The Trusted Source For Health
Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health Information Photos by Heidi de Marco A developing quantity of hospitals are outsourcing often-unprofitable outpatient products and services for their poorest people by location up unbiased, nonprofit companies to deliver major care. Medicare and Medicaid fork out these clinics, recognized as …
Cannabis use previous year between youthful adults—19-30-year-olds—reached historic highs for the age group because 1988, the U.S. National Institutes of Wellbeing (NIH) has uncovered via a drug and alcoholic beverages use analyze. On Aug. 22, the NIH introduced this and other findings from the most …
When Stephanie caught COVID-19 just before Thanksgiving of last year, her daughter Laurie suggested that she get help.
“She was really not feeling well, and I was like, ‘Just go to the doctor,'” Laurie recalls.
But Stephanie, who was 75 at the time, didn’t go. A few years before, she had been sucked into a world of online conspiracy theories — far-fetched ideas like one claiming John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive. With the pandemic, it got worse. She became deeply distrustful of the medical system.
Laurie remembers what her mother used to tell her about the COVID vaccines: “Everybody who got vaccinated is going to die.” (NPR is only using family members’ first names to protect them from online harassment.)
COVID cases and hospitalizations are once again on the rise, thanks to a new omicron subvariant. Vaccines and certain proven treatments can help prevent the worst outcomes. But for Americans like Stephanie who don’t trust the medical establishment, there’s a network of fringe medical doctors, natural healers and internet personalities ready to push unproven cures for COVID. And a shady black market where you can buy them. Stephanie was plugged into that alternative medical network, and doctors say it ultimately cost her life.
Ivermectin has developed an enormous following over the course of the pandemic – in part because of a small cadre of fringe doctors who promote it as an alternative to COVID vaccines, despite early studies which didn’t support it as a treatment.
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
Ivermectin has developed an enormous following over the course of the pandemic – in part because of a small cadre of fringe doctors who promote it as an alternative to COVID vaccines, despite early studies which didn’t support it as a treatment.
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
The array of alternative COVID treatments is vast. Some offer kosher multivitamins, others suggest more radical interventions, such as drinking your own urine.
But one drug in particular has become the center of many alternative therapies: ivermectin. Originally used to treat parasitic worms, ivermectin has developed an enormous following over the course of the pandemic — especially in politically conservative circles. That’s, in part, because of a small cadre of licensed doctors who promote it as an alternative to vaccination against COVID. Among the most prominent is Dr. Pierre Kory, whose group, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, has become a major force promoting ivermectin.
“Ivermectin is effectively a ‘miracle drug’ against COVID-19,” Kory told a Senate committee in December of 2020.
But rigorous studies show ivermectin is far from miraculous. Ivermectin was studied early in the pandemic as a potential treatment for COVID, but it hasn’t panned out. Large clinical studies show that ivermectin does not lower rates of hospitalization. Meanwhile, some of the early, promising results have been retracted, including one study led by Kory himself. Today, everyone from the American Medical Association to the Food and Drug Administration tells doctors not to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID.
When Laurie’s mother, Stephanie, fell sick with COVID-19 last fall, she refused to get tested. Instead, Stephanie got swept up in a world of conspiracy theories online that touted alternatives to proven treatments. “I don’t believe she was supposed to die,” Laurie says. “I blame the misinformation.”
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
When Laurie’s mother, Stephanie, fell sick with COVID-19 last fall, she refused to get tested. Instead, Stephanie got swept up in a world of conspiracy theories online that touted alternatives to proven treatments. “I don’t believe she was supposed to die,” Laurie says. “I blame the misinformation.”
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
“The non-fraudulent non-messed up clinical trials are all pretty uniformly negative,” says David Gorski, a cancer surgeon and researcher at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Michigan.
For years before COVID, Gorski tracked doctors who offered alternative cures for cancers. And he sees plenty of parallels between those physicians and doctors like Pierre Kory.
“A lot of these doctors fit the mold of what I used to call back in the day ‘the brave maverick doctor,'” he says.
Gorski says that they play up their persecution by the system, offer scant evidence for their treatments, and deride effective therapies while promoting their own cures. In Kory’s case, he offers personal consultations to sick COVID patients — for $400.
“COVID is no different than quackery going back centuries,” Gorski says.
Kory did not answer NPR’s emailed questions in time for our deadline, but he’s been everywhere on right-wing media promoting ivermectin — and his bravery for prescribing it: “People who’ve used ivermectin, their license have been threatened,” he said on a recent conservative podcast. “I have eight complaints to my medical board; I don’t know what’s going to happen to my license.”
Among those influenced by Kory’s message was Stephanie. In text messages, Stephanie’s friends were passing around an ivermectin-based treatment protocol that he helped develop.
Timothy Mackey is a professor at the University of California, San Diego who studies online pharmacies. He says ivermectin promoters have spent months hyping the drug.
“They’re creating demand and this demand is being circulated in all these different online groups,” he says.
Mackey says there’s a whole range of entities trying to make a buck off the underground demand for ivermectin. It’s difficult to track how many people are seeking it out on the black market, but Mackey believes many Americans are affected.
“There’s probably thousands of people, tens of thousands of people that have looked for drugs, tried to buy something…maybe been defrauded and at worst maybe even harmed from these products,” he says.
After she fell ill with COVID, Stephanie went looking for ivermectin. A friend gave her the name of a woman in Jacksonville, Fla., who was willing to sell it to her along with some other unproven COVID drugs. Stephanie’s order totaled $390.
“She was just waiting for the pills and really did not want to do anything else,” Laurie remembers.
Her mom was getting sicker and sicker and refusing to go to the hospital. Laurie was worried that she had invested so much in the mail-order pills.
“I was like, ‘Who’d you buy it from?’ because I had read a lot of stuff about people getting it illegally, and she was like, ‘I got it from a doctor,’ and I said, ‘Are you sure it’s a doctor?’ and she was like, ‘Yeah it’s definitely a doctor.'”
Except it wasn’t a doctor. The woman’s name was Elizabeth Starr Miller. According to her LinkedIn profile, she’s a “quantum healer” who also works as a loan officer. In text messages shared with NPR by Stephanie’s family, Miller repeatedly told Stephanie to be wary of the hospital.
Meanwhile, the drugs weren’t arriving. After a few days, Stephanie worried she might be getting conned.
Stephanie became so ill she had to be rushed to the local hospital. That same day the drugs arrived, stuffed inside a plain brown envelope with Miller’s home address on the return label.
When her daughter, Laurie, looked at them, she found ivermectin pills that aren’t licensed for use in the U.S. They appeared to be made by Indian pharmaceutical companies. Except, when NPR shared the photos of the packets with Mackey, the pharmaceutical researcher, he wasn’t even sure that the Indian company had made them.
“It looks highly suspect the way this pill pack is set up to begin with,” Mackey says. Mackey points to one stamp on the pack that reads “WHO GMP Certified.” It’s a real certification in one Indian state, but he’s also seen it before, on fake pills from overseas.
“Once you see this mark here, you’re pretty much going to throw out this sample,” he says.
The pack of pills that Stephanie received in the mail included blister packs that were labeled as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
The pack of pills that Stephanie received in the mail included blister packs that were labeled as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Meredith Rizzo/NPR
When reached by phone, Elizabeth Starr Miller, the woman who sold Stephanie the suspicious drugs, initially told NPR she had nothing to do with the drugs.
“I don’t prescribe the medicine, someone else does,” she said. When pressed about text messages she sent Stephanie that, among other things, included a tracking number for the ivermectin, Miller says she and Stephanie had consulted a licensed doctor. An NPR review of the entire text thread between Stephanie and Miller did not show any evidence of such a meeting, and her family says they are unaware of any appointment taking place. Miller says the doctor has since died of cancer and she has no notes from the consultation.
Miller says she was one of well over a hundred doctors, homeopathic healers and online pharmacists offering ivermectin. She says she believed the drugs would help and that she can’t be blamed for Stephanie’s death.
“This was a grown woman who had made her choice,” she says. “I was just trying to help her, I wasn’t trying to hurt her. I would never hurt anybody.”
Stephanie’s faith in the drugs cost her valuable time. Doctors who treated her at the hospital told NPR they believe she wasted critical days waiting for them. Stephanie grew weaker and eventually succumbed to COVID just a few days after Christmas.
Stephanie’s best chance would have been to be vaccinated before she got sick, says Jai Ballani, a physician with Northwell Health who treated Stephanie at the hospital last year. But even without vaccination, had she quickly sought scientifically tested therapies, she would have fared better. “There might have been a chance that this story might have had a different outcome,” Ballani says.
Laurie and the rest of Stephanie’s family have begun to heal in the months following her death. But Laurie remains angry that both misinformers and profiteers continue to operate, promoting their treatments to the public. “It’s so abusive,” she says. “It’s so bad.”
This story was edited by Brett Neely, Meredith Rizzo and Carmel Wroth of NPR. Design and development by Connie Hanzhang Jin of NPR.
4 years back, when Karen Giuliano went to a Boston healthcare facility for hip substitute surgical procedure, she was supplied a pale-pink bucket of toiletries issued to people in numerous hospitals. Inside have been tissues, bar cleaning soap, deodorant, toothpaste, and, without a question, the …
On July 5, 2022, Bayhealth Healthcare Heart, Inc. posted see of a data breach that affected the delicate data of as numerous as 17,481 clients. In its detect, Bayhealth stated that the incident included a breach at a single of the company’s distributors utilised to …
If someone’s heart skips a defeat, tech organizations want to enable them know about it.
Gadget companies — starting with Apple and now Fitbit, which is owned by Google — are selling wearable gadgets that check heartbeat rhythms and alert buyers when anything is out of sync.
These solutions require some feats of technological know-how. Lots of use innovative optical sensors that peer beneath the skin to monitor how blood quantity alterations — virtually like monitoring the tides — and thereby tally heartbeats. Other gadgets have a miniature electrocardiogram — which information the heart’s electrical exercise — embedded. Possibly approach can detect irregular heartbeats — and perhaps atrial fibrillation, a situation that influences an believed 2.7 million Us citizens and drives up the risk of stroke and coronary heart failure. When a person has it, the beating in the heart’s upper chambers is erratic, and blood does not move as perfectly as it ought to to the heart’s reduced chambers.
However, although the devices are a technical accomplishment, some cardiologists say the facts the units produce is not often valuable. Notifications from the gadgets aren’t definitive diagnoses.
It is a conundrum, and a consequential one particular, for the health and fitness treatment process. Tens of tens of millions of individuals are armed with these products, and if even a tiny portion of individuals get a ping, it could imply a lot a lot more treatment and fees for the program.
“The technological know-how has outpaced us,” reported Rod Passman, a cardiologist at Northwestern University who’s assisting with a research analyzing the Apple Watch’s skill to screen for the coronary heart rhythm problem. “Industry arrived out with these points mainly because they could. Now we’re actively playing catch-up and seeking to determine out what to do with this data.”
Coronary heart rhythm sensors are amongst numerous instruments packed into these wearables. Buyers can have their ways counted, their snooze tracked, and their gaits analyzed. Some products and solutions will call 911 if the wearer has been in a motor vehicle crash or had a lousy tumble.
All those characteristics are meant to make patients the protagonists in maintaining their wellbeing. In the course of an occasion touting Fitbit’s atrial fibrillation functionality, corporation co-founder James Park explained it was a single of several options of the brand’s conditioning-tracking bands that are “making consumers very easily in management of overall health and wellness.”
The wearable’s atrial fibrillation ping — a “test [doctors] did not get,” Passman claimed — tells sufferers there’s something likely irregular. In the long run, nevertheless, any treatment is left to the physician.
The original visits really don’t usually supply brief answers. To corroborate a notification, a cardiologist outfits people with health-related-grade diagnostics — a patch or cumbersome check — that are much more exact than wearables. (The Apple View, for instance, is cleared by the Fda for “informational use only.”) That fancier device may have to operate for a while to catch a momentary missed beat. That waiting implies extra time and money, expended on extra visits to the doctor.
Having a diagnosis “can be pretty the odyssey,” stated Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of California-San Francisco. People can come to be anxious alongside the way. Social media community forums like Reddit present that numerous buyers question regardless of whether their watches or their physicians are a lot more trusted. “It is nonetheless freaking me out,” a single user wrote, even immediately after a medical doctor told him he was possible good.
“There’s heading to be a interval of uncertainty,” acknowledged Tony Faranesh, a investigation scientist at Fitbit. He said the corporation provides educational substance to buyers warned of a probable arrhythmia.
Scientific tests about the prevalence of panic that final results from atrial fibrillation pings are tricky to arrive by. Fitbit collected such facts, Faranesh informed KHN, as element of a study submitted to the Fda for clearance of its product. But the full outcomes of the analyze — which gathered data from 455,000 individuals — are not still out there.
Analysis is not the exact same as realizing what the finest procedure should really be. For instance, treating or else wholesome clients with anticoagulants — the common therapy for atrial fibrillation — may possibly expose them to unwanted facet results.
In accordance to medical doctors interviewed by KHN, atrial fibrillation is a broad situation. Some patients have many bouts in a presented calendar year and signs or symptoms like fatigue or shortness of breath. Some sufferers never discover a thing.
In the past, fleeting fibrillation wouldn’t have been detected, allow by yourself handled. And wearable technological innovation customers are healthier and wealthier than the usual atrial fibrillation individual. A new Apple View expenditures all around $400 the most inexpensive Fitbit is $50. (Firm officers couldn’t say which Fitbit units would have the atrial fibrillation detection perform, while they explained they have been fully commited to creating the tech widely available.)
The mix of the wellness condition’s small burden and more healthy sufferers usually means cardiologists are not completely absolutely sure what to do with this cohort of clients.
Concerning the panic and the unknowns, the tech corporations have nonetheless started the overall health procedure on a massive science experiment.
Large swaths of men and women have embraced wearable gadgets. Analysts at Counterpoint Investigation said the Apple Observe — which has integrated the atrial fibrillation-scanning feature since 2018 — crossed 100 million customers around the world very last summer. Fitbit probably has tens of hundreds of thousands much more buyers. How lots of of them will have the new attribute once it’s readily available is not however crystal clear.
More organizations are coming. “Everyone wants to include better- and greater-caliber health-related-quality sensors” to their consumer gadgets, explained Dr. Justin Klein, handling husband or wife of Vensana Funds, a enterprise capital company. It is “going to drive people to clinics to get these diagnoses confirmed,” Klein said.
Firms are broadening the abilities of the wearables even further. Klein stated huge tech and startups alike are eyeing much more situations for gadgets to passively notify end users about, from blood oxygen ranges to significant blood force.
Figuring out what to do with these new doodads is up to sufferers and health professionals.
Northwestern’s Passman considers himself an optimist when it comes to the possible of the devices. In an job interview — sporting an Apple Watch on his wrist — he mentioned the devices can support medical practitioners and people manage problems and respond quickly when there is a funny flutter. And medical doctors can use the equipment to confirm irrespective of whether their treatment plans for atrial fibrillation are operating, cardiologists like Passman say.
However, the characteristic is likely to lead to headaches for cardiologists. “It’s brought on some enhanced burden, managing mobile phone calls, business office visits,” Weiss explained — and all for an as-however-unclear gain.
