Yesterday we started internal routing for submitting the grant. As the grant is almost off of my desk, today I started rewriting the manuscript and rebuttal letter to peer-reviewers. Good reviewers do ask good questions that stimulate our thoughts. Hopefully in 2 weeks, revised manuscript should be sent to editorial office.
What else was I doing? ...I was doing some research for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) by reading general books, by researching literature, and by ordering some of the medicines available in the US.
Of course the original motivation for the small personal research was the COVID19 and to update my medicine cabinet in case of sickness.
Many should have already noticed that regular western medicines for viral infection diseases are limited. For symptomatic relief there are NSAIDs, cough suppressants, etc. But we were not even sure if it would be beneficial to use them for COVID19. Do you remember the rumor that we should not use ibuprofen?
Perhaps this is a good time for each of us and for medical community to summarize what knowledge we have got for COVID19 and what tools we have now to subdue ongoing pandemic, in exchange for 100,000+ people in the US alone and 4 months of time including the lock down.
BTW actually TCM is quite an interesting research subject. Although I am under impression that doing clinical research for TCM would be tricky for so many reasons, those TCM herbal concoctions can show unique medicinal actions for conditions western drugs are not good at handling.
I'd write about TCM later. It would be nice if my newfound knowledge on TCM turns out to be useful in my professional studies on genomic instability-associated diseases (i.e., cancer and Alzheimer's).
I guess my curiosity was not so pure in this case. But certainly the research was fun. Also, usefulness is important in medicine, isn't it?
[TCM ingredients]
