In his book "Of the Epidemics" Hippocrates advises physicians that they must "have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm" (1). Facing the challenge of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, this advice remains as pertinent now as it was over 2,400 years ago. In response to the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic, physicians in desperation turned to the antimalarial quinine (2). It is disappointing that 100 years later, despite the emphasis on evidence-based medicine, the same strategy was adopted, owing to the highly emotional need to treat patients with "something." Faced with a new disease, numbers of patients that have in many cases vastly overwhelmed healthcare resources, and no available effective treatment, an extraordinary array of experimental therapies have been given to critically ill patients, often in combination. Whether this approach has harmed more patients that it has helped remains to be seen. Desperate times are felt to justify desperate measures. However, in this issue of the Journal, the case series by Du and colleagues (pp. 1372-1379) (3) demonstrates that access to basic critical care support, not experimental therapies, is the most important determinant of the high mortality reported in some SARS-CoV-2 series. Despite acute respiratory distress syndrome in 74% and shock in 81%, only 21% of cases received invasive mechanical ventilation. Many physicians across the world are recommending treatments even while researchers and regulators claim that the evidence of benefit is limited, and therapies should be tested in a randomized controlled trial. These physicians believe that the chance of potential benefit outweighs the chance of harm. However, safety concerns may be significantly underestimated since most of these drugs have never been properly studied in critically ill patients. For example, many of the experimental therapies used are potentially cardiotoxic, including hydroxychloroquine, ritonavir, lopinavir, IFN a-2-b, azithromycin, and methylprednisolone. As myocarditis is reported as a potential complication of SARS-CoV-2, if all these agents are used in combination, is it a surprise that very high rates of cardiac complications occur, such as the 60% incidence of arrhythmia reported in the case series from Du and colleagues (3) in this issue and by others (4)? IFNs are generally proinflammatory and may be deleterious in patients with hyperinflammation with high plasma IL-6. Anti-IL-6 monoclonal antibodies have been associated with cytomegalovirus reactivation, episodes of bacterial septic shock, and bowel perforation, particularly when combined with high-dose corticosteroids (5, 6). Many of these experimental agents have pharmacologic interactions with a large list of drugs commonly This article is open access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License 4.