On the Florida Roundup, hosts Tom Hudson and Melissa Ross spoke with Dr. Marlow Hernandez, Chief Executive Officer at Cano Health in Miami and Dave Lacknauth, Director of Pharmacy Services at Broward Health about fighting a dangerous virus with a controversial medication.Here’s an excerpt from the conversation.
Melissa Ross: Dr. Hernandez, are you seeing success with Plaquenil at your facilities at Cano Health? Are you using it?
DR. MARLOW HERNANDEZ: Yes, we are using it across our 45 facilities in the state. We have over 60,000 patients, and we are using it selectively for those who do not have contraindications, for those who have high-risk symptoms.
For those who seem to be going into that inflammatory stage of the disease, science now pretty definitively tells us that you’ve got a viral phase that can last for about a week, maybe more, but that quickly fades. Then what is really causing a lot of the morbidity and mortality is that inflammatory phase of the disease, which follows the peak and viral counts. And that inflammation can build up in your lungs, can build up throughout your body. And if we have a medicine that can lower that inflammation going amuck, we can improve outcomes.
So, hydroxychloroquine is not a panacea, but we’ve used it against immune system-derived overreactions for decades. It’s safe for most patients. And as long as it is an individualized treatment decision within a clinical setting, I’m very supportive of using it because it’s one of the tools, an important one, no doubt, that we must use until everything is ultimately discovered.
Read the original article here: https://www.wlrn.org/post/florida-doctors-cautiously-using-hydroxychloroquine-fight-coronavirus