re: Covid: outside the box thinking - hemoglobin/ Vit D/ “host-centric” (and why that matters)

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We learned about the retinal toxicity associated with chloroquine. The risk factors for that, such as advanced age and and obesity, coincide with the risk factors for Covid-19. Do you think there is some hesitance on using hydroxychloroquine based on how the risk factors for retinopathy are the same risk factors for this disease?

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Others please correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC there's a significant difference in the side effect/risk profile between hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, the latter being more serious/dangerous.

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Personally, I am a non domain dependent thinker. I collate information so that others can “see”

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So you don’t think on your own then take others thoughts, group them up and share?

So, the answer has always been covfefe.

HCQ Adverse rxn from Lexi Comp:1% to 10%: Ophthalmic: Retinopathy (4%; serum concentration dependent [Petri 2019]; early changes reversible [

Lexi Comp is a drug reference we use at work. I’m a hospital RPh. This is for long term use. My mom has Lupus& RA and has been on HCQ for several years. She is followed closely by an ophthalmologist.

The other peripheral observation are the unique symptoms clustered in Covid patients include:

Severe body aches
Anosmia
Ageusia

Severe pain crisis are noted in patients with sickle cell disease (mechanism is likely different)



But one has to wonder if the virus is creating a temporary confirmational change in Covid patients. A person I know who has it reports extreme muscle pain/body aches.


Loss of smell and taste can be associated with heavy metal toxicity and vitamin deficiency. Makes you wonder if there is a link (excess of the former or consumption in the latter )

https://www.livestrong.com/article/524848-does-zinc-deficiency-affect-our-taste-buds/

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Does Zinc Deficiency Affect Our Taste Buds?
By Shannon George

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Your sources are suspect as usual.

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We are indeed speculating

You, like Fauci, are welcome to quote from randomized control trials that do not exist...
Lots of folks will be poorly served while others and you wait...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/opinion/sunday/flossing-and-the-art-of-scientific-investigation.html

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Flossing and the Art of Scientific Investigation
By Jamie Holmes

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The opposition between randomized controlled trials and expert opinion was fueled by the rise in the 1990s of the evidence-based medicine movement, which placed such trials atop a hierarchy of scientific methods, with expert opinion situated at the bottom. The doctor David Sackett, a father of the movement, once wrote that “progress towards the truth is impaired in the presence of an expert.”

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But while all doctors agree about the importance of gauging the quality of evidence, many feel that a hierarchy of methods is simplistic. As the doctor Mark Tonelli has argued, distinct forms of knowledge can’t be judged by the same standards: what a patient prefers on the basis of personal experience; what a doctor thinks on the basis of clinical experience; and what clinical research has discovered — each of these is valuable in its own way. While scientists concur that randomized trials are ideal for evaluating the average effects of treatments, such precision isn’t necessary when the benefits are obvious or clear from other data. Clinical expertise and rigorous evaluation also differ in their utility at different stages of scientific inquiry. For discovery and explanation, as the clinical epidemiologist Jan Vandenbroucke has argued, practitioners’ instincts, observations and case studies are most useful, whereas randomized controlled trials are least useful. Expertise and systematic evaluation are partners, not rivals.

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Distrusting expertise makes it easy to confuse an absence of randomized evaluations with an absence of knowledge. And this leads to the false belief that knowledge of what works in social policy, education or fighting terrorism can come only from randomized evaluations. But by that logic (as a spoof scientific article claimed), we don’t know if parachutes really work because we have no randomized controlled trials of them.

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The cult of randomized controlled trials also neglects a rich body of potential hypotheses. In the field of talk therapy, for example, many psychologists believe that dismissing a century of clinical observation and knowledge as anecdotal, as research-driven schools like cognitive behavioral therapy have sometimes done, has weakened the bonds between clinical discovery and scholarly evaluation. The psychiatrist Drew Westen says the field is too often testing “uninformed hunches,” rather than ideas that therapists have developed over years of actual practice. Experiments, of course, are invaluable and have, in the past, shown the consensus opinion of experts to be wrong. But those who fetishize this methodology, as the flossing example shows, can also impair progress toward the truth. A strong demand for evidence is a good thing. But nurturing a more nuanced view of expertise should be part of that demand.

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So if I am understanding your logic correctly,

We should not speculate as we are because the information presented suggested that all bilateral pneumonia associated with covid were not really pneumonias?

Your position is that because atypical pneumonia can present with bilateral infiltrates that it is what is accounting for the covid patients clincial picture? All of them ?(as it is a pretty consistent finding)

Is it not possible for us to both be correct (some patient may not have covid, but instead have an atypical pneumonia unrelated to covid???) or both be incorrect (other mechanisms in play still evading us)?

Either way, your feedback has not definitively made the case to "end speculation". The cocksure "we got this figured out but don't have enough information to do anything" mindset is not sitting well with most people in the lay public if you have not noticed...

Your input adds to the discussion, but dismissing other points suggested here wholesale is being willing obtuse (or you just want to be "right"...)

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Not true.

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A 185lbs man has 13 lbs of blood
A 120lbs woman has 8.4lbs of blood, almost a gallon or 800tsp.
Blood is 7% body weight.
365 days divided by 120 is ~3. So all blood is renewed 3 times a year or 300%. 3 times/12 months means 25% of your blood is renewed every month.
A period is ~ 7tsp or 1% total blood of a woman. or 12% for the year.
So they may renew the same as men at 300% or more at 312% or 336%.

Either way you are correct, I just had to hash it out.

Read this article the other day and reading the one in this thread set off some red flags:

AI predicts COVID severity

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The researchers were surprised to find that characteristics considered to be hallmarks of COVID-19, like certain patterns seen in lung images (e.g. ground glass opacities), fever, and strong immune responses, were not useful in predicting which of the many patients with initial, mild symptoms would go to develop severe lung disease. Neither were age and gender helpful in predicting serious disease, although past studies had found men over 60 to be at higher risk.

Instead, the new AI tool found that changes in three features -- levels of the liver enzyme alanine aminotransferase (ALT), reported myalgia, and hemoglobin levels -- were most accurately predictive of subsequent, severe disease. Together with other factors, the team reported being able to predict risk of ARDS with up to 80 percent accuracy.

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