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Re: undefined

#321
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly like the man in the article. People are trying to make this into some political, partisan fight, which causes people’s trust in experts to be eroded. There’s a whole story about this called the boy who cried wolf.

The President's whole brand is that he knows more than the experts. I'm listening to him right now, live, saying 'the doctors re telling us we have to shut down the whole world, they want to shut it down for years, but you can't let the cure be worse than the problem.' He's talking complete nonsense about quarantine and how bad it is to close the stock exchange while saying the quarantine is a bigger problem than the…

I’m a died-in-the-wool liberal, and I think he’s right about that.

We aren’t rationally weighing costs and benefits right now. We really should be talking more about what we’re doing to the economy, and if there are better ways to move forward.

Re: undefined

#322
post #317
post #249

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Almost no one should be taking 4g of acetaminophen a day. That’s definitely going to be toxic given enough time. It doesn’t belong in convo with other drugs because it requires far less monitoring. It’s also not taken chronically like the other drugs. Or shouldn’t be, at least.

4g of acetaminophen is what you'd take if you followed the directions of an adult taking 2 regular strength tablets every 4 hours for 24 hours (3.9g to be exact).

I understand that.

That said, any physician who sees a patient taking 4g of acetaminophen a day chronically is going to tell them to reduce their dosage, switch to another drug, or stop.

It’s not safe in the long run.

Re: undefined

#324
post #226

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The FDA approved emergency expanded access for inhaled nitric oxide a couple days ago, which has the same mechanism of action as garlic and beet root. There is actually a plausible mechanism of action there, and a bunch of in vitro research.

This is insane. Garlic and beet root are not used medically for any disease at all, let alone COVID. NO evidence is pretty weak for COVID. Even if it was true, we’d give NO or other related compounds and certainly not unregulated dietary supplements.

> Garlic and beet root are not used medically for any disease at all

Garlic is literally one of the most widely used medical treatments in the entire world. It's used medically by 0.8% of all US adults, according to the NIH.

https://nccih.nih.gov/research/statistics/NHIS/2012/natural-...

It's use was advocated for my Hippocrates. You know, the "father of medicine" guy.

https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/131/3/951S/4687053

Re: undefined

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily a lay person cannot get medical grade chloroquine. They can purchase a chemical to use in aquariums, but that is not medication. Those chemicals are not regulated, and may contain all sorts of other compounds that could kill humans, or have an incorrect amount of chloroquine. Sorry, no matter what the president says, self-medicating is nuts.

It’s obviously nuts to take medical advice from Donald Trump. However, some people will do it, which makes it irresponsible to give such advice, even obliquely.

Thankfully Trump didn't say to take it. He said doctors can prescribe it. Doctors know what dosage is safe (and there is a safe dosage, since quinines are sold at the grocery store all the time), and what contraindications there may be for certain dosages. Your aquarium cleaner box does not.

Re: undefined

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that someone took X when referring to a chemical, and X is just a scary way of describing a use for that chemical, is really just FUD tactics. You know what else you could say that is just as meaningful? So-and-so died because they took an 'aquarium cleaner'... where the reference is to Water, which is also used when cleaning aquariums. Everything is chemicals.

See below, likely other ingredients were involved and like others mention the difficulty of selecting the right dosing from an aquarium product makes it very pertinent to point out the source of what they took. Not FUD, just trying to add more context.

Your quoted source "A man has died and his wife is under critical care after the couple, both in their 60s, ingested chloroquine phosphate, an additive commonly used at aquariums to clean fish tanks." doesn't actually say these particular people used a fish tank product as their source of chloroquine phosphate.

This comment is harshly worded but explains the subtly well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22670152

Re: undefined

#327
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is insane. Garlic and beet root are not used medically for any disease at all, let alone COVID. NO evidence is pretty weak for COVID. Even if it was true, we’d give NO or other related compounds and certainly not unregulated dietary supplements.

> Garlic and beet root are not used medically for any disease at all Garlic is literally one of the most widely used medical treatments in the entire world. It's used medically by 0.8% of all US adults, according to the NIH. https://nccih.nih.gov/research/statistics/NHIS/2012/natural-... It's use was advocated for my Hippocrates. You know, the "father of medicine" guy. https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/131/3/951S/4…

I can’t tell if this is a troll or not.

It is listed below echinacea and cranberry pills (two supplements with substantial evidence for NON-efficacy) on the National Institute for Complementary and Alternative Medicine’s ranking of SUPPLEMENTS taken in the US. If it was real effective medicine, it wouldn’t be considered an “alternative” medicine (a polite phrase for horseshit).

Do you realize how ridiculous that is as evidence for anything? The fact that misguided people buy it in supplement form does not mean it is a treatment for anything, let alone COVID. People also buy lots of Diet Coke.

And then to top it off you reference Hippocrates (literally thousands of years ago). Did you know most Med schools don’t even take the Hippocratic oath any longer? Do you believe that doctors should treat people by keeping the 4 humors in balance?

Completely ridiculous

Re: undefined

#328
post #299
post #274

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> if people will look at something like a cleaning product and think "I will drink this" then there is not much options available. Last year I watched as a homeless man squirted hand sanitizer into a cup then drink it. Before a woman yelled at him and started calling 911. He disappeared pretty quickly after that, so not sure what ever happened to him. Fun fact: The hand sanitizer stand he used was one of the ones ins…

Hand sanitizer with alcohol is one such product that does not exist in Swedish stores. There is gels and other similar products that evaporate but they do not actually include any alcohol. I remember many years ago that there was a campaign to inform the public of this fact as people still continued for a while to ingest those products under the idea that they still had alcohol in them. Many products also had for a w…

That's interesting, Sweden is more aggressive with this sort of thing. That'd be a controversial move even here in Canada.

The CDC recommends using alcohol sanitizer over non-alcohol ones:

> Many studies have found that sanitizers with an alcohol concentration between 60–95% are more effective at killing germs than those with a lower alcohol concentration or non-alcohol-based hand sanitizers. Hand sanitizers without 60-95% alcohol 1) may not work equally well for many types of germs; and 2) merely reduce the growth of germs rather than kill them outright.

https://www.propublica.org/article/coronavirus-hand-sanitize...

A friend who lived in Sweden told me the stores there shut down early and it was hard to find a place to buy alcohol (the Swedish state-run liquor store closes at 3pm on Saturday and is completely closed on Sunday). So if your flight arrives late to the city you might miss out.

Culture plays a big role in getting support for this sort of thing... Ontario used to be more like Sweden but recently expanded the hours of our state-run liquor store (until 11pm) and let grocery stores sell beer/cider.

Re: undefined

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably means this: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/fda-expands-access-to-... But that has nothing to do with HIV, neither do garlic and beetroot have anything to do with nitric oxide.

> neither do garlic and beetroot have anything to do with nitric oxide. "Potent activation of nitric oxide synthase by garlic: a basis for its therapeutic applications." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7555034 ...

Validated at least by reference, which he has given. Upvoted. We need more than this such as references to it or disclaimers for it, niether of which I can find. That is not to detract from the existence of the paper which he referenced.

Whether nitric oxide has much to do with health is anothre question. I believe one of the reasons viagra works is due to nitric oxide, so perhaps it's we should be viagring instead.

Re: undefined

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also haven't shut down their economies, which was the point I was making. The actions you describe are not mutually exclusive to a more nuanced approach to reduced economic activity. That is, something other than economic suicide.

They were able to take a more nuanced and targeted approach because they got their testing infrastructure in place very quickly and made tests widely available. That way, they were able to quickly figure out who had the virus and needed to be quarantined. The USA, in stark contrast, had a gutted CDC (thanks to the hard work of the GOP to shrink the government), an abolished White House Pandemic Response office (used…

> The USA, in stark contrast, had a gutted CDC (thanks to the hard work of the GOP to shrink the government), an abolished White House Pandemic Response office (used to be part of the national security group), and a President who first ignored and then downplayed repeated warnings from his own country's Intelligence Community because he thought it was a "hoax".

The CDC budget has not been gutted (https://mises.org/wire/cdcs-budget-larger-now-under-obama). Perhaps you meant that he proposed reductions. Sure, but that didn't happen so you can't use a reduced budget as the cause for anything.

The Pandemic Response Office was consolidated as part of the restructuring of the NSC. The office might have been eliminated but the function was not. (https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/465320-reducin...)

And as for your "hoax" comment. You are just parroting false accounts of what the President said. His reference to a "hoax" was to the particular types of criticisms being made by the Democrats not to the virus. It is obvious on its face that he hasn't thought it was a hoax since he has continued to make executive decisions that would make no sense if he thought it was a hoax (e.g. banning travel from China in mid January)

Unfortunately, you have been suckered into believing lots of things that just aren't true. The press continues to embarrass itself during this crisis.

> Regarding the economy, tell me this: do you seriously think our economy can handle millions of deaths within the span of several months?

Well it is a bit of a false choice you are forcing on me, but it is quite possible that a destroyed world economy could lead to more deaths than could be caused by the virus alone. As bad as things are, they could get a whole lot worse.

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