Have you had a discussion with your doctor about what his or her protocol is if you are diagnosed with COVID-19? 

Does the medical practice that your doctor works for have any kind of COVID-19 treatment protocol for their patients?

You might be surprised by their answer.

My doctor recently retired and recommended a fellow Nurse Practitioner to take over my health care. 

I prefer having a D.O. instead of an M.D. for my primary care physician but I was open to meeting this new health care provider that my doctor recommended. 

I want someone with more than 20 years of experience in the medical field and someone who is willing to listen to me and work as a partner in my care. She fit that criteria.

Overall, I was pretty satisfied with this new person until the end of the conversation when we talked about the coronavirus. I was quite shocked by her answer when I asked if the practice she worked for had a protocol of treatment if their patients come down with COVID-19.

The answer was basically no. 

No Zinc or anything.

I am to treat my own symptoms while I stay at home.

WTF? 

And then, what? 

When the symptoms get bad enough, I guess I go to the hospital even though it’s probably too late by then because the virus has replicated, gone through my body and caused inflammation and possibly damage to multiple organs.

Seeing how fast the president’s doctors were able to control some of the main issues of the virus (replication, inflammation, etc.), it’s easy to see that there are obviously treatments available to help us at the onset of contracting the virus.

The question is, will our doctors prescribe these preventative treatments to help us get better before the virus takes over our body? And how many of them have a preventative protocol set up ahead of time for patients that they are willing to share with us?

So it’s not a matter of who you are or what kind of insurance you have necessarily. It’s a matter of what your doctor will give you – what they’ve decided to do to fight the virus – or not.

I am currently taking vitamins including Vitamin D which is something that was given to the president.

The over-the-counter remedies that Trump was on that I can get for myself is the Melatonin (studies show that it can help suppress the cytokine storms and reduce inflammation), daily aspirin (to prevent blood clots), Zinc (bolsters immune system and can possibly help with inflammation) and Famotidine (Pepcid – heartburn medicine that possibly binds to a viral enzyme to interfere with its replication)  

For the rest of the treatment that the president received, I would need a doctor’s prescription.

That includes Regeneron (antibody cocktail that reduces the viral load – not FDA approved yet); Remdesivir (antiviral that tamps down body’s immune response so the body doesn’t go into overdrive and shuts down organs due to a cytokine storm) and the steroid Dexamethasone (to help with oxygen levels).

In a perfect world, every doctor and hospital would have their preferred treatments listed on their website so we could make an informed choice about where we wanted to get our care.

Nope. We are stuck with what we are stuck with.

Which is why you need to talk with your doctor about this.

The treatments that the president received were done with the same goals in mind that the doctors using the Hydroxychloroquine cocktail had when we first learned about it. 

These treatments are meant to fix things as fast as possible – reducing viral loads, stopping replication, and stopping inflammation… getting things taken care of before the body goes into overdrive and you need to be hospitalized. If you treat the early infection, you have a better shot of recovering.

So what are we left with then if our doctors want us to ride out the storm?

Well, besides using the four over-the-counter things that you can pick up as mentioned above (after consulting your doctor, of course), while we are at home taking care of ourselves, it looks like most of the physicians, including the ones at Harvard, are telling us to rest, hydrate, take acetaminophen for fever and pain management and “monitor” our symptoms. If we have an inhaler, we can use it for shortness of breath.

After leaving the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, President Trump said, “We have the best medicines in the world” and that is certainly true.

The only question is, will our doctors figure out that treating the virus immediately in its early stages is the best course of action and change their regimen to more closely reflect the aggressive treatments that the president received?

The president has exposed the fact that there are very effective therapeutics out there. The only thing stopping us from getting most of those treatments are our own doctors.