Prescribing Clorox for COVID-19 patients is malpractice
I would expect to be sued for malpractice and gross incompetence were I ever to prescribe jiggers of Clorox for COVID-19 patients. I’d expect to face disciplinary boards if colleagues discovered that I’d been musing with patients about the merits of injecting Lysol into their veins.
In either case, it seems doubtful that I could successfully defend myself by claiming that I’d merely been pranking my patients and colleagues. I don’t think they’d pardon me if I said that I’d only been exercising sarcasm, something they would’ve known, had they only been smarter and less gullible.
The problem with speaking to hundreds of millions of worried and sick people from a national stage during a devastating pandemic is … you are speaking to hundreds of millions of worried and sick people from a national stage during a devastating pandemic.
These people are desperate for information about the coronavirus, so they listen to whatever you say, especially if you’re the president. Many are fearful about exposure, so they listen to your advice about protecting themselves and their loved ones. Tens of thousands are already sick, so they listen attentively when you embrace treatments and entertain cures. Your words matter to these people.
And it doesn’t work — not even as a weak disclaimer or antidote — to sprinkle the occasional asterisk over whatever you fancy to tell them, suggesting they could discuss your medical speculations with their doctors. That’s an abuse of everyone’s time, especially now.
Importantly, too, many of the people who listen to you don’t have a doctor, let alone one with the time on her hands for têteà-têtes about using household cleaning products to cure COVID-19. Many of your listeners also can’t access health care. Even before the pandemic delivered a monumental loss of jobs and income and employer-based health insurance, the most recent data from the U.S. Census
Bureau revealed that, in 2018, already 27.5 million Americans had no health insurance coverage.
Besides, certain matters ought to be considered “settled” at this point in history. I don’t expect 100% agreement on anything in this country right now; but it’s at least 200% certain that it’s a terrible idea to be injecting household disinfectants and cleaning products as posed by the president. Whether taken by injection or ingestion, those chemical concoctions are notorious for causing multiple organ failure and death, as their product labels have warned us for decades. We know that people sometimes ingest those products with the intention to kill themselves by “detergent suicide.” We know that too many children continue to suffer accidental poisoning and death after ingesting laundry pods. Clearly, we don’t need to wonder whether household cleaning products possess therapeutic value in treating COVID-19 patients.
We have no reason to urge the medical establishment to waste valuable time and resources to study this obviously settled matter. If research money has already been allocated to this useless pursuit, perhaps it could be diverted to purchase masks and face shields for our nurses and doctors.
Several states and poison control centers reported significant upticks in the number of calls they’ve received after the president floated his ideas about using household disinfectants for COVID-19. It seems those callers hadn’t picked up on the sarcasm. Still, I am grateful for the first time about the ubiquitous shortage of hand sanitizers and disinfectants in the supermarkets.
Clearly, we need more reliable and authoritative health care leadership from people purporting to deliver it. We need information that is detoxed from fantasy and misinformation, and medical advice that is sanitized of politics. You won’t find the solution for this in any broom closet.