Tamiflu, and the Fatal Mistake of Doing Something
About this episode
The episode critiques the use of Tamiflu in ICU settings, highlighting its dangers and the biases in medical culture that promote intervention.
As a long time critic of Tamiflu and its brethren , I have often heard defenders make the following last ditch plea to justify its use: “What about people in the ICU with the flu?? Without it they could die!.” The unspoken insanity behind this claim is a powerful, almost gravity-like bias in medical culture: the urge to intervene. At the bedside of a critically ill patient, doing something simply feels better. But in medicine there is no free lunch. Sometimes, doing something is a grave mistake. At a conference last month, researchers presented unpublished results from the first ever trial of Tamiflu for people critically ill due to influenza. Despite the absence of trial data, major guidelines ( CDC , WHO , IDSA ) have for years strongly recommended the drug in such patients. But Tamiflu in the ICU, we learned, has been a decades-long massacre. The trial was abruptly halted when a safety committee saw, after enrolling 652 people, that Tamiflu increased deaths by more than 40% . Based on these preliminary data, it appears that guideline-based ICU care has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people. To grasp the absurdity of ever having used Tamiflu in the ICU, we first have…
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