COVID-19: Is It Like Mountain Sickness?

Are the symptoms of COVID-19 like those of mountain sickness, and does this change the way we should treat it?

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An ICU Doctor Speaks

A concerned ICU physician from New York has released a video with new information about COVID-19 symptoms that is relevant to us all.

He says that COVID-19 patients admitted to his intensive care unit have symptoms unlike anything he has ever seen before.

They are not the typical symptoms of viral pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) that he and his unit were told to expect but more like those of high altitude or mountain sickness

His fear is that “we are treating the wrong type of disease” and that the current medical treatment employed may, in fact, be causing the lung damage that has come to be associated with COVID-19 infections.

He believes that in order to save as many lives as possible, the way the disease is being understood and treated has to quickly change, and he calls for insights and feedback from other colleagues working closely with COVID-19 patients.

Video – From NYC ICU: Does COVID-19 Really Cause ARDS??!!

(A transcript of this video, minimally edited to improve readability, is available at the end this article.)

What has This got to do With Homeopathy?

First, we admire the courage of this doctor who, for the sake of his patients and the rest of us, has gone out on a limb to challenge the currently accepted medical view about COVID-19 and its treatment.

Second, our attention was also caught by his mention of the symptoms of COVID-19 appearing to be similar to those of mountain sickness.

Within homeopathy, one remedy is known for mountain or altitude sickness – Coca. It has been used for the symptoms high altitude sickness for more than a century.

In 2000, a study formally documented its ability to improve blood oxygen saturation and reduce breathing difficulties associated with high altitude mountain sickness in mountain climbers. See: The Effect of Homeopathic Coca on High Altitude Mountain Sickness: Mt. Everest Base Camp

Coca for Symptoms Similar to Mountain or Altitude Sickness

On examining Coca in homeopathic materia medicas we find similarities between its symptom profile and those of COVID-19: fever; headache; difficult breathing; difficult breathing in the elderly; shortness of breath on exertion; painful shortness of breath; rapid breathing; cough; intense oppression of the chest; weakness and affections of the lungs; reduced sense of smell; heaviness, weariness and weakness of limbs and muscles; intense weariness with fever and, night sweats.

While it is already known that the symptom profiles of several homeopathic remedies match those of COVID-19, Coca has not previously been considered.

With the new insights provided by Dr Kyle-Sidell, and for those who have reached the end of medical interventions, perhaps it should be considered.

Do the matching symptom profiles mean that Coca will automatically relieve COVID-19 symptoms? Before that can be claimed, the remedy has to be tested for efficacy on those unwell.

What is known is that it is quickly produced, easily applied, cost-effective, non-toxic, and doesn’t interact with other medicines. Testing should be simple and quick.

To do otherwise seems immoral under the circumstances.

Should Coca prove to be a useful treatment remedy, homeopathic principles suggest it could also be a prophylactic.

Video Transcript: Does COVID-19 Really Cause ARDS??!!

This is Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell, ER and critical care doctor from New York City.

Nine days ago I opened an intensive care unit to care for the sickest COVID positive patients in this city.

In these nine days I’ve seen things I have never seen before.

In treating these patients I have witnessed medical phenomena that just don’t make sense in the context of treating a disease that is supposed to be a viral pneumonia.

Nine days ago I presumed I was opening an intensive care unit to treat patients with a virus causing a pneumonia that was ravaging lungs across the world, starting out as something mild – a cough, a sore throat, and progressively increasing in severity until ultimately ending in something called acute respiratory distress syndrome or ARDS.

This is the paradigm that every hospital in the country is working under.

This is the disease – ARDS – that every hospital is preparing to treat and this is the disease – ARDS – for which in the next two to six weeks a hundred thousand Americans might be put on a ventilator and yet everything I’ve seen in the last nine days, all the things that just don’t make sense, the patients I’m seeing in front of me, the lungs I’m trying to improve, have led me to believe that COVID-19 is not this disease and that we are operating under a medical paradigm that is untrue.

In short I believe we are treating the wrong disease, and I fear that this misguided treatment will lead to a tremendous amount of harm to a great number of people in a very short time.

As New York City appears to be about ten days ahead of the country I feel compelled to get this information out: COVID-19 lung disease, as far as I can see, is not a pneumonia and should not be treated as one

Rather it appears as if some kind of viral induced disease most resembling high altitude sickness.

It is as if tens of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers are on a plane at 30,000 feet and the cabin pressure is slowly being let out.

These patients are slowly being starved of oxygen.

I have seen patients dependent on oxygen take off their oxygen and quickly progress through a state of anxiety and emotional distress and eventually get blue in the face, and while they look like patients absolutely on the brink of death, they do not look like patients dying of pneumonia.

I have never been a mountain climber, and I do not know the conditions at Basecamp below the highest peaks in the world, but I suspect that the patients I’m seeing in front of me look most like as if a person was dropped off on the top of Mount Everest without time to acclimate.

I don’t know the final answer of this disease but I’m quite sure that a ventilator is not it.

That is not to say that we don’t need ventilators.

We absolutely need them.

They are the only way at this time that we are able to give a little more oxygen to patients who need it but when we treat people with ARDS, we typically use ventilators to treat what’s called respiratory failure.

That is, we use the ventilator to do the work that the patient’s muscles can no longer do because they’re too tired to do it

These patients muscles’ work fine.

I fear that if we’re using a false paradigm to treat a new disease, that the method that we program the ventilator on, based on a notion of respiratory failure as opposed to oxygen failure, that this method (and there are a great many number of methods we can use with the ventilator but this method being widely adopted at this very moment in every hospital in country which aims to increase pressure on the lungs in order to open them up) is actually doing more harm than good and that the pressure we are providing to lungs that cannot stand it, that cannot take it, and that the ARDS we are seeing – that the whole world is seeing – may be nothing more than lung injury caused by the ventilator.

Now, I don’t know the final answer to this disease.

I do sense that we will have to use ventilators.

We will have to use a great many number of ventilators and we need a great many number of ventilators but I sense that we can use them in a much safer way in a much safer method

That safer method challenges long-held dogmatic beliefs within the medical community and among lung specialists which will not be easy to overcome but I really believe that they must be overcome.

There are hundreds of thousands of lungs in this country at risk and the time to overcome them is now.

I’m confident that if those of us that work bedside with these patients, those of us who are witnessing the things that we have never seen before despite the many years we have worked with the thousands of patients and diseases we have seen, if we can effectively communicate this to all those that are so important, but who are not bedside – the researchers, the administrators, those who procure our resources and make our protocols, the politicians, our own governments – if we are able to convince them that this is a disease that is different than anything we have ever seen, I am confident that an answer can be found, that effective treatments can be discovered, and that a plan to disseminate that treatment can be rapidly deployed and that tens of thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of lives and lungs will be protected.

The time for this is now.

We are staring into a future in which a great many of our fellow Americans are going to suffer, not to mention people all around the world.

For those who will not suffer directly from this disease, from the terrible human cost of this disease, for those who will not lose a family member or a friend, and there will be a great many number of people who will lose those close to them but for those who don’t they are still going to suffer from the great economic cost of COVID-19.

We are all involved in this future so I urge you, for those of us, for if you are out there, for those who work bedside, I urge you to speak up so we can change this.

I thank you all for listening. Please spread the message and stay safe.

(Dr Kyle-Sidell prefaces his video with: “I am a physician who has been working at the bedside of COVID+ patients in NYC. I believe we are treating the wrong disease, and that we must change what we are doing if we want to save as many lives as possible. I welcome any feedback, especially from those bedside: doctors, nurses, xray techs, pharmacists, anyone and everyone. Does this sound wrong or right, is something more right? Please let me know. @cameronks”)