🧵1/5

I think that this layperson article about Berberine is pretty fair, but missing the boat. Although they point out that berberine has a lot of small beneficial effects in the body, like improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol & blood sugar,...👇

today.com/health/diet-fi… 🧵2/5
They don't tie these many small improvements to their ultimate effects. Berberine has the potential to be strongly impactful against cardiovascular disease:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P….

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Excerpts from "Untangling Cardiovascular Disease":

"Cardiovascular disease causes a litany of ubiquitous miserable outcomes, including heart attack, stroke, heart failure...—Any of which can lead to disability, reduced quality of life, and premature death." 2/14

"There are some non-pharmaceutical remedies which have such abundant medical data supporting their use, that I’m continually shocked that cardiologists and general docs alike are not screaming about them from the rooftops."

Autoimmune diagnoses are puzzles waiting to be solved. Some infections can cause autoimmune disease, we even wrote a book about it. @danaparish

💡Over a dozen RCT's show that antibiotics help RA, even those without anti-inflammatory activity.

Placebo doesn't, imagine that. Here they found that when clarithromycin was added to immunosuppressive treatment, results in RA were much better than immunosuppressants alone.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23864141/

1/9🧵
Scary but important--

Medical dogma: Prion disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob is not transmitted person to person--Are we sure?

With incubation periods lasting decades, it's not possible to contact/trace.

With prion diseases with shorter incubations:👇
mayoclinic.org/diseases-condi… 2/9
Prion illness: Chronic wasting disease spreads rapidly in deer--from 2 states to now many.

"spread between animals through body fluids like feces, saliva, blood, or urine...through direct contact or indirectly through environmental contamination..."👇
cdc.gov/prions/cwd/tra…

This is enraging, scandalous, & pathetic.

And it's close to happening here in the US--Pharmacists have been cracking down on ivermectin prescriptions over the past month in an orchestrated fashion. 🧵👇

theguardian.com/australia-news… Before Covid politics:
Ivermectin excites scientists: "help improve global public health by treating a diverse range of diseases, with its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent being particularly extraordinary.🧵👇
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28196978/

Study evaluating treatment with various combos: azithromycin, hcq, ivermectin, & nitazoxanide

"Subjects with early COVID-19 treated with two-to-four drug combinations showed overwhelming improvements compared to untreated patients."

sciencedirect.com/science/articl… "Improvements remained massive even when underestimating benefits of proposed treatments and underestimating risks of non-treated COVID-19."

I'm disappointed that there are no RCT's of the old, cheap, safe, supplements rutin & procyanidin for #COVID.

They're active in so many in-silico models, including a prescient study from the start of the pandemic which found activity for ivermectin. Little 5 tweet thread.👇 This article from March accurately predicted antiviral activity of such notables as ivermectin, which hit 2 of the 3 #SARSCoV2 targets evaluated.

Both rutin and procyanidin each hit 2 targets as well.

who.int/bulletin/onlin…

Designing valid retrospective reviews is like putting lipstick on a pig. But RCT's have no porcine roots. They start out with racehorse potential, which made it even more sad when the major design flaws in this study rendered this horse lame. Analysis:👇 acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M2… To test whether #HCQ works for #COVID19, subjects must have had proof that they actually had it, not just clinical suspicion. Without this evidence, we can't draw reliable conclusions. But only 1/3 had positive COVID tests. And maybe that's why the following didn't add up:👇

My Dad's recent #COVID19. Not an academic document-just sharing a human experience of outrage & triumph.

My Dad is almost 90, frail as can be, in a nursing home. I went to visit him 3 months ago & wore a mask before it was fashionable to protect him just in case I had it. I sent an email to 5 people at the nursing home the next day saying that I was shocked that none of the staff or visitors were wearing PPE. I warned them that the now infamous Seattle nursing home which had massive deaths early on in the #COVID pandemic was a sentinel event.

I think the authors put forth a good effort, but there are significant issues with this study, which was intended to evaluate #COVIDー19 post-exposure prophylaxis with #HCQ. My two cents:👇nejm.org/doi/full/10.10… Planned enrollment threshold was within 3 days of exposure due to the average incubation period of 5.5 days. But then the threshold was changed to 4 days. Cutting it close. One can argue that the study nearly misses its basic premise of being a PEP trial. And then this: 👇

Subconscious biases are ubiquitous and powerful. We all have them, so what are going to do about it? "Confirmation bias—probably the most pervasive and damaging bias of them all—leads us to look for evidence that confirms what we already think." theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… Physicians are vulnerable to bias just like other humans and it can lead to diagnostic errors. "The culture of medicine has never been one that encourages discussion of physician vulnerability."
beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-physi…

Chronic illness in #LymeDisease is shockingly common. This occurs more frequently if #Lyme is first diagnosed and treated at a later stage, but occurs at every stage of the disease.👇@Lymenews @BayAreaLyme @LymeChallenge @danaparish @ProjectLyme @lymelegacy @LymeOntario Even for early #Lyme (erythema migrans stage illness), a study by Johns Hopkins demonstrated that about 40% did not get regain their health at 6 months after treatment.👇@LymeAlliance @Lyme_Connection @liv_lyme @UKLyme @AdvocatLyme @LymeDiseaseLDA pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23462300/

Another poorly designed interpretation of a #HCQ data set for #COVID19. A larger poorly designed "trial" only leads to larger erroneous conclusions. For analysis, see the thread👇@JamesTodaroMD @niro60487270 @danaparish @marybethpf thelancet.com/journals/lance… This study implies that it's an early treatment study because hospitalized patients were treated within 48 hours of diagnosis. It's a late treatment study, and here's why: 👇

A very poorly designed hcq study. A study is like a house: Only as strong as its foundation. Analysis of why this study is unacceptable can be found in this thread. @danaparish @niro60487270 @SamParkerSenate @lymenews bmj.com/content/369/bm… Not a prospective, randomized study. No p-values provided to assess differences between treatment and control groups at baseline, ie "control" group had almost twice as much azithromycin treatment as hcq group, higher CRP, and lower lymphocyte counts. Statistically significant?

#Lyme and #MultipleSclerosis can be clinically indistinguishable, with some docs differentiating them based on 40 year-old, inaccurate Lyme antibody tests. See thread. @danaparish @BayAreaLyme @Lymenews @lymehopecanada @ProjectLyme @LymeChallenge pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28480854/ Spirochetes had been found in human MS autopsy tissue since the early days of medicine. They called it Spirochaeta Myelophthora. Many researchers have published the same findings. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13118387/