host response

May 9, 2020

The Path to a Virginia Medical Center’s COVID-19 Integrative Protocol Using Multiple Natural Agents: Interview with Paul Marik, MD

The polarization in US medicine has never been so front and center as it is with COVID-19. Natural agents are off the table. Despite early clarity that the state of the host matters big time in susceptibility to the virus, natural strategies focusing on host susceptibility are routinely denigrated and dismissed.  So it was remarkable that within the course of 24 hours in late April, two colleagues independently sent news of a formal medical center protocol associated with a medical school that includes multiple natural agents. These are inlaid with conventional measures into a series of stages that the institution’s medical staff is following. Who are these people and how did this come to be? I was able to reach the primary author of the institution’s Critical Care COVID-19 Protocol, a South Africa educated internist, Paul Marik, MD, FCCP, FCCM.  Marik is a professor of medicine and chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) who has previously stirred controversy for unorthodox approaches. The non-conventional reasoning that drove the COVID-19 protocol Marik calls “uncommon common sense.”