The Truth About the Hugging Doctor

A few days ago the following thanksgiving picture (yes, it was taken on thanksgiving day) exploded on the world wide web as people sang praises about a doctor who takes time out to express compassion to a Covid-19 patient.

Dr. Joseph Varon, compassionate patient-centered physician, hugging an elderly man who was feeling lonely and vulnerable.

From my calculations based on some analytics it has doubtlessly been seen by 10’s of millions of people.

I won’t go into great detail about the picture itself, as that has been well covered already, and the subsequent outpouring of gratitude for doctors like Dr. Varon has been tremendous. It’s a critical a part of the pandemic dialog that has been under-represented for some time.

A Special Doctor, A Special Person

Instead I wanted to talk about Dr. Varon himself, because he’s a special doctor. A rare breed, and not just among Doctors. He is a rare breed among people as a whole. What kind of doctor works in the hospital every single day, 12 hours per day, for 257 days straight?

The kind of doctors who do that (and the families who support them)… it seems unbelievable. And so when a candid photo of such a reported person looks this compassionate … to some it must seem almost an opportunistic photo, enough that it prompted USA Today to do a “fact check” . Is this guy for real? Yes. Apparently, according to USA Today, yes he is. Working 12-hour days, 257 days straight, and regularly hugging infected patients when they really need it … yeah that’s who he really is.

And he starts early … about 4:30 to 5:30am and his days are long. Very long.

“If I am lucky, I get home before 10 o’clock at night. If I’m not lucky, which is most of the time, I make it home around midnight,” — Dr. Joseph Varon

According to co-workers, he will sit on the bed with people, hug them, and chat with them.

But Dr. Varon’s character goes deeper than just the dedication and compassion shown in this picture and evidenced by working nonstop 12 hour days for 257 days straight.

Dr. Varon was one of the first doctors early on to tape a picture of him on his gown for his patients to see him as a friend and a person. This caught on like wild fire and soon doctors everywhere have been doing it. “Make them smile.”, he says, “They’re going through hell … be humane, compassionate”.

In fact, this was not the first time I’ve seen Dr. Varon in the news, nor was it the first time that I was impressed about how he was willing to sacrifice everything, and I mean everything, to make the world a better place.

The earliest incident I read about happened about 7 years ago, he had a brain injury which temporarily affected his speech and ability to walk (which he treated himself with hypothermia to stop the damage), but which didn’t stop him from hopping over on one leg to help a man on an airplane during a flight. His wife asked him “What were you thinking?” to which he replied, “it‘s more powerful than you, it’s more powerful than me”. It was a big plane with 100’s of passengers, there were certainly other doctors on board, but he just had to do something.

Because that’s who he is.

The Maligned Breakthrough You Never Heard Of

And before that he was an early adopter of the greatest medical breakthrough of the last few years that you never heard of. Why did you never hear of it? Because it was slandered in a botched experiment, again and again, and then quickly buried in infamy by a professional medical organization.

I speak of a novel treatment for sepsis, the #1 killer of people in hospitals, a protocol championed by Dr. Varon (and only a small number of other doctors, who do so at the peril of their own careers) which threatens to cure all but the worst cases of sepsis. In fact it was out of that protocol from which a Covid19 treatment evolved which he now promotes (more on this below).

The treatment for Sepsis is the #1 most expensive single medical product, costing well over $20K per night per patient. Sepsis generally originates in the hospital and treating it makes up for 6% of hospital costs. Six percent! That can easily make up the difference between hospital profitability and going belly up.

So after this protocol was first unveiled and it was found to be cheap … I mean really cheap … of course it was met widely with deep disdain.

“Sepsis Experts” …almost unanimously consider our study to be “Fake Science”, “Tooth Fairy Science”, “Witchcraft” and worse. Their comments have mostly been very unprofessional and personal. — Dr. Marik

But Dr. Varon was more interested in curing sepsis than maintaining its lucrative status quo for his hospital. Dr. Varon’s only interest has always been whatever is best for his patients. That’s his only focus. So while most emergency care providers thumbed their noses at the new protocol (called HAT — Hydrocortisone, Ascorbic acid, Thiamine) Dr. Varon considered the fact that septic shock has a mortality close to 50%, and the HAT protocol suggested about a 3x improvement over that. Add to that that the treatment is completely devoid of side effects and was proven to be extremely safe, it was a no brainer. Dr. Varon was 100% on board.

Since then a number of studies of HAT protocol has been done, but all of them riddled with problems according to Dr. Varon and Dr. Marik:

“powerful forces [are] at play attempting to invalidate and disprove the beneficial effects of HAT Rx. This includes designing clinical trials that are doomed to fail, by using absurd doing schedules or selectively enrolling patients likely to do poorly.”

For example, all of the studies done to derail the protocol waited longer than the maximum 6 hours (after the patient presents sepsis symptoms) to treat the patients, except for one trial, and that trial mixed the concentrated formula into the saline way in advance, causing it to oxidize before administration (note that after diluted in saline the solution has a half life of only 1 hour). Most of the RCT studies seemed to do this (mixing the IV cocktail way in advance of treatment). In other words, they all seemed designed to fail, and did not match what Dr. Varon and others were doing in practice.

Dr. Marik, who co-authored a paper with Dr. Varon on the treatment, defending HAT protocol for sepsis showing that it must be administered within 6 hours (see the blue columns) when in fact all the studies waited too long to administer the protocol, ie. studies designed to fail. Dr Varon’s hospital among a few others have seen the 3x improvement, so they do it, despite the criticism for not waiting for a study to be done properly.

However, Dr. Varon, not one to blindly accept the bogus findings in botched studies, and seeing firsthand of the benefits of the HAT treatment for Sepsis he continues to use it despite the torrent of criticism from sepsis doctors who reference the faulty experiments. There are only a half of dozen or more hospitals who do HAT for sepsis, but those who do it correctly are seeing a 3x improvement in sepsis survival, even years after the first bogus studies were done. They, like Dr. Varon, put patients above profit, leaving behind rigid conventions that leave no room for compassionate treatments that are guaranteed to be safe.

Dr. Varon’s FLCCC and the MATH+ Protocol Against Covid19

Another image of Dr Varon hugging another Covid19 patient when it was very much needed.

A few years later, early in 2020, Dr Varon helped found a group called the FLCCC that developed a protocol (called “MATH+”) which after treating thousands and thousands of patients has yielded a survival which is about a 3 fold improvement compared to what the rest of the country has been seeing for severe Covid19 cases. Not surprisingly, it’s based in part on the HAT sepsis treatment (which also demonstrated a 3X improvement when done right) because the symptoms of severe Covid19 and sepsis are very similar at the metabolic level. You can read about it on their website: covid19criticalcare.com

The non-profit founding team of front line responders, including Dr Varon, who developed and are promoting this protocol which has demonstrated unequalled success against Covid19, which is also non-proprietary and is something even 3rd world countries can afford to do.

In addition to developing the MATH+ protocol his FLCCC group also developed a prophylactic treatment called the I-MASK+. They make no money on these development and informational exchange efforts, there are no grants, it is entirely non-profit oriented. He regularly gives seminars on how to improve the Covid-19 situation, to doctors, to the community, to community leaders. Dr. Varon is up to his elbows in Covid-19 patients, and yet he can’t help himself … “it‘s more powerful than you, it’s more powerful than me”.

Most doctors don’t know about these treatments, but they are superior in efficacy to what is conventionally done, as they have independently evaluated it with respect to all the most common treatments, from HCQ to Remdesivir to you-name-it … when they find something that helps, like Ivermectin, they update the protocol on their website, covid19criticalcare.com.

There are many more examples of the kind of character that makes a doctor like Dr. Varon. From putting his patients first even above himself, to his all day-long / 7 days a week dedication, to championing and even developing the best science, even when it’s not popular, to starting a campaign to make sure the harder hit African American community gets the care and attention it needs; He is a force to be reckoned with, and he’s fearless when it comes to delivering the care, and love, and hugs, that patients need.

But he just calls himself “an average joe”.