Early clinical trial shows anti-depressant prevents hospitalization from Covid

Yes, I agree, people should be doing the "easy, obvious, low risk" stuff first (if they can -- lots of people don't have the money, can't exercise adequately because of lock down, etc).

One of the problems is that is an inherently hard sell. People are terrible at measuring the disasters that should have happened but didn't.

If you convinced everyone to take their Vitamin D supplements, you would have an extremely hard time measuring the deaths that didn't happen but should have and an even harder time convincing the general public you weren't making up BS as click bait.

This is the bane of my existence. I have a serious medical condition and I know what the path not taken is supposed to look like and I've been getting better for nearly two decades when the condition is supposed to involve a steady and irreversible decline and I get told all the time that I am full of baloney and I can't possibly know that what I'm doing is effective and "X number of years of steady forward progress is just a wild coincidence -- stranger things have happened" and on and on.

Even people who believed me and took my advice have told me "I gave x, y and z nutritional things to my child and they are in the ER less but they aren't on less medication." by which this person meant the child's maintenance drugs were the same. But they implicitly failed to count the fewer antibiotics, steroids and other emergency treatment drugs as "less medication."

If you normally are in the ER every couple of months and need antibiotics for a month afterwards, being in the ER less constitutes a very significant reduction in use of medication. So this person was seeing results and going "But my child still needs just as much maintenance drugs, so the drug use is the same as before" when it absolutely wasn't the same as before.

So what you will see here is that the general public is much happier if you can tell them "X number of people were saved by a vaccine/antibiotic/ventilator/hospitalization" than if you tell them "We convinced the entire nation to take its vitamins and saw a dramatic reduction in incidence of disease."

If you tell them the second thing, the entire world will rise up and go "You are so full of shit. That's just a coincidence man. We didn't even need to take our vitamins. It just fucking died out for no apparent reason and you made me waste all this money on vitamins, you shit head, you."

So I've mostly quit trying to talk about "Things you -- yes, you as an individual -- can do to try to cope with this global pandemic." because I'm tired of being attacked with bullshit accusations of "practicing medicine without a license" and other crapola of that ilk.

I'm pretty damn sure I will survive this -- unless I stupidly try to be helpful, in which case an angry mob may decide I am somehow to blame for something. So: Whatever. "You fools do whatever the fuck makes sense to you and leave me the hell alone."

For what it's worth, many government authorities already recommend vitamin D supplementation under varying criteria simply for general health. Because a lot of people in temperate-latitude countries really do have a mild to moderate deficiency:

> Just over two-thirds of Canadians (68%) had blood concentrations of vitamin D over 50 nmol/L -- a level that is sufficient for healthy bones for most people. About 32% of Canadians were below the cut-off. About 10% of Canadians were below the cut-off of 30 nmol/L -- a level that is considered a deficiency.

In Canada, everyone is advised to discuss it with their doctors in relation to the winter season. My doctor tests it with my routine blood work. Many people take a supplement over the winter, especially those with darker skin. And people over 50 have a blanket recommendation to take a 400 IU dose daily year-round.

There's always some excuse.

In this situation, I would say that anyone who is high risk and has no affirmative reason to believe Vitamin D is contra indicated should consider trying to take a small supplement and/or get some sunlight regularly.

For optimal absorption, you need to take Vitamin D, Vitamin K and Calcium together. Some Calcium supplements include those two vitamins.

For optimal results, do not consume calcium and iron together. This means if you are trying to improve your nutritional status via diet, do not eat high iron foods (like beef, broccoli) with high calcium foods (like cheese, milk). They interfere with each other in terms of absorption.

If you are in a really fragile state of health, all these details and more (such as bioavailability) matter a helluva lot. If you are not in a really fragile state of health, you may find that you don't need to care so much all these pesky details.

Anyone who is really interested in their own welfare can and should start a food and symptom journal and read, read, read about health stuff (and learn how to sort the wheat from the chaff). If you do that, you can get to a point of noticing symptoms of deficiency at an early stage.

I do this regularly and adjust my diet accordingly.

But these are not answers people want to hear. They want a pill, a shot, a surgery, a solution with a really big and obvious and immediate change so they can look at it and go "I did a thing and got a result." They don't want to hear "You need to track it over time and see how you feel in a week or a month to have any real idea what helps."

It's also inherently hard to isolate nutritional stuff. If you make any change at all to your diet, you have probably made multiple different changes.

The way to isolate it is to start with supplements, stick to your normal diet, make no more than one change per week and keep a journal so you can track it and see what happens.

Anything that has any health benefit will have side effects. Antibiotics routinely cause diarrhea and that's one of the more common side effects of alternative remedies, yet if I tell people that many of them will use that as an excuse to say "Oh, it has side effects. Nope. That's a big fat nope for me. I'm not doing that." even though it's the same side effect that antibiotics have and they wouldn't hesitate to take those.

There's a lot of ignorance and prejudice and inherent resistance to resolving medical things nutritionally. In spite of study after study after study saying "Nutrition and exercise mitigate every known deadly medical condition ever in the history of human kind" when the rubber hits the road, people hand wave off nutrition as not important and "not something that will cure cancer, you dumbass!" and stuff like that.

Note that "antidepressant" is largely a marketing term. The drug in particular is fluvoxamine, a potent selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). This doesn't mean that other antidepressants will work (if fluvoxamine really does work in larger trials).

Believe it or not, fluvoxamine isn't even approved by the FDA for depression. It probably works, but it's only labeled for OCD (https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2017/02...). Usually, we'll preserve it for more refractory cases of OCD since it tends to have more side effects and interactions than other SSRIs.

Former homemaker here: Not to me it doesn't.