A Master Class in Medical Ethics in the Age of COVID from My 95-year-old Dad

I am not a doctor, but in the fight for humanity with the FLCCC, I am obligated to continue my father's adherence to his Hippocratic Oath

A note to my father from a grateful patient.

During the first summer of the pandemic (in July, 2020, when I was still writing on Medium (before being de-platformed for scientific truth-telling), I published a story about a conversation I had with my father, a retired anesthesiologist. (The entire story appears below.)

Now, a year and a half later, I remain so inspired by what he told me that day…because it fuels my resolve to forge ahead in the work of the FLCCC— and to save as many lives as we possibly can. That’s what my father did every single day of his career as a physician.

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Dad began his medical career..in the early 1950s as a general practitioner in East Chicago, Indiana—just a few miles west of Gary, Indiana, where my siblings and I grew up. Dad told us many, many stories about the things he encountered during those early years—which he describes as “the wild west of medicine.”

By all accounts it was. And Dad, I might add, was the chief cowboy. His stories are so familiar to me now, that they don’t shock me at all. But they DO rattle folks who’ve never heard the likes of the tales he has to tell. (Dad and I wrote a compilation of his unlikely, zany stories for the sake of documenting “events” in medical history that would likely never make it to print.)

There was the time in the early 50s…when Dad had to shield a young bride and her groom from the scorn of their community when she gave birth to a healthy full-term baby boy — a scant 5 months after her wedding. Dad told the distraught parents that he had a plan. He would isolate the baby in the hospital nursery for a month, and no one except the parents could come to see the baby. Then, he said they should tell their family and friends that their “scrawny, premature, but feisty” baby was receiving “Dr. Kamen’s special baby-fattening formula.” Sure enough, after a month, the parents brought home their beautiful, bouncing baby boy to the amazement and joy of the entire community. “Dr. Kamen has worked a miracle!” many exclaimed. For the parents—and the community they feared they would lose forever— it was indeed miraculous.

Then there was the story of a young man named Manuel…who had been hit by a car while walking near a grocery store. He was immediately intubated, and taken into surgery where his spleen was removed and his broken jaw was wired shut. After five days in the ICU, Manuel was making terrific progress. He wrote on his pad of paper to my father that he was hungry and wanted an enchilada. Dad tried to explain to Manuel that his jaw was wired shut, and he still had a tracheotomy, and that’s why he was being given nutrition though a gastric tube. Manuel scribbled that he could not stand whatever they were giving him and it made him vomit. So, Dad thought for a moment…and then had an idea. He brought a blender into the ICU, and for the next few weeks, he had the nurses whip up enchiladas, jalapeño peppers and tomatoes, nicely thinned with splashes of beer in the blender. The nurses dutifully did what Dad, the ICU Chief, told them to do though they complained bitterly. They placed the blended potion into the feeding tube for Manuel’s every meal. Though he experienced ups and downs during his hospital stay, Manuel made a full recovery. And every year on the anniversary of his hospital discharge, he came to see my father…with a bottle of Tequila in hand.

Dad in the OR circa 1980, ready to administer anesthesia to a patient.

You see, for my father, it was always about what was in the best interest of the patient that was before him—medically, emotionally, intellectually, and socially. Yes, he was a most unorthodox maverick, and he could be quite the troublemaker—getting himself into hot water on more than one occasion with hospital administrators. But he swore his adherence to the Hippocratic Oath…and interpreted that allegiance as he saw fit for each and every patient. He could not save everyone, of course, but he tried until the fight was over. “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” he would say.

So on that day in July of 2020, when I had the following conversation with my father (who will turn 97 next month), it moved me to know that 20 years after his retirement, he was still capable of thinking through how he would go about saving his patients in the time of COVID.

Little did I know then that a new war was brewing for the FLCCC that would begin later that fall, when the FLCCC physicians reported in October, 2020 that they’d identified a clear data signal in new studies showing that ivermectin could be used for every stage of COVID-19 disease—from prevention to serious illness. That’s when a coordinated attack on ivermectin began, waged by Big Pharma, public health agencies, elected officials and corporate supporters who feared a collapse of the trillion dollar vaccine industry if ivermectin’s capabilities to stop the pandemic were known by the masses. The war on ivermectin they ignited then, using lying words as lethal bullets, rages still—even as people continue to die unnecessarily. (Based on worldwide epidemiological studies of the efficacy of ivermectin, the FLCCC’s Critical Care team believes that over 500,000 Americans — and millions more globally— could have been saved with widespread use of ivermectin.)

The conversation below is what I go to in my mind whenever I need to remember the hundreds of thousands of patients that are in harm’s way standing before us. There’s GOT to be a way to break through and save them from COVID. There just has to be…

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MEDIUM ARTICLE—Posted July 13, 2020

The other day, I was speaking with my father about my work on the Communications and Education team for the Frontline COVID19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). (My dad, Jack Kamen, is a 95-year-old retired Anesthesiology/Critical Care professor and Chief of Intensive Care who spent his career at St. Mary Mercy Medical Center in northwest Indiana and at Northwestern University Hospital in Chicago.) During our conversation at his home, I was telling Dad about how months ago, the FLCCC doctors developed an effective hospital treatment protocol called “MATH+” for critically ill COVID19 patients. (MATH+ is Methylprednisolone, Ascorbic Acid, Thiamine, Heparin, plus several additional co-interventions.) I told Dad that in March, the FLCCC doctors urgently reported to health authorities that the protocol was saving lives — if given to patients when they first experience shortness of breath from COVID19. At the time, most hospitals were reporting that their COVID19 mortality rates were anywhere from 30%-75% — with some even higher. But the hospitals of our physicians where MATH+ was being used had a 6% average mortality rate.

Dad was listening intently. I explained to him that neither mainstream medicine nor major media would listen to these super-brilliant physicians, who were urging doctors treating COVID19 patients around the country to immediately adopt the MATH+ protocol to save the tens of thousands of people who were dying. The replies to their pleas pretty much went something like this: “Where are your double-blind randomized controlled trials (RCTs)?” “We need data.” “Your protocol calls for steroids that the World Health Organization (WHO) is strongly recommending against.” “You have ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) in MATH+? Thiamine too? Melatonin? Vitamin D? Zinc? Magnesium? Are you serious?” “Do an RCT and we’ll consider writing the story.”

“Well, they are actually right,” said Dad, who was a long-time reviewer for the medical journal Chest — one of the most prestigious journals in the field. “Double-blind studies is just how medicine works. It has to. In order for something to become widely accepted therapeutic practice, you need to prove your protocol by publishing a peer-reviewed study.”

June, 1951—My mother Shirley with my father, Dr. Jack Kamen on the day dad graduated from Chicago Medical School.

“But, dad, there ARE several peer reviewed studies that we provided the journalists and other physicians to show that COVID19 is a steroid-responsive disease. Our physicians knew that their MATH+ protocol bucked all the major national and international health care societies that they believed had badly misinterpreted the medical literature. We shared with them that one of our physicians, Dr. G. Umberto Meduri, published the landmark paper which pointed out the errors the societies had made in recommending against the use of corticosteroids, and despite its publication in a journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, which then disseminated it to all of its members, there was little change in treatment approaches. And because of that, it is more than likely that thousands of patients who died after becoming critically ill with Covid19 and who were suffering from massive inflammation may have been saved if Methylprednisolone (a safe yet powerful anti-inflammatory medicine) had been provided to them.

“And Dad, another of our physicians, Dr. Paul Marik, worked with all the FLCCC doctors to adapt his groundbreaking 2018 peer-reviewed study on the treatment of sepsis for the treatment of COVID19. His “HAT” therapy (Hydrocortisone, Ascorbic Acid and Thiamine) is the basis of what eventually became MATH+ for critically ill COVID19 patients.

Dad thought for a moment. “Joyce, that’s all fine. But those studies did not specifically examine the MATH+ protocol itself. And that is why you keep hitting brick walls.”

“OK, dad,” I said, wanting desperately to win him over to my side of the argument. “Let me read you something that I wrote to a producer from CNN last week, trying to explain to her why she should interview one of our physicians about MATH+ — even though we did not have the RCT that she really wanted to see.”

Dad listened as I read an excerpt from the email I wrote to that CNN producer:

“…Here were some of the most highly respected and highly published Critical Care doctors in the country…in the midst of a killer pandemic, and they were being asked to randomize some of their patients to supportive care, knowing that if they did, they would be sending those patients to their deaths. That’s essentially why an RCT has not been published by our group. The Recovery trial [on the use of dexamethasone in COVID19] had to be stopped because the researchers at Oxford quickly learned that the patients they randomized to placebo were dying. But our doctors knew all of this months ago…and wanted to get the word out there to save lives…which is the sole goal of the FLCCC Alliance.”

I reminded Dad that it was only last week that the WHO finally reversed its stance and recommended the use of steroids for COVID19.

Dad looked at me and gave a slight shoulder shrug as if to say, “I already told you what I think.” But I could see he was trying to work it all out in his mind.

So I came at it a different way.

“OK, dad, let’s look at it like this. Say you’re the doctor in your old ICU in Gary, Indiana as a pandemic is raging across the country. You’re giving your critically ill patients the MATH+ protocol because you know from previous studies done on the components and your clinical expertise in the ICU that this cocktail will save their lives. Sure enough, mostly all of your patients recover, while thousands are dying in other hospitals. Now, the doctors in these other hospitals know or have heard about MATH+, but they won’t use it without RCTs. They say the WHO strongly recommends against using steroids. They think Ascorbic Acid and the other natural interventions in the protocol are junk science. So they are giving their patients supportive care instead, but their patients are dying at an alarming rate.

“And so you are told that the only way to convince the world that MATH+ saves lives is to do a double blind study and randomize some of your own critically ill patients to placebo…when you know that if you do, most of those you place on placebo will probably die. Will you agree to do the study?”

Dad at the hospital, circa 1975.

He thought for a long moment. Then he spoke. “Yes,” he said. “I would do the study, but not exactly as you describe.”

“WHAT???” I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I had always considered my dad to be the most ethically principled physician in the world.

“Wait,” he said. “Just listen. What I would do, of course, is continue to give all of my patients who required MATH+ the treatment cocktail, just as I had been doing. Then, I would tell the health authorities to compare my institutional clinical data with the clinical data of patients in other hospitals NOT receiving MATH+. The collection of the data would have to meticulously measure apples to apples…considering things like age, gender, co-morbidities, lifestyle, symptoms, length of symptoms, severity of symptoms, full clinical history; with day by day comparisons highlighting medicines used, dosages, days used, and subsequent treatment outcomes and so on. That’s the RCT that can be done. Randomized NOT by the doctors — but by organized medicine within the United States.”

Whoa. Just whoa. Could the randomized clinical trials we’ve been asked to produce already be underway by federal health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the WHO or even the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and national health insurance providers who should all have access to this data? If not, why not? (It could not possibly be because the components of MATH+ are off-patent, globally available, safe and inexpensive…right? I mean, I only bring it up because the “treatments” we do hear about are those of large pharmaceutical companies, which are touted about in every national news cycle with minimal data about their efficacy; and oh, by the way, they cost a lot of money…)

Dad served in the U.S. Navy during WWII—and went to medical school on the G.I. Bill.

I sat back and watched my dad silently staring past me. I sensed he was still thinking about his answer and imagining himself still in the tiny 6-bed ICU he opened in the 1960s (the first in Indiana). Those were his glory days. Working long, long hours…called out as many as three times a night…always learning, reading, teaching, probing, trying anything and everything to save every patient that came through the double doors of his ICU. Of course Dad would not randomize any of his patients to a placebo when he knew he could save them. I knew that.

I was still thinking about the conversation I had with my dad as my husband Fred and I drove home.

“At 95, Dad is still teaching, isn’t he Fred?”

Fred, who is a pulmonologist, replied, “Talking with your dad about medicine is like taking a master class in filmmaking with Stephen Spielberg.”

Dad never wanted to leave that ICU — or medicine — but the vagaries of old age had other plans for him. Thanks for your brilliance and your unfailing humanity, Dad. I’ll get back to you soon about the RCT for MATH+. I feel certain that if you were still fighting today on the frontlines of this pandemic, you’d be COVID19’s most formidable foe. I just know it.