COVID patients are crossing state and international lines to get treatment from this Houston doctor
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- He first made headlines for working more than 280 days straight at the start of the pandemic, and now, Dr. Joseph Varon is still counting.
"We've been doing this for 671 days as of (Tuesday)," said Varon, tallying the number of days he has been using his own COVID-19 treatment methods.
"We offer a treatment that we know makes a difference in the outcome of patients with COVID," said Varon, the chief of critical care at United Memorial Medical Center.
It's a treatment that, at times, put him at odds in the world of medicine, but has also garnered attention from families desperate for hope.
"They're in a situation where their family member is very sick and you can see their pain."
He says hundreds of COVID patients, from across the U.S and Mexico have transferred to him coming in by ambulance, medical flight, helicopter and even personal car.
"We recently had a gentleman who drove from Montana. He got in his car and drove from Montana and came to us because he wanted to be treated by our hospital," Varon said.
Varon added that people are traveling to United Memorial Medical Center, seeking treatment that other practitioners are not offering.
Co-developed with four other colleagues, he said they use steroids, vitamins, blood thinners and ivermectin.
"We use ivermectin in conjunction with all these agents and then we use zinc, we use melatonin," says Varon.
While Varon does not have UMMC's 2021 data, he said the hospital is seeing high success rates among COVID patients, "Our published mortality, which we published for 2020 was 4.4% when the rest of the country was 25%."
"I'm not going to beat them up because they did not get vaccinated. That was a choice that they made. I am going to take care of them the same way I would take care of somebody with an alcoholic condition or some other condition," said Varon.
