The State Of The Coronavirus

There is paranoia about the coronavirus. Patients come into my office for other reasons and we have often ended up talking about it.

There are a variety of classifications of paranoid thoughts in the latest (fifth) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of psychiatry. Even though I have to hang a moniker from it on my work in order to get paid by any insurance for my services, there have been plenty of research articles published by responsible people tho show that it is pretty much useless.

Anyone who has had decent training in psychiatry has at least heard of “realist paranoia.” The world around you can be genuinely threatening.

The coronavirus is a genuine threat.

Even the newest and most modern antipsychotic drugs have enough of a side effect profile that I would not use them on this. As those lovable Brits say in an article which predates the coronavirus, cognitive-behavioral therapy may be a reasonable way of handling this.

If you are uncomfortable handling this, this would not be the worst of all ideas, if most therapists did not consistently live and work in the cellar located miles beneath reasonable expectations.

America’s anti-intellectualism has colored my life every step of the way. Threatening illnesses have happened before, and there are people who spend their lives studying how to handle them. Science is a painful and unabashed rowing toward the truth by people of courage, which is not valued by those who make their decisions according to some kind of emotional politics.

Our government has pretty much failed us by refusing to make widespread testing and treatment available. The only government person who seems to me to be speaking intellectual sense is Dr. Anthony Fauci, as I’ve noticed on NBC news.

There is a lot to be said for general strengthening of the immune system, if one knows exactly how to do it. Most of the advice on this that I can locate on the internet (like what you “should” eat) is unmitigated rubbish.

I trust responsible scientific evidence about how to do it.

Low Dose Naltrexone is basically a drug FDA approved in 1984 as an opiate antagonist; that is, to diminish the desire to take opiates. I myself was an investigator in clinical trials of it to diminish a desire to take alcohol.

It was discovered that in a much lower dose, to be a potent immunostimulant and has helped people with a variety of seemingly insoluble disease problems.

It was developed so long ago it is “out of patent,” which means (at least in the United States) nobody can make any money from it, so information about it is not to be usefully disseminated.

It is unlikely that your present treating physician knows about it.

I believe in it. Read about it for yourself at their basic website or the site where a doctor explains his experiences with this treatment.

I tend to avoid endorsing prescription drug treatments as it might make people think I’m a paid cheerleader, a shill. But since this is strictly non-commercial and nobody is paying to promote it, I whole-heartedly endorse LDN. If you read about it and are interested in trying it, I advise contacting a special kind of pharmacy called a compounding pharmacy, and ask the pharmacists there for doctors who are treating with this, and they could give you an evaluation and possibly prescribe it for you.

The best endorsement I can say is that I use LDN, and I’ve got my husband on it.