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Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter | Vol. XXXVI, No. 5

No, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness does not recommend do-it-yourself medicine.

You should have a physician who knows you and is available to advise you—confidentially. Fewer and fewer people are so fortunate. Most are enrolled in a “health plan” and have an assigned “healthcare provider.” Even if the provider has an M.D., evaluation and management may be determined by the drop-down menus in the electronic health record. The EHR will follow you everywhere, tracking your history and compliance—some even have electronic “sticky notes” to flag potentially disruptive patients who have a politically incorrect attitude.

Corporate medicine has been adamantly opposed to early home treatment of COVID-19, and employed physicians deviate from that policy at their peril. Hospitals, clinics, and most of “organized medicine,” including the AMA and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), will cite “the science” as determined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter | Vol. XXXVI, No. 4

Between the date on the masthead and the time of this writing (January 2021), events have moved at a breathtaking speed. With a foot-high pile of selected articles on COVID-19 waiting to be read, I’d like to pause for historical perspective.

DDP was founded in the early 1980s, when medical journals were full of articles on the “bomb run,” the effects of a nuclear attack on one or more American cities: death and destruction, the few remaining medical facilities overwhelmed, environmental contamination, panic, and despair (hope to be at Ground Zero, kiss yourself good-by, etc.).

At that time, during the Cold War, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) still had an Office of Civil Defense and remnants of a civilian nuclear defense program. DDP and The American Civil Defense Association (TACDA) promoted these programs, and FEMA officials spoke at our meetings. There were home shelter displays.

DDP Newsletter – Vol. XXXVI, No. 2

The “silver bullet” of antibiotics seemed to herald the conquest of infectious diseases, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shifted its focus to noninfectious “epidemics” such as cancer and heart diseases. But with the rise of multiply resistant bacteria as well as the ever-present threat of viral diseases, we might soon be living in the post-antibiotic era. We need to review methods from the pre-antibiotic era, which rapidly lost favor after the discovery of penicillin.

In 1892, William Osler wrote that lobar pneumonia “is a self-limited disease and runs its course uninfluenced in any way by medicine. It can be neither aborted, nor cut short by any known means at our disposal.” By 1913, leaders at the Rockefeller Institute initiated equine serum therapy for the treatment of pneumonia. Two decades later, mortality from lobar pneumonia was 25%–40% in patients not receiving serum, but 10%–20% in those who received this therapy. While the treatment was a major advance, it was expensive, time-consuming, needed to be matched to the serotype of the bacteria, and limited by allergic reactions to horse or other serum. Serum therapy was soon eliminated after the introduction of sulfonamides in 1939.

X-irradiation began to emerge as an alternative to the therapeutic monopoly of serum treatments in the 1930s. Edward Calabrese and Gaurav Dhawan (Yale J Biol Med 2013;86:555-570, tinyurl.com/s7ua856) trace its history, beginning with the first report in 1905. Radiotherapy (RT) was broadly accepted early in the 20^th century, with notable successes in the treatment of many inflammatory and infectious diseases such as gas gangrene, carbuncles, sinusitis, arthritis, and inner ear infections.

DDP News – Vol. XXXVI, No. 1

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, face masks for the public have been advocated or required in various places in the world, but the demands to force everybody, even children, to comply in the U.S. have become frenzied as this is being written in early July.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) floated the thought that the epidemic might be over, as all-cause mortality had peaked and returned to normal. But then surges of “cases” were reported in Florida and the border states of California, Arizona, and Texas—along with a surge in testing. A “case” is a person with a positive test, even if apparently well. Governors were criticized for re-opening too soon, and began forcing still-surviving businesses such as gyms to close. And various jurisdictions began to impose mask requirements.

DDP Newsletter – May, 2020, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3

Many people’s lives are dominated these days by concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. Many refuse to go anywhere if not absolutely necessary. Some “quarantine” or disinfect their groceries, and shower and wash their clothing after doing an errand. Are the masks, “social distancing,” and obsessive-compulsive behaviors necessary—or protective?   Evidence for benefit from the drastic measures is nonexistent to thin. There are many unknowns, but some observations can be made:

If there is coronavirus in the vicinity, you have some on you. In an unpublished experiment, a harmless chemical compound resembling material found in viral coats was radioactively tagged and applied near the mouth or on the palm of two “spreaders.” They carried on normal social interactions with several test subjects who were doing library research—talking, looking at papers, etc. The subjects washed their hands frequently. At the end of several hours, all had radioactively tagged material on face, hands, and clothing.