4 ms·

There were multiple posters here on HN advocating for Hydroxychloroquine saying that it's safe, that you have nothing to lose otherwise and that it's better to

There were multiple posters here on HN advocating for Hydroxychloroquine saying that it's safe, that you have nothing to lose otherwise and that it's better to try something than do nothing. So unfortunately what we have here is a textbook example of people falling for a cargo cult surrounding a drug whose efficacy wasn't confirmed at all. Even if a drug seems safe and has few side effects, you should never self-dose or listen to people without medical consensus.

Khelavaster 6y ago
Hydroxychloroquine's efficacy against coronavirus-family viruses has been actually shown for 15+ years, since SARS. And by definition, innovative medicine doesn't have medical consensus yet.
- rurban 6y ago
  As prevention yes, as treatment not. Because then it's too late already. It needs 2-3 weeks to build up enough zinc in the cells.
odyssey7 6y ago
> medical consensus I think I can understand where these sentiments come from. People are dissatisfied with medical consensus because medicine doesn’t really speak with a unified voice. A doctor in one hospital might treat a condition differently from another — sometimes radically differently — and your family doctor might say something different from either of them. And anyone who’s been paying attention has seen authoritative recommendations from one decade be retracted a decade or two later. The discipline is still waiting for a lot of discoveries that would dramatically change both mundane and more rare scenarios. A lot of competing theories show up in practice, which is natural for innovation. Unfortunately, there are a number of cargo cults that have been medical consensus for many years.
- Lammy 6y ago
  > People are dissatisfied with medical consensus because medicine doesn’t really speak with a unified voice. It's hard for me not to empathize with this mindset in others when I see agencies like WHO spreading dis/misinformation on the pandemic to control some political narrative.
downerending 6y ago
There are many drugs that aren't "safe", but are yet better than any alternative (including doing nothing).
miked85 6y ago
> you should never self-dose It isn't like you can just pick this stuff up at the grocery story, you would still need a prescription from a doctor.
- rurban 6y ago
  You can tell the doctor that you need Plaquenil for your upcoming business trip to Africa. Thats how people started doing it back in March. If you are in the risk group. Otherwise the chances are extremely low.
mydongle 6y ago
Call me crazy, but there is something interesting I observed. Before Trump started advocating for it, there were some articles touting Hydroxychloroquine as a potential Covid-19 treatment, and that it was worth trying. Immediately after Trump started advocating for it, Hydroxychloroquine became like a poison, that will kill everyone. Isn't that great? I wish more things would receive this level of scrutiny before being inflicted on vulnerable and desperate people.
- twirlip 6y ago
  I believe it's the same phenomenon that we saw with the stock market crash after Trump gave his first coronavirus address.
- acdha 6y ago
  This is an artifact of the way the news was presented where you read it: this is an old drug with well-understood side-effects and actual experts (pharmacists, doctors, patients) pointed those out almost immediately. The problem is that the people hyping it through either desperation or greed have a lot more time to spend promoting an idea than, say, medical professionals during a pandemic — a dynamic which got much worse when the full weight of Fox News and the President of the United States jumped on board the hype train.

Khelavaster 6y ago

Hydroxychloroquine's efficacy against coronavirus-family viruses has been actually shown for 15+ years, since SARS. And by definition, innovative medicine doesn't have medical consensus yet.

rurban 6y ago
As prevention yes, as treatment not. Because then it's too late already. It needs 2-3 weeks to build up enough zinc in the cells.

odyssey7 6y ago

> medical consensus I think I can understand where these sentiments come from. People are dissatisfied with medical consensus because medicine doesn’t really speak with a unified voice. A doctor in one hospital might treat a condition differently from another — sometimes radically differently — and your family doctor might say something different from either of them. And anyone who’s been paying attention has seen authoritative recommendations from one decade be retracted a decade or two later. The discipline is still waiting for a lot of discoveries that would dramatically change both mundane and more rare scenarios. A lot of competing theories show up in practice, which is natural for innovation. Unfortunately, there are a number of cargo cults that have been medical consensus for many years.

Lammy 6y ago
> People are dissatisfied with medical consensus because medicine doesn’t really speak with a unified voice. It's hard for me not to empathize with this mindset in others when I see agencies like WHO spreading dis/misinformation on the pandemic to control some political narrative.

downerending 6y ago

There are many drugs that aren't "safe", but are yet better than any alternative (including doing nothing).

miked85 6y ago

> you should never self-dose It isn't like you can just pick this stuff up at the grocery story, you would still need a prescription from a doctor.

rurban 6y ago
You can tell the doctor that you need Plaquenil for your upcoming business trip to Africa. Thats how people started doing it back in March. If you are in the risk group. Otherwise the chances are extremely low.

mydongle 6y ago

Call me crazy, but there is something interesting I observed. Before Trump started advocating for it, there were some articles touting Hydroxychloroquine as a potential Covid-19 treatment, and that it was worth trying. Immediately after Trump started advocating for it, Hydroxychloroquine became like a poison, that will kill everyone. Isn't that great? I wish more things would receive this level of scrutiny before being inflicted on vulnerable and desperate people.

twirlip 6y ago
I believe it's the same phenomenon that we saw with the stock market crash after Trump gave his first coronavirus address.
acdha 6y ago
This is an artifact of the way the news was presented where you read it: this is an old drug with well-understood side-effects and actual experts (pharmacists, doctors, patients) pointed those out almost immediately. The problem is that the people hyping it through either desperation or greed have a lot more time to spend promoting an idea than, say, medical professionals during a pandemic — a dynamic which got much worse when the full weight of Fox News and the President of the United States jumped on board the hype train.