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05-30 Are State Rules For Treating Sepsis Really Saving Lives? "That's problematic, because doctors haven't found the best way to treat this condition. The scientific evidence is evolving rapidly, Kahn says. "Almost every day another study is released that shows what we thought to be best practice might not be best practice."" "For a while, medical practice guidelines distributed to doctors called on them to use one particular drug to treat sepsis. It turned out that drug did more harm than good. Another heavily promoted strategy, called goal-directed therapy, also turned out to be ineffective." 03-30 Why The Newly Proposed Sepsis Treatment Needs More Study "The astronomer Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Last week, a physician made the extraordinary claim that he had an effective treatment for sepsis, sometimes known as blood poisoning." "Dr. Paul Marik, a well-regarded intensive care physician at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va., is the doctor with the extraordinary claim. As we reported last week, he says he has treated about 150 patients with sepsis and that only one died of that often fatal condition (though some died of other causes). Marik's treatment involves a mix of intravenous corticosteroids, vitamin C and vitamin B, along with careful management of fluids. And his experience, so far, falls far short of the "extraordinary evidence" that a claim like his requires." Editors note: while we can argue about the rate of death without Marik's protocol as this number ranges from 25 to 75% depending on where and wh are measured, the point is only one in 150 died in Marik's study. What is it exactly they think explains then? They may suggest "they don't know how this works" which might be true they don't know. Others do though and this is not a recent revelation it's been well documented since 1949. This is as pointless as saying "we don't know how water puts out fire" because the point is it does. Every time.

03-23 Doctor Turns Up Possible Treatment For Deadly Sepsis "Marik decided to give it a try. He added in a low dose of corticosteroids, which are sometimes used to treat sepsis, along with a bit of another vitamin, thiamine. His desperately ill patient got an infusion of this mixture. "I was expecting the next morning when I came to work she would be dead," Marik said."But when I walked in the next morning, I got the shock of my life." The patient was well on the road to recovery. Marik tried this treatment with the next two sepsis patients he encountered, and was similarly surprised. So he started treating his sepsis patients regularly with the vitamin and steroid infusion. After he'd treated 50 patients, he decided to write up his results. As he described it in Chest, only four of those 47 patients died in the hospital — and all the deaths were from their underlying diseases, not from sepsis. For comparison, he looked back at 47 patients the hospital had treated before he tried the vitamin C infusion and found that 19 had died in the hospital. This is not the standard way to evaluate a potential new treatment. Ordinarily, the potential treatment would be tested head to head with a placebo or standard treatment, and neither the doctors nor the patients would know who in the study was getting the new therapy. But the results were so stunning, Marik decided that from that point on he would treat all his sepsis patients with the vitamin C infusion. So far, he's treated about 150 patients, and only one has died of sepsis, he said. That's a phenomenal claim, considering that of the million Americans a year who get sepsis, about 300,000 die."