t pretend to know the answer.
I used to work for a foot & ankle guy who hated the ankle replacements that were out there. He’d cite the horrible results all the studies showed. He much preferred to do ankle fusions, and his patients did reasonably well.
Here’s the caveat though: he readily admitted that only the most severe cases of ankle arthritis were likely to wind up in those studies, most likely skewing the outcomes.
Use your brain. Listen to experts, but don’t blindly accept what they say as irrefutable fact.
People always ask me about updating The Final Step; I probably will at some point, but the PANCE won’t deal with how best to treat COVID. Hydroxychloroquine won’t be an answer choice. The PANCE is about medicine that is all but concrete. Syphilis, otitis media, strep throat… that kind of thing. There are a few small changes in that realm, but a lot less than you’d think.
If you’d like to learn some tried and true medicine and pass your PANCE, you may want to take a gander at The Final Step.
Brian Wallace
