Like lice or bedbugs, coronavirus misinformation has become an infestation on most social media platforms. From less-than reputable politicos arguing for re-opening their state while Covid-19 rates continue to soar, to Youtube videos featuring some left-field scientist or doctor, stone crazy solutions are being spewed like chamber pots onto a street in Victorian London. (It’s worth noting that many of those Youtube authorities got their street cred on the science-free fringe of antivax and climate change denial movements.)
Don’t get me wrong; for over a quarter century, I’ve been practicing alternative medicine, and I can be very comfortable in the land of woo. But also during that time, I’ve become hypersensitive to misrepresentation, miscategorization, cherrypicking and downright fraud on both sides of the medical fence. And I can smell someone trying to make a name or a buck on the latest cure-all from a mile away.
These things tend to go in fads. When I first began practicing, Vitamin C was the cure-all for everything from colds to cancer. Then it was Vitamin E. Then Vitaman D. Then antioxidants. Then probiotics.
Look, all of these nutritional supplements are good for some things. I use them in my practice all the time. And one of the big advantages of doing work nutritionally is that, in most cases, if you’ve done something wrong, you haven’t worsened the patient. They have a huge safety factor. But when you’ve got patients coming in wondering why their CVS-brand probiotics haven’t improved their hot flashes, things have gone a little bit overboard. These supplements become “discovered,” their actual uses broaden, then an entire industry is built around hawking them for damn near everything.
The same thing happens with drugs. Off-label use of dubious provenance is incredibly common, and when some drug gets a push, everyone starts getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia or osteopenia, and it’s off to the pharmacy we go. Nevermind that diagnoses are sometimes actually created to fit the drug.
The pandemic has put a rocket booster on this process. There’s an awful lot we don’t know about this virus, but what I know is that hucksters hate a vacuum, and they will come swimming in like sharks smelling blood.
People are, understandably, grasping desperately for answers. It doesn’t help that our president presumptuously touts miracle cures or mindlessly speculates on inane possibilities from behind a podium in front of the world. That just encourages folks to go running after any “researcher” with a couple of abbreviations after their name.
I’m sorry to tell you, but pretty much all of what you’re hearing and reading about Covid-19 is barnyard fertilizer. Even looking at the legitimate end of things, very few, if any, of the studies you’re reading about have been through the peer review process. I’ve been through that process myself, and it’s a grinder designed to find the tiniest loose end and pull on it until your entire article has come unraveled. When done right, peer review really does leave the fertilizer in the field.
What does that leave us with? Not much. A bunch of blind men poking different parts of an elephant and coming up with different descriptions. Clinicians nearly brain-dead from overwork grasping at any straw that might save their dying patient, and in the maelstrom, willing to try damn near anything that they imagine might work.
Here’s what we do know: Most of us will get infected and not die. But too many of us will die, in some of the most horrible ways. This will come to an end. New cases will peak, then level off, and then fall. Social distancing works, and is the best, if not only, tool we have to fight this on the large scale.
But honestly, that’s about all we’ve got and it ain’t much. Eventually – in six months, in a year – we’ll know more. But by then we might be going through round two of COVID-19, while we’re still punch-drunk from fear and grief and an administration which is the antithesis of functional leadership.
I’m sorry. It’s kind of a bleak picture, solution-wise. But that’s the unvarnished truth.
Until then, put your doubting Thomas glasses on every time you see a post, every time you see a news article that touts a great leap forward. Things don’t really work like that. We’re at the mercy of nature’s cycle of change, and it can be (for human eyes) exceedingly, painfully, slow.
Hold onto those close to you, and huddle under the roof as humanity has for millenia, until the storm has passed. Eat good food if you can find it, and make sure you get a little exercise. But for sure don’t buy what the itinerant snake oil salesman is selling you. You’re better than that.