The Most Promising Medical Treatments for COVID-19

The potential dangers

This virus is killing so many people worldwide (here are the numbers) and this can be quite overwhelming even when you and your family are safe. Unfortunately, some people spread dodgy information about COVID-19 and its “treatment”, and this is why you should scrutinize everything and question the sources.

“People out of fear and anxiety reach out to these things and that’s almost never a good way to make good decisions,” says Dr. Poland. “Many feel fear but how we act on that can impact our health for the better or the worse.”

Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, for example, can be safe if they are used at the right dosage and monitored carefully, but they can also cause cardiac arrest. A man in Arizona died and his wife was hospitalized after they took chloroquine phosphate for COVID-19. Chloroquine potassium is not even the same thing as the drug chloroquine. It is literally a compound used to clean fish aquariums.

“No treatment is free of adverse side effects,” says Dr. Schaffner. “It’s very important to assess that. Nobody wants to give a drug to a patient who’s already sick that’s of no benefit, but there’s a larger risk of getting an adverse reaction. The average layperson usually doesn’t consider the safety side of the equation.”

The significance of clinical trials

Clinical trials are “absolutely essential and are the only way to find new therapies,” says Andre Kalil, MD, professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in a recorded statement.

“There are many, many examples in the past in different outbreaks of people getting hurt and even dying from the side effects of drugs that were not properly tested. The only way to find a new treatment is going to be by doing a controlled trial and as many trials as possible.” Dr. Kalil is leading the remdesivir trial at the University of Nebraska.