Dr. Tom Yadegar, a specialist in critical care medicine who has been treating some of the most extreme cases of the coronavirus, joined Glenn Beck on the radio program Tuesday to share some important information with the public and doctors around the world about treating COVID-19.
As the intensive care unit director at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in California, Yadegar and has been treating patients with COVID-19 for about seven weeks and has not lost a single patient. He was recently asked to command four more regional hospitals because he and his team are performing well above other hospitals in the Los Angeles area.
Yadegar created a protocol to determine which patients with COVID-19 also have what's called "cytokine storm syndrome" -- a process by which the body's immune system rapidly releases too many cytokines into the blood.
"The immune system kind of goes awry. It doesn't act normally. The immune system gets super ramped up, and instead of attacking the virus, it attacks the patient's own vital organs," Yadegar explained. "It's actually [the patient's] own immune system that's causing the problem, not necessarily the virus.
"Don't get me wrong. This is a deadly virus. Just like the influenza virus, it can definitely cause pneumonia. It can definitely cause respiratory failure. If the patient has emphysema or heart failure, it can definitely exacerbate those," he added. "But this [coronavirus] was doing something unique. This was doing something that I really hadn't seen much in my 20 years, where it was activating the immune system. And then the immune system was causing all the destruction in the lungs."
Yadegar noted that, while a virus triggering an autoimmune disease is not necessarily an "unknown thing," the COVID-19 virus "does it at an extraordinary pace" and to a significant number of patients. He stressed the importance of recognizing that not every patient with COVID-19 will develop an autoimmune disease and that every case must be treated individually.
"One thing that I can't stress any harder to you and your listeners. There isn't necessarily one test, and there isn't one particular treatment plan. Every patient has their own kind of individual disease," he said. "You can't treat everyone with the same treatments. There isn't a one-size-fits-all for this disease. You have to do your due diligence. You have to look at the patient in front of you and then, you know, come up with a treatment for the disease that that patient is manifesting. You can't just go through the ICU, and start handing out these medicines. If you give this medicine to someone who doesn't need it, you will surely kill them."
Watch the video below for more details:
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