December 15, 2022
Dr. Jerry Williams of Urgent Care 24/7 discusses COVID-19 treatment, what we did at Urgent Care 247, and why were we successful.
Dr. Williams knows this is a very controversial topic, but he wanted to talk to you about what we did at Urgent Care 247, his national urgent care company, and why we were so successful in keeping our patients out of the hospital and we had no deaths of our treated patients. We treated 900 patients for acute COVID-19 infection. The most frequently asked question was, how many patients did you treat? The answer is about 900.
The next question was, what did you treat everybody? And no, we did not. If someone was young and healthy, and there were no co-morbidities, and they were handling the disease, well, we didn't treat them, we gave them supportive measures. Please understand that in all patients that had COVID-19, and in fact, we were having all patients during the pandemic, take what we call the vitamin and mineral packet. That included vitamin D3, vitamin B, 12, vitamin C, magnesium, and zinc. Because all five of those vitamins and minerals have compelling strong scientific data that supports that if you have an ample supply of those vitamins and minerals in your body, that you're more likely to fare well with the illness and survive the illness.
We were encouraging everyone to get those vitamins and mineral levels up in their body, number one. Number two, if we had a patient who was quote, unquote, really sick and presented with high fever and extraordinary symptoms, or if they had any comorbidity at all, including obesity, diabetes, older age, COPD, asthma, etc, there was there are many comorbidities, we recommended treating those patients, despite all the politicization of the treatment, we stayed out of the politics, so we just stuck to the science and used hydroxychloroquine.
The reason we did that is because there was a paper from 2006, that showed the mechanism of action of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. Two very commonly used drugs for anti-malaria treatments that have been used in millions of patients worldwide. In the case of hydroxychloroquine, which is the drug that was being studied. Early in the pandemic, it actually began being studied first in France, and showed very compelling data through a very small study, which was certainly not ideal. What we knew about hydroxychloroquine was number one, it's an incredibly safe drug. No matter what you watched on TV, or what you read on the internet, trust me, it is an incredibly safe drug. Case in point, it is FDA approved in all three trimesters of pregnancy. There is nothing more difficult to treat pharmacologically than a patient who is pregnant, especially in the first trimester when the fetus is developing.
Yet with hydroxychloroquine, FDA approved and all three trimesters of pregnancy, so very safe drug and we checked an EKG on all the patients we treated to get a QT interval, which is an electrical measurement of how the heart is conducting electricity through it to make sure that that isn't getting prolonged and there wasn't an abnormal prolongation of the electrical flow through the heart that allows the heart to be so we, we checked a QT interval with the EKG we got patients on hydroxychloroquine and all the vitamins and minerals and, and we also treated them with azithromycin because the early French study showed that is that the myosin was very effective in helping decrease the the length and severity of the illness, even better than hydroxychloroquine alone.
We were again, checking QT intervals on the patients and getting them started on this regimen. And later we added the ivermectin as well, but which is a medication that's also been widely used internationally. There was discussion and some scientific evidence that was compelling that it was also helping with the COVID-19 infection. But the treatments that we had still need to be more formally studied and proven.
During the pandemic, we didn't have time for that. Dr. Williams knows that makes you feel like we're treating you like a guinea pig. In some cases, we had to make clinical decisions earlier sooner than we would have liked to have, we would have liked to have had randomized placebo controlled studies that would have been more thorough. Fortunately, the drugs that were in question were overwhelmingly safe, and there was compelling evidence that they were effective. We move forward with that without apology. Dr. Williams would tell you, though, that overall, if when people ask me, why do you think, Urgent Care 247 was so successful in treating COVID-19 infections?
He would tell you this one statement: we started treatment early, meaning we tried to get patients on medications within 48 hours of the first onset of symptoms. We also worked very hard to get all of our patient population on those five vitamins and minerals, which we know improved outcomes by patients, for example, not having a vitamin D3 deficiency when infected.