05-23-2020, 08:07 PM
(05-23-2020, 05:08 PM)6andcounting Wrote: You're right on this. I should clarify that there are known side effects and depending on your pre-existing conditions these side effects may put you at greater risk, but this is something doctors know and can control for this by making sure the consider how it will affect the specific patient in front of them. These are well known side effects that doctors have been accounting for when they treat their patients with this for decades. It may not be right for every patient, but my original comment was made under the assumption those treated in a hospital with this drug were under competent and ethic medical care of doctors.
Again, just taking hydroxychloroquine increases your risk. Depending on the patient the risk may be even greater.
Taking hydroxychloroquine puts the patient at increased risk for potentially fatal arrhythmias (and other adverse reactions) regardless of past medical history. Prescribing hydroxychloroquine to someone with a heart condition increases that risk even further. Combining hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin also increases the risk. Combining those two in someone with a heart condition further increases the risk.
Adverse reactions can happen even in your otherwise healthy patients and you can’t control who it will affect in this group of patients. In these patients it’s a matter of statistics. If you prescribe hydroxychloroquine to enough patients some of them will develop ad adverse reaction. It’s the same for vaccines. If enough healthy people get vaccinated someone will develop Guillain Barre Syndrome for example. We can’t predict who will get a fatal arrhythmia from hydroxychloroquine anymore than we can predict who will get GBS from vaccinations. If we could then we wouldn’t have adverse reactions. I know of a patient who almost died because they developed Steven Johnson Syndrome after taking something as benign as amoxicillin for a sore throat.