site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4262 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat malaria. It is also used to prevent malaria infection in areas or regions where it is known that other medicines (eg, chloroquine) may not work. Hydroxychloroquine may also be used to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) in certain hospitalized patients.

Using this medicine alone or with other medicines (eg, azithromycin) may increase your risk of heart rhythm problems (eg, QT prolongation, ventricular fibrillation, ventricular tachycardia). Hydroxychloroquine should only be used for COVID-19 in a hospital or during clinical trials. Do not take any medicine that contains hydroxychloroquine unless prescribed by your doctor.

What's going on here? A hat tip to the crazies who really want to use it despite lack of evidence, or has The Science changed, and I should pray they do not alter it any further?

HCQ, when taken with zinc, has always been the silver bullet. It worked wherever it was tried. People were sneaking it into the hospitals to give to their relatives. I guess the Mayo Clinic finally had to bow to actual science.

Anecdote:

Since I couldn’t get any HCQ, I took tonic water (quinine water) with lots of zinc, plus horse paste (ivermectin), vitamin D, and vitamin C during my first bout (probably Delta, Nov. 2021). I remember the final night of the fight, when I felt the characteristic flu-like aches, and took aspirin. The next morning, I felt far better than the previous week, and I was on the mend; I lost my sense of smell for a year, but didn’t have brain fog or long COVID. My dad and mom, squarely in the risk zone of their 70’s, took a similar medicine regimen and also both survived without long COVID.

On my second bout (summer 2022, Omicron), I got a week’s groceries and prepared for another long haul. Vitamin D and zinc, plus tonic water and walking outdoors in direct sunlight, but to my surprise it was over in three days. Not only that, I felt great afterward! I felt better than I had before the illness, oddly.

I'm not convinced brain fog or long covid are real anyways. Incidence of each in Covid survivors seems to basically match base rates.

(Unrelatedly, I somewhat dislike referring to abuse survivors, rape survivors, suicide survivors, etc. by that name while 'survivor' otherwise has such a powerful connotation, so a fun way to play with those terms is to use 'survivor' where it is slightly, but only slightly, more obvious that it's inappropriate)

What else do you not believe in the existence of?

To some degree some long COVID is psychosomatic. It correlates strongly with political ideology and a minority of people reporting long COVID have no COVID antibodies.

Being sick weakens you. So to some degree some portion of people have long COVID. But also I think many (most?) people suffering from long COVID are imagining it. They truthfully feel down or slow. And they blame it on COVID. But COVID is an unusually mild cold to most people and given that some of these long COVIDers never even had COVID, I think there is much hyperbolic doomerism about it decoupled from the facts.

At this point I doubt long COVID exists in any significant portion of the population, outside of some trivial sense that getting sick makes you feel worse for a while.

Plenty of things, what are you looking for?

This seems very insensitive to me, a person, who like billions of others, is a survivor of the common cold.

Can you provide any clinical data to support this “silver bullet”?

This pre-print, as reported by Yahoo News in 2021.

This study in Nature is about HCQ alone, and suggests it would have been even better during Omicron than previous waves due to the different pathways Omicron takes.

This study in Clinical Infectious Diseases of a "prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled multicenter trial" on zinc alone, with positive results.

This extensive examination of Zinc's use with HCQ for COVID by Alberto Boretti in Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology Volume 71, May 2022.

This ScienceDirect study on the so-called "Zelenko Protocol" of zinc, HCQ, and azithromycin (AZM), with astounding results.

Disclaimer: I used dogpile.com to find this clinical data, which doesn't have the restrictions on misinformation (and "misinformation") of Google. I don't have a list of citations at hand, so I did this search in approx. 1 hr.

Disclaimer: I used dogpile.com to find this clinical data, which doesn't have the restrictions on misinformation (and "misinformation") of Google. I don't have a list of citations at hand, so I did this search in approx. 1 hr.

Thanks for the recommendation!

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats