RE: It is an unfortunate fact that charlatans pop up to take advantage of people, and they know just what to say to sway a certain group of people.
Let’s look at examples of classic charlatans -— the old Travelling Medicine Show where peddlers sell their “medical cures” for various ailments to gullible people for money.
The predecessor to the traveling American medicine man was the European mountebank, well known throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance for selling their medicinal wares at fairs, street corners, in market squares or wherever they could gather a crow of onlookers.
I think you have that in mind when you think of Dr. Zelenko.
Have you asked yourself if they are similar or are there HUGE differences? Here are the difference — refute them if you will:
1) The medicine men DO NOT tell us the formula behind their medicine. They simply ask you to trust that it works based on their stories.
Dr. Zelenko : 1) REFERS to scientific studies done using the SAME drugs that he is using; 2) PUBLISHES his protocol and patient profile for all to see so that they can be replicated.
2) The medicine men sell their wares for money. I am waiting for you show me how Dr. Zelenko is enriching himself by pushing a drug combo that is GENERIC, without a single monopolizing company, and costs less than $30.00
3) The medicine men usually tell others that this is a special ingredient that was discovered and does not invite doctors or scientists to test their miracle cure.
Dr. Zelenko INVITES other people to replicate his work, ORGANIZES a KNOWN catholic hospital with nearly a hundred year history to test his protocol and more importantly has MANY LICENSED DOCTORS who actually REPLICATED his success ALL OVER THE UNITED STATES *AND* the world.
It is an unfortunate fact that people like you IGNORE the huge difference, ignore the evidence, ignore the successful cases presented in order to insist that one must follow ONLY YOUR SPECIFICALLY APPROVED METHOD of inquiry in order to be accepted as efficacious.
If that is the case,then I have to say that even the drug the FDA approves of — the potentially more expensive Remdesivir, has less scientific and clinical evidence backing it than Hydroxychloroquine ( and I am not even against the use of Remdesivir ).
I think you have that in mind when you think of Dr. Zelenko.
Actually, I am basing my assessment of him on modern day charlatans. Many of them have MD degrees, which means that they have the knowledge to speak of the subject they are scamming with a high level of expertise. But, rather than speak matter-of-factly to the science, they go off on conspiracies--about big pharma and about the medical establishment, while claiming that they have THE cure to whatever disease the patient is suffering. They effect a high level of empathy (which I do not think they feel), so as to attract a particular type of person.
Charlatans are extremely common in the field of cancer, but can pop up in any discipline of medicine. One particularly notorious charlatan routinely advertises his quackery in airplane magazines, and even links to a paper that he (somehow) got published as proof that he has THE cure to cancer that somehow thousands of medical researchers and physicians have missed.
1) The medicine men DO NOT tell us the formula behind their medicine. They simply ask you to trust that it works based on their stories.
Actually, they do tell about their medicine. They publish everything about their craft, from data on drug efficacy to the type of suture that causes the least scarring, in the medical journals which are available to everyone. (Some are behind paywalls but you can still read the abstracts.)
So one thing I look for immediately when someone claims to have a miracle cure is the medical literature. Is there evidence that the claimed cure actually works? Does the person making the claims have a solid research background? Or is it something that anyone could have heard about, and the charlatan picked up on it and started touting it. I think that is the case with Zelenko. As far as I can tell, he was an ordinary practicing family medicine doctor who may simply have gotten in over his head on this one, and has fallen into the charlatan mindset as a result.