I did a web search and found him. He's also suggesting ACE inhibitors to treat West Nile virus in horses.
"West Nile Trial For Horses: GenoMed's patent-pending approach, which uses a class of blood pressure pills to gently reduce excessive inflammation by a patient's own immune system, has achieved a 100% response rate so far among 12 patients with an intact immune system who came down with West Nile virus encephalitis. If GenoMed's approach continues to work in humans (which remains to be seen; 12 is still a small number), it should also work in horses and birds. Dr. Moskowitz stated; “Essentially there are no side effects. The dose used won’t lower a horse’s blood pressure at all, I should think. The only other side effect of an ARB, namely angioedema, is extremely rare, at least in humans. It occurs in about 1% of humans who use an ACE inhibitor, so in 100 out of 10,000 people who use an ACE inhibitor. Of these, it occurs in only 3 people who then get switched to an ARB. So 3 out of 10,000 is a pretty rare side effect. If your horse is in need of treatment for West Nile Virus your Veterinarian may contact Dr. Moskowitz at ..." (link removed)
Editing to add this, quoted from another message board in 2004:
"I did some snooping. Dr. Moskowitz IS selling something. He hopes to eventually market the use of ACE inhibitors for a profit. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but I have a few concerns. His site says:
'GenoMed invites physicians to join its Clinical Outcomes Improvement NetworkTM in order to bring the latest in genomics-based medicine to your patients. Of the $800 annual subscription fee paid by your patient to belong to GenoMed's COIPTM, the physician is paid $200 in exchange for managing the patient and updating GenoMed on the patient's clinical course. Thus, a physician with 1,000 hypertensive or diabetic patients in his/her panel could earn an extra $200,000 annually while delivering superior outpatient preventive care.'
Apparently, the "Clinical Outcomes Improvement Program" (a term that is actually trademarked) is not a formal clinical trial. Will the patients who purchase this membership first be informed that their own physicians are receiving a financial incentive for promoting the therapy? There is a conflict in such a patient/physician relationship that I doubt will be made transparent. Will the "clinical outcomes" be reported in an unbiased way?
Might he eventually promote this therapy for "post-lyme" symptoms to the exclusion of antibiotics? The last thing we need is a company with a financial interest in rejecting evidence of chronic lyme infection.
It turns out that ACE inhibitors and ARBs are separate classes of drugs that nonetheless achieve similar anti-inflammatory effects. I checked Dr. Moskowitz's patent applications and it appears that he claims a right to the use of ARBs only when combined with the ACE inhibitors. But the people at
www.sarcinfo.com use the ARBs quite successfully without combining them with the ACE inhibitors. So why would anyone pay Dr. Moskowitz's licensees' for the privilege of using ACE or ACE+ARB when ARBs alone will work?
The mere discussion here of the possible use of ARBs for Lyme should constitute "public disclosure" and should therefore preclude any right to patent the use of ARBs for Lyme. I'm therefore uncomfortable with the prospect of a company with the incentive to marginalize the evidence that ARBs may be an effective surrogate for ACE inhibitors.
If you want info on this from people who in fact have no financial incentives, see
www.sarcinfo.com They explain the rationale behind this approach in much greater depth than you will find at Dr. Moskowitz's web site."
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