I am fortunate to have smart physician friends, very smart physician friends and then there is Dr. Robert Haley who is in a league of his own.
Haley
Robert W. Haley, M.D., is Professor of Internal Medicine and Director of the Division of Epidemiology in the Internal Medicine Department at UT Southwestern Medical Center and holder of the U.S. Armed Forces Veterans Distinguished Chair for Medical Research Honoring America’s Gulf War Veterans.
Dr. Haley is an infectious disease specialist. He worked at the CDC for 10 years before founding the Division of Epidemiology at UT Southwestern Medical center. He is the author of over 150 publications in peer reviewed journals. In 2013 he wrote about the epidemic of west Nile Virus in Dallas. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1713591.
He is best known, however, for the elegant research that he did in determining the cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Research that was funded by the late Ross Perot. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/1397621
I emailed Dr. Haley yesterday to congratulate him on his latest award. He thanked me and replied that he was busy at work on a paper on Covid-19. This led to an interesting series of exchanges with him on his work on Covid-19 and zinc. He has allowed me to excerpt his remarks here.
“ My recommendation is to take zinc supplements. Most every multivitamin has 15 mg zinc which is quite enough for a person with no underlying condition to avoid mild zinc deficiency, which I think is what causes people to get in trouble with COVID-19. People with hypertension on ACEi, ARB (classes of blood pressure medicines) and/or thiazides (another blood pressure medicine) should take a total of 75 to 100 mg/d in divided doses (30 mg TID) (three times a day) with a pure zinc supplement to replenish zinc lost through renal wastage. I’m writing a paper on this. I find the basic physiology and immunology of zinc compelling for this disease.
Go ahead and buy zinc for the family now. I am expecting other articles coming out soon, and when they do there will be a run on zinc and you won’t be able to find it. This is a sleeper of an issue, about to be discovered. In fact, there is already a minor run on zinc.
But you should also get a supply of pure zinc supplements: tablets, capsules or lozenges – all the same. If you were to get what could be COVID-19 clinical syndrome, you should immediately up the dose to 80-120 mg/d in divided doses. High dose would be required to arrest the infection and prevent the cytokine storm (according to the theory).”
Now most of my patients know that I am not a proponent of supplements for general health since there is no proof of their benefit and some proof of their harm, but this is not for general health. This is to prevent or mitigate the effects of a potentially serious disease and I intend to follow his advice.
Readers of this blog know that I am not one to jump on the latest fad like the observational study on 80 patients done by the controversial French physician, Dr. Didier Raoult, promoted by President Trump which advocated treating patients with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/COVID-IHU-2-1.pdf
Having said that, given the urgency of the situation, I’m going to recommend following Dr. Haley’s advice.
In summary:
In Fauci We Trust
In Haley We Trust
In this guy,
No So Much
