You Can Get Fluvoxamine

[TLDR: I paid $95 for a 10 minute video consultation with a doctor, told them I was depressed and wanted fluvoxamine, and got my prescription immediately.]

I’m not a doctor, and this isn’t medical advice. If you want information on the status of fluvoxamine as a Covid treatment, you can see the evidence base in the appendix, but interpreting those results isn’t my business.

I’m just here to tell you that if you want fluvoxamine, you can get it.

Years ago, some of my friends were into downloading apps that would get you a 10 minute consultation with a doctor in order to quickly acquire a prescription for medical marajuana. Today, similar apps exist for a wide range of medications, and with a bit of Googling, you can find one that will prescribe you fluvoxamine.

What’s required on your end? In my case, $95, 10 minutes of my time, and some white lies about my mental health. Fluvoxamine is only prescribed right now for depression and anxiety, so if you want it, my advice is to say that:

• You have an ongoing history of moderate depression and anxiety
• You have taken Fluvoxamine in the past, and it’s helped

And that’s basically it. Because there are many other treatments for depression, you do specifically have to ask for Fluvoxamine by name. If they try to give you something else, say that you’ve tried it before and didn’t like the side effects (weight gain, insomnia, headaches, whatever).

One more note, and this is critical: unless you are actually suicidal, do not tell your doctor that you have plans to commit suicide, to hurt yourself or others, or do anything that sounds like an immediate threat. This puts you at risk of being put involuntarily in an inpatient program, and you don’t want that.

Finally, you might ask: isn’t this super unethical? Aren’t you not supposed to lie to doctors to get drugs? Maybe, I don’t know, this isn’t medical advice, and it’s not really ethical advice either. I think the only real potential harms here are we consume so much fluvoxamine that there isn’t enough for depressed people, or that doctors start taking actual depressed patients who want fluvoxamine less seriously. As far as I can tell, there isn’t currently a shortage, as to the latter concern, I couldn’t really say.

Appendix

Again, this isn’t medical advice. You shouldn’t take any of these results or pieces of news coverage as evidence that fluvoxamine works and that the benefits outweigh the costs. I’m literally only adding this to cover my own ass and make the point that fluvoxamine is a normal mainstream thing and not some weird conspiracy drug.

Here’s the Lancet article, and the JAMA article.

Here’s Kelsey Piper at Vox:

One medication the TOGETHER trial found strong results for, fluvoxamine, is generally used as an antidepressant and to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. But it appears to reduce the risk of needing hospitalization or medical observation for Covid-19 by about 30 percent, and by considerably more among those patients who stick with the 10-day course of medication. Unlike monoclonal antibodies, fluvoxamine can be taken as a pill at home — which has been an important priority for scientists researching treatments, because it means that patients can take their medication without needing to leave the home and without straining a hospital system that is expected to be overwhelmed.

“We would not expect it to be affected by which variants” a person is sick with, Angela Reiersen, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis whose research turned up fluvoxamine as a promising anti-Covid candidate, told me.

And here’s a Wall Street Journal article headlined “Is Fluvoxamine the Covid Drug We’ve Been Waiting For?” with subheading “A 10-day treatment costs only $4 and appears to greatly reduce symptoms, hospitalization and death.”:

A small randomized control trial last year by psychiatrists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis was a spectacular success: None of the 80 participants who started fluvoxamine within seven days of developing symptoms deteriorated. In the placebo group, six of the 72 patients got worse, and four were hospitalized. The results were published in November 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association and inspired a real-world experiment.

…The three fluvoxamine trials were conducted while different variants were circulating, so there’s no reason to think the drug wouldn’t work as well against Omicron

Here’s Scott Alexander:

It decreased COVID hospitalizations by about 30%… I and many others take Luvox pretty seriously. At this point I’d give it 60-40 it works.

Here’s Derek Lowe.

Here’s the Johns Hopkins guidlines which recommend fluvoxamine for “Ambulatory Patients Early in Disease at Risk of Developing Severe COVID-19”. It also notes that this might be a bad idea if you’re pregnant.

And that’s it. Again, not medical advice.