Moth

The bizarre thing about people shouting either "IVERMECTIN IS HORSE DEWORMER" or "THE ELITES ARE HIDING THIS FROM US" is that both of those things are just obviously wrong. We've looked at Ivermectin for a bunch of potential uses and it seems like there is a small chance that, at very high doses, it might help some people with certain cancers, but if it does help (which is unlikely) it probably won't help much. There's one trial recruiting patients to test it in combination with an immunotherapy drug right now. The thing about ivermectin is that it isn't well-absorbed by mammals. This makes it very useful as an anti-parasitic because worms absorb it readily. So it poisons parasitic worms but not people. But it is absorbed a bit and at high enough doses, it has a bunch of other effects on the human body, many of them negative. Early in the pandemic, there were some studies in individual cells (rather than whole bodies) that showed it might help control the virus. When the "health influencer" space glommed onto that, we actually didn't know for sure whether it would be helpful or not. But because it was cheap and available, some people (lots, actually) really did started dosing themselves with veterinary ivermectin. By the time studies on the efficacy were published (which showed it wasn't at all effective) the damage had been done. And so we ended up with ivermectin (a drug that real people take for real diseases) becoming a culture war signifier, which is FUCKING STUPID. Now, Mel Gibson has friends who are in remission from cancer after taking ivermectin (and probably also the treatments recommended by their oncologists, as that is almost always how these stories go). And he and Joe Rogan, during their conversation, seem ASTOUNDED that people in cancer research are ignoring it. They seem to think that every elite knows that, if they so much as GLANCE at ivermectin, they're getting fucking fired. Except that researchers have done tons of studies on whether ivermectin could possibly be useful in cancer treatment because, if it is, that would be really great! People seem to think that pharmaceutical companies are the only ones who do cancer research but actually they mostly just bring drugs to market. Most cancer research is funded by the government or done by universities. As much as we've looked, it doesn't seem likely that ivermectin is a good cancer drug because, at the doses where it might have an effect on a cancer, it'll have all kinds of other nasty effects on the human body, like damage to the nervous system and brain. But, despite that, we're looking, because for some people who are dying, it's worth checking to see if it would be useful in combination with other therapies. Cancers are very hard to treat because cancer cells are very similar to /our/ cells. Trying to kill a parasite is relatively easy because worms are very different from people. Cancer cells are descended from us, they are human cells gone rogue, so it's hard to attack them without attacking the rest of the body. That's the whole reason why it's so much easier to kill parasites than it is to kill cancer cells. Fenbendazole is an even weirder thing to get all excited about as an "alternative treatment" because we've studied it for cancer treatment because it acts on the microtubules that control cell replication. That's how a lot of chemotherapy drugs work (including one I took), targeting cells that replicate a lot. So fenbendazole's whole thing is that it might have been a good cancer treatment because it would be another option as a toxic cell-killing chemo drug. But, because fenbendazole is (again) not very well absorbed by mammals, it is (again) a great drug for killing parasites and not a great drug for treating cancers. I just...I kinda can't believe we are this incapable of just leaving cancer research to cancer researchers. Ivermectin is a medicine for humans. It's not a panacea. At low doses, it basically does nothing because it isn't easily absorbed by humans and, when it is, it hangs out almost entirely with fatty tissues. It would be amazing if a cheap, well-understood drug were broadly useful in cancer treatment. Ivermectin just /isn't/. I have a private theory that fenbendazole and ivermectin are so present in these conversations 100% because they are known to cure real diseases (parasitic infections) and they are easy to purchase extremely cheaply because they are available for animals. That means people can actually take them, which creates both government warnings to NOT TAKE ANIMAL MEDICINES and many stories of people taking the animal medicines and (mostly) being just fine. That's just a tremendous mix for creating discourse and turning it into a culture war thing. And look, if people are taking ivermectin WHILE taking the treatments their doctor recommends, that's stupid but unlikely to kill anyone. But the way it was discussed on the JRE, it makes me think some people will ONLY take these medicines, and they will not take their drugs their doctors recommend, and those people will die. And that's fucked.