Slashdot Mirror
Possible Breakthroughs in Cancer and AIDS Research
FortKnox writes "Two possible medical breakthroughs have come to light in recent days. In Australia, it was discovered that pineapple extract can stimulate the body to attack cancer cells. And in Japan, Kumamoto University researchers have developed a drug that will block cells from the AIDS virus, thus making something akin to an AIDS vaccine." From the Australian news: "One of the molecules, CCZ, stimulates the body's immune system to target and kill cancer cells, the other, CCS, blocks a protein called Ras, which is defective in 30 percent of all cancers. QIMR researcher Tracey Mynott said her team had set out to find why the enzyme-rich bromelaine crush had such strong effects on biological material."
Still no cure for can...er, never mind. Well, the people over at FARK must be really disappointed. They'll have to come up with a new tagline!
From TFA:HA! I told my guidance counselor that all that beer drinkin' would pay off eventually... ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Never tried it, but I do like Orange Crush...
Bromelaine Crush is so much better than Orange Crush.
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
Time to go buy some stock in Dole!
Oh I can see it now... Healthy, Tasty Pineapple Flavored Cigarettes that have no Surgeon General's Warning.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Cures for a lot of diseases probably already exist but there is no money in curering people, just treating their symptoms. You really think drug companies care about your health?
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
Herbal Pineapple extract Spam in 5... 4... 3...
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I just KNEW they were good for me!
The latest Slashdot meme.
old news
1: Planta Med. 1985 Dec;(6):538-9. Related Articles, Links Inhibition of tumour growth in vitro by bromelain, an extract of the pineapple plant (Ananas comosus). Taussig SJ, Szekerczes J, Batkin S. PMID: 4095199 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
1985.
At least it's not a dupe.
I just hope these don't fade into the background as a lot of these types of things do. i think the world is ready for some cures...
Now they should use "Fundable" to hold the cure hostage until they receive 1 MILLLLLLLION dollars! Or is that only for open source software?
Maybe I'm getting jaded these days, but it seems that every other week we have an announcement about a revolutionary breakthrough that's going to cure all these terminal conditions. And yet, we don't really seem to see masses of cancer patients getting cured outside these laboratory studies, in the way that antibiotics swept away most bacterial illnesses. Survival rates are up, sure, but most people are still dying and these conditions are still considered more or less terminal. Are the Powers That Be simply sitting on a bunch of cures, or do these things never turn out to be as promising as they were in experimental trials?
Scientists discover new substances that offer progress in the fight against cancer and HIV.
Still no cure for bartenders who put fruit in beer.
Zonk submitted these stories to Fark many hours ago, with less-funny headlines?
...oh wait, now I understand, he has a MAGIC JOHNSON!!! I'm always the last to figure it out.
Slashdot must be a little starved for news these days. I didn't even bother to read the HIV paper. There are so many compounds that can block entry of HIV into its target cells that one new one is not exactly a breakthrough. Ditto for the bromelaine - there are many many compounds that will kill cancer in vitro. How everything will work in the actual patient, that's something else entirely. Please wake me up when some realistic coverage of modern drug research is posted.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Does this mean that, at least in theory, I could cure myself of cancer just by eating a lot of pineapple? How much would I need to consume?
So, if the drug prevents HIV from entering cells, what's the difference between that and immunity? My guess is the virus can still enter the bloodstream...
Making a vaccine is one thing, getting it to Africa is another thing entirely. Last I read, drugs exist to treat the "Sleeping Sickness" but aren't readily available because it's not profitable to sell them to the poor Africans...
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
That's such a great cover. I wonder what the "almost no" side effects are, like "all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light".
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
Anyone interested in AIDS science, who wonders why HIV is so misunderstood, would do well to start here and read a bit:
http://aliveandwell.org/
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink =1564149
Read this last night.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
He's clearly the ripe man for the job.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Now I'm gonna start getting spam from Dole touting their miracle cancer cure...
Well, cancer stuff is cool and all, and I know you all love to comment on anything involving fruit... but I think the AIDS blocking research is a bit more interesting, personally. Not that I have AIDS or anything, but it would certainly be nice to be rid of it, especially in Africa.
"pineapple molecules"
Pineapples have molecules of their own?
"AIDS virus"? AIDS is not a virus
HIV - Human Immunodeficiency Virus
AIDS - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS
Why pineapples?
FWIW, HIV is the virus, AIDS is a descryption of a condition when your white blood cells drop below a certain level.
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
If we're going to express our support for getting this research funded do we all have to wear little paper umbrellas on our lapels?
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
This was obviously a result of the successful G8 summit!
:)
The terrorists are defeated!!1
Local to St. louis here. There has been an ad on the radio about an AIDS vaccine being tested here. I was wondering if anyone else knew anything about it. The ad is for volenteers to go in to be a part of the study...you can't get AIDS from it and yadda yadda crap. Why exactly do we have fifty billion research companies all looking for the same answer and none of them are working together on it?
Bad news for Trojan good news for Hasboro.
Malaria kills about a million Africans a year, but we hear less about it and more about HIV, despite the massive funding gap for malaria. Especially since there are cheap and effective measures against malaria which are not used because of a simple lack of funding.
Hey hippies---are you happy you got DDT banned now? All those dead Africans say thank you!
But seriously, there are some moderately effective drugs, and treated mosquito nets (covered in a bug-eating fungus, apparently) have been used to great effect.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If you're dating an immunologist, you ought to be smart enough to spell "lose".
"Ah beer. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."
Homer was right after all.
The laws of probability forbid it!
Good one!
... can be cured by a single pill. Some of them, such as diabetes, require external supplements for what the body can't create. Granted, things like stem-cell research can lead to the ability to (re)grow islet cells to make one's own insulin, but otherwise...
Since people get all bent out of shape about GM foods, I doubt they'll be too interested in GM people. Cuz that's what a gene-based cure is - get the body to do something it can't do now.
Or, will people take the cure and not the tomatoes?
The effect of enzymes on cancer has been
known and in use by the alternative
health community for decades.
Look up Wobenzym N and see the history.
shares of Dole will skyrocket on this.
antipaucity
humans!
d y-had-a-simple-solution-since-day-one, i.e. quit screwing around
for most-effort-put-into-solving-a-problem-that-alrea
now for the next category, most-bodily-gases-expelled-in-a-minute, the winner is...
the Verticons!
I wonder how my imaginary girlfriend will feel about this...
>if it succeeds it will seek a commercial partner to develop a drug that could be used in human clinical trials.
What they are saying is, "Unless we find a patentable and highly profitable way to secure this discovery, We won't bother."
I welcome the return of more natural remedies. These drug companies aren't happy until they turn a natural remedy into something with side effects.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
They're working on one right now...it's called 'Christian Fundamentalism'...preliminary trials have shown it to be moderately effective against Islam, but studies suggest that this 'cure' may be even more dangerous than the 'disease'.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This just in: SpongeBob is celebrating quietly with Tinky Winky at his home in Bikini Bottom.
This space for rent
However, your anal objection to the phrase "AIDS virus" in completely unfounded. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. AIDS uniquely identifies this particular virus, and so in English, the phrase "the virus that causes AIDS" can be shortened to "the AIDS virus" without any loss of meaning or correctness.
In fact, the phrase was probably intentionally chosen to intensify (or sensationalize) the mental image conveyed by the story.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
If I said "Tonka truck" I suppose you would tell me Tonka isn't a truck, it's a company.
"AIDS virus" is a common synonym for HIV. To put it in other words: "the virus that causes AIDS".
I wonder how long it will be until the world begins to wake up and realize...
Why is this news? Scientists continually find all sorts of things which look good in the biology lab but don't work in real life.
First, the Yahoo news article does not a cite where the findings were published, if at all. Did Zonk try to find the actual reference? I bet.
Second, we know lots of things that cure cancer in test tubes, but fail miserably when it comes to working in people. The article states they haven't even tried any clinical trials yet. My guess is that it won't work when they actually try to test it in people, if for no other reason than pineapples are pretty popular and we would have seen an effect on cancer rates in epidimeological studies long ago.
This is good example of how the slashdot editoral board is pretty much comprised of a bunch of computer geeks who've hardly ever cracked open a science textbook in their lives, much less worked in a real lab.
Ever think about getting some editors on this site who actually have taken a real science course or two?
Let us know how your herbs and ritual dances work on your cancer tumors, okay, Sport?
You don't want to know what he pays for a pair of gloves.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Back in the day, when one wrote a NSF grant proposal to fund the isolation, identification and synthesis of natural product, one always included prominently the fact that in vitro - in a Petri dish, the desired compound killed cancer cells. Hey presto - now it's an NIH grant proposal as well. The keywords antitumor, anticancer, etc. in the title were magic.
Of course, these never became actual medicines. One realized over time that a sledgehammer will kill cancer cells in a Petri dish. As will a stick of dynamite or a teaspoonful of sodium cyanide or just driving over it with a Buick.
Once you take into account that human biological system is slightly more complex than the Petri dish system, you will be less excited by the breathless prose of headline writers.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Well, only those that travel to Malaria-infested parts of the world do.
Rich White Americans DO get HIV. Expecially those with multiple sex partners.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
As a biomedical researcher who has worked on cancer mechanisms in the past, I speak with some authority: these "breakthroughs" are a load of hooey. The popular press really loves it when some dinky little research group at Bumblefuck U. discovers a modest effect on cancer cells, HIV, etc. by some commonplace natural molecule. We've heard it about pineapples, green tea, broccoli, red wine, you name it. Usually these studies are conducted under extremely artificial conditions using tiny sample sizes and ambiguous assays. To be cynical, if researchers want to get a positive result, they can usually contrive some experimental condition where they'll observe said result. I read Slashdot for interesting technology items but I have been very disappointed with the caliber of the biomedical coverage. There have been a number of stunning discoveries over the last few years (two that leap to mind are microRNA-mediated viral immunity and gene regulation or epigenetic memory in plants) that never made it to Slashdot because they require more than a high school level education in biology to appreciate. Evidently, mod points don't go to people with an advanced knowledge of biology. How would you feel if all of tech stories were press releases from Microsoft?
I'm starting on the pineapple colored wristbands. Only a dollar to support pineapple research.
We wouldn't have most of the medical science that exists today if it weren't for capitalism. No, it's not perfect, as I imply above, but this "System X is the reason for all misery in the universe" is down on the zero level of intellect.
Ooooo! BIG EVIL CAPITALISM!!!! Grow up, you silly, uneducated fool.
How would you test an AIDS-type vaccine on real people? Give them the vaccine and then have them shoot up with a dirty needle? Not many volunteers for that.
Perhaps asking for volunteers in Africa (very high AIDS rate) might work though... if a noticable decrease occurred in the test area you've got a winner...
Well this sucks, I HATE pineapples! any chance of a pill form?
Free electronics!
If someone finds a no-side-effect, affordable, treatment or vaccine for HIV, the drug companies that hope to make money off of HIV won't like it, and they'll take steps to delay it's entry into the marketplace.
Thank goodness it's HIV we are talking about, the politics of HIV will limit how much of a delay industry can force without looking like the bad guys in the media.
Another prediction:
If this looks promising, a major drug company with an existing drug will invest enough money in the project to exert some kind of control. Those controls will include keeping the price high, at least at first, and scrupulously following FDA requirements to force delays.
On the other hand, the best outcome may be that a drug company WITHOUT a stake in the game will invest heavily and use their influence to get this to market sooner rather than later.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Work with the gist of the story. Its like the guy in CS class complaining the professor didn't put a semicolon on the blackboard pseudocode.
Safety is a real problem. Lots of things kill cancer cells or have other useful medical properties. The problem is that too many of them also screw up other cells or bodily processes. Rapidly dividing cells, such as those in the digestive system and hair follicles are often hosed by cancer drugs (hence the nausea and hairlessness of cancer treatment patients). I'd also worry that anything that accelerates immune function leaves the patient prone to autoimmune diseases. Sure, I'd rather not die of cancer, but if it means I get MS, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, hypothyroidism, etc., then I (and the FDA) might think twice about approving the drug or really calling it "a cure."
Only about 1 in 5000 drugs gets approved (and I'd bet that all 4999 rejects started out promising). And only 1 in 3 approved drugs makes money for the company (i.e., is actually used to treat the number of patients that the company expected).
I truly wish them the best of luck in finding new treatments for cancer, but I also recognize that the odds are stacked against the new drugs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
And there's a cure for ebola, measles, smallpox ... abstinence from society. Total abstinence. That'll knock 'em dead.
There's a cure for auto accidents, too, called the M1 Abrams tank. Mileage sucks, maintenance sucks, cost sucks, but by god, if we only let those people drive who could afford Abrams, why, we'd cut deaths from auto accidents down to almost zero.
Or maybe you'd prefer banning automobiles altogether. Yeh, that'd stop auto accidents. Yeh.
Get real. Expecting humans to abstain from sex except with their spouse is about as real as expecting people to stop speeding on the honor system. Especially when the number of people with AIDS in the US is around one million; one in 300. And with the incubation period being on the order of ten years, it sure isn't on people's minds all the time, especially when they get drunk or just plain feel good. Are you going to ban alcohol and feeling good too?
It's real nice to spout platitudes about morality and abstinence being the only known cure, but it isn't a known cure because it doesn't stop transfusions or needle sharing spreading AIDs, and there are far more practical methods like using condoms. Are you part of the crowd that turns your nose up at recommending condoms to stop AIDs because it encourages amoral sex outside marriage? Must be nice to not have shit that stinks.
Better to have a solution, condoms, which is widely used, even if it is only 95% effective, than some psuedo cure, alleged to be 100% effective, which is unusable in practice.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Moral twerps have their heads up their asses.
Infuriate left and right
In Russia there is a serie of books by Mark Zholondz.
:-)
About cancer, he tooks a number of biology books, counts forces of immune system, and even in ideal scenario, where immune system is not required to deal with diseases, poisons of outer environment, nor old and dead cells of our body - even then immune system would have enough soldiers to defeat only 33% of cancer cells. So there is another enti-cancer system in our bodies.
Perdon my English.
I wonder if some medical student with good knowledge of russian was interested to translate those broshures to English
Let the summer of love commence!
"C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung"
The supplement people advertise it as good for digestion rather than as a substance which helps fight cancer though.
It's interesting how much scientific evidence there is now for the medical effects of what are basically just food supplements. I started looking into this stuff when my finger joints began aching after 10 years worth of typing for 8 hours a day. (Sorted BTW)
e.g. The following all have scientific studies backing up the claims.
Glucosamine and chondroitin helps fight arthiritis, there's animal research showing that they may also help with sports injuries to joints.
Omega 3 oils significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks. They also help significantly with brain function; memory, concentration. They also help with joint suppleness and skin health. (Cod liver oil, fish oil, flax seed oil)
St Johns Wort contains a mood enhancing compound which has a significant effect on minor depression. As effective as stuff like Prozac, with fewer side effects.
Lycopene, from red fruit like tomatoes helps prevent prostate cancer.
There's a load more. This isn't to say that all health foods/supplement claims are valid and if you have a problem you should see your doctor, but the saying "you are what you eat" certainly appears to be true.
Deleted
in Japan, Kumamoto University researchers have developed a drug that will block cells from the AIDS virus, thus making something akin to an AIDS vaccine.
:
Ok, first of all, an *HIV* vaccine (AIDS is a syndrome, not a virus) is NOT akin to what they are talking about here. Although the article is woefully unsourced, the drug they are talking about is probably what they call a Fusion inhibitor. It basically keeps the virus particles on an HIV viron from interacting with the CCR5 receptor on the outside of a macrophage cell. Normally a HIV viron would be able to shut down the cells functioning by attaching to the CCR5 and thus gain an easy target to penetrate and infect.
This drug class, while becoming more popular and good for those extremely drug resistant who are being treated with anti-retroviral meds, is not going to do anything but supress the virus a bit in it's current state in an already infected person. Once infected, you always have HIV. Fact. HIV has far to many ways to attack the body (cell-to-cell mediation, inducing an autoimmune response, etc). There is also no big trials mentioned. I'd like to know what stage theirs is in, but 40 people is NOT a big test group. It takes a much bigger one to test a drug, and even then, 'AIDS miricle drugs' don't have a great history (see AIDSVAX).
Finally, an excellent article to read on everything HIV/AIDS is Wikipedia's AIDS article. Educate yourselves, please people. If I hear one more person afraid to pick up gum cause they think 'they'll get the AIDS', i'm gonna seriously wreck up the place.
--
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
in Swahili Kumamoto translates to Hot Pu**y
Check for yourself.
Kuma moto
I thought I was going to have to get circumcised.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
From dictionary.com:
Abstinence isn't a cure, abstinence is a form of prevention. If abstinence was a cure all you would have to do if you got AIDS is not have sex for a period of time.
The only thing abstinence cures is a marriage. If neither partner has ever had sex before, especially with each other, then it's a shot in the dark as to weather or not they will have a healthy sex life once they are married. What if one loves sex and the other doesn't? What if one person thinks the other is horrible in the sack? The quickest route to divorce is a bad sex life. There's no way in hell I'd ever consider getting married before having sex with the women unless she was either rich (in which case if it didn't work, I'd get half her dough) or she was otherwise the perfect women in every way. Drop dead gorgeous, funny, smart, healthy, in good spirits almost 100% of the time, employed, energetic, willing to cook and clean if I handle the yard work, willing to be the primary caretaker if she wants children, willing to put up with all of my bullshit, willing to not complain that I spend "too much time with the guys", willing not to complain if she feels that "I never take her with me when I go out with the guys", willing to leave me along when I'm watching the game ... aka ... a women that doesn't exist.
So in closing, you enjoy your abstinence and your either failed or unhappy marriange when you realize you don't click with your wife sexually, meanwhile I'll be chasing tail and really having a good time and when I finally do settle down and get married it'll either be a long and happy one or I'll come out of it rich.
I don't think that's the method they used in the studies, but if it works for you, fine.
And you must have a huge pair of hefeweizen.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
when a certain lab releases it's groundbreaking work on literally raising temperature inside human cells to destroy cancerous cells, while non-cancerous cells survive quite nicely.
I was at a talk about this a month ago, and we're talking about 50 percent of all cancers.
Now, as to how one delivers the temperature, that's actually not as hard as it sounds.
You heard it here first.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know how popular those pineapple suppositories are going to be.....
There have been others immune found, and they are being studied. Been known about for many years, apparently started as an urban legend in the new york gay scene but was found to be true.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
I'm going to go buy some of the pineapple extract (bromelain) tonight and start taking it daily.
I have a bad case of melanoma (stage 4), and while there's still some hope in traditional treatments and clinical trials, I need every advantage I can get. If bromelain slows the growth of the tumors even a little, it's a huge help in combination with the other things I'm taking. And if it doesn't help, it probably won't do any harm. It's just natural pineapple extract, and it's been consumed for years.
I'm taking artemisinin (sweet wormwood extract) for similar reasons, though I do have to be careful with my dose of that because it's somewhat hard on the liver. I'm also waiting for an order of Vitamin B17 (amygdalin/laetrile) to arrive. The latter was somewhat hard to track down because of a stink the FDA raised about it a few years ago.
Dietary supplements alone won't cure me, but they just might help, and as such it would be ridiculous for me not to try them.
-John
As a biomedical scientist working in the field of HIV and immunology research in the past 15 years (having published over 40 papers in journals like Nature, Science) I fully and completely agree with Yeasbeast's comment. Where are the peer reviewed papers on these "major breakthroughs"?? If there was really a true breakthrough in either HIV or cancer research it would make it headline in Nature, Science or Cell, sorry to say /. headline only enhances these pure BS hype, because most don't quite understand the nature of biological research and discovery.
Happy Friday!
There's a town in northern italy where a significant number of people are now immune... the immunity is a great chat-up line :)
Evolution in action!
I apologize for reading your post as a neocon rant. The Bushie crowd loves to spout about abstinence, and that is the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions it.
As for morals, no, everyone has morals. My rant was about the holier than thou moralists who deny everyone else having morals that bugs me. It's bad enough that they are so smug as to assume they, and only they, know the One True Path, but when you peek behind the curtain, they all seems to have been practicing the opposite of what they preach. Then put them in charge of the Bushie's plan for fighting AIDs, and it only means that they will have no effect whatsoever on stopping AIDs.
Again, mea cupla on misreading your post as a rant from one of those holy hyprocrits.
Infuriate left and right
She let me taste that sugar whole and I wanted more
Great concept, pineapple juice.
...NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Hey hippies---are you happy you got DDT banned now? All those dead Africans say thank you!
Got news for you - it isn't banned. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDTwikipedia, and you'll find that it is definitely in use in Africa, and other tropical areas "where mosquito-borne malaria and typhus are greater health problems than DDT's potential toxicity."
Try checking your facts before you start calling names, would you?
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
And start buying Dole stock!
I know this may be sort of thick of me, but does immunity also imply that you won't carry it?
I've been following for some time an oncolytic (viral) treatment that targets the RAS pathway, which is referenced in this article. The human reovirus targets cells with a disrupted RAS pathway, infecting and killing them.
Some great pictures can be seen here
The "CCZ molecule", states the article, "blocks a protein called Ras, which is defective in 30 percent of all cancers."
So there's a little bit of precedent, here.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
THe healthcare prices that Americans pay carry all the rest of the world when it comes to medical research! THat is why our American drug prices are so high, why our American healthcare costs so much!
isn't that what the rightwingers say whenever they encounter arguments that the other countries pay much less in healthcare?
Yeah....and where was cloning first accomplished?
Yeah....uh huh....we Americans are carrying the rest of the world when it comes to medical research. Sure....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Back when they were first discovered (1990s), these symptomless carriers seemed like they could have been the genesis of a separate species. Children that they had with other symptomless carriers would have HIV and only be able to have survivable offspring with other symptomless carriers. Given time we'd have separate gene pools.
Around 2000 or so, they figured out how HIV- children could be born to HIV+ mothers. So there won't be any separation of the gene pool. Due to sexual recombination, if there are no disadvantages to this adaptation (like sickle cell anemia), then the gene may quickly spread throughout the species. Quickly meaning hundreds of thousands of years rather than hundreds of millions.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Hate to burst your bubble, but "News for CS Nerds" implies that the most of the people here have taken CS Theory classes, and have a rudimentary understanding of discrete mathematics/linear algebra.
Mostly it's uninformed quips.
Don't even get me started on hardware stories on slashdot, most people here have no idea how a transistor even works.
Most people don't.
"Homepathic" does not mean that it's natural, herbal, or any of this.
Homeopathic means that the medicine is expected to do its work through sympathetic vibrations.
One of the odd things about this idea is that supposedly, the less of the active ingredient there is, the more intense the vibrations, and the more effective the "medicine".
The result is that the most intense, most "powerful" homepathic medicines are literally nothing but water in a bottle.
Homeopathy is one of these 19th century quackery ideas that's been inherited by future generations without an awareness of the original form of the idea. A modern populace would never swallow the idea if they actually had to have it explained to them, because even ignorant people know just enough to think making something more dilute is not going to make it more effective.
People only believe in homeopathy because the word's been around for a while. Similarly, hypnosis clearly has a psychological effect, but the original version held that a hypnotized retard could outthink all the geniuses of history, and that by touching a tree, could charge the tree with animal magnetism that would hypnotize other people....
What it comes down to is that placebos work. They always have worked. They will continue to work. There are just some things that work better.
Note that quite large portions of the northern european population have increased HIV resistance (not total immunity, but enough that even with pandemic HIV it's likely sufficient europeans would survive past breeding age to keep european civilisation going) as various mutations that likely helped people survive one or more of the various plagues that swept through europe (e.g. smallpox, and The plague) also help prevent HIV entry into cells.
People don't generally make a song and dance over it because it lends fuel to the "AIDS is a western plot to cripple africa" meme, but google "CCR5 mutation" (note that several links will be disinformation).
Analyses have shown that the CCR5-D32 mutation spread through the european population extremely quickly 700-800 years ago as various horrible diseases swept through and the population crashed. People who think humans have stopped evolving or that evolution happens slowly are very much mistaken.
Specifically Lentinula Edodes (Shitaki), some Pleurotus species including P. Ostreatus (oyster), Grifola frondosa (which has strong anti HIV properties as well), Hericium erinaceous and many others have been shown to have medicinal properties including anti cancer - anti-tumour, and anti-colesterol. Not all species are effective for all ailments of course. Some of these mushrooms are available in the supermarket.
If you cannot buy them it is feasible to grow them... They make nice pets. They don't bark - they don't bite people - you don't need to take them for a walk and you sure don't need to clean up after them. Also - they only need to be fed once.
There is good information on the net and seminars are available.
I knew someone great who had had AIDS for twenty years without ever getting medication for it, who died of cancer three months ago.
To top it off, he died because the doctors didn't believe that he had a growing lump in his neck. They said they didn't have the funding to check such arbitrary nonsense (we have public health insurance in Denmark).
Cures for a lot of diseases probably already exist but there is no money in curering people, just treating their symptoms. You really think drug companies care about your health?
That's true, but you can't blame only the drug companies. The information is out there for how to cure things but almost nobody cares to look. I'm not talking about crackpot theories but successful treatments from serious scientists.
... I don't get WTF is up with people who think sex outside of marriage is okay? I mean shit, just live with her if you can't commit. I'm not referring to those people who get drunk or do something stupid and end up cheating, but specifically to the crowd that thinks it's okay to get married and have sex with other people. It isn't really about morality either, it's about logic. What fscking point is there to getting married if you want to have sex with other people? Just to be able to say you're married?
More on topic, while I agree with the use of condoms, I think you put down abstinence a little too harshly. It's 2005 and guess what? Cold showers still work! No shit! So does spanking the monkey! Whoduh thunk it? STDs are a high price to pay for having fun with some skank, and as you pointed out, Condoms aren't perfect.
My main point is, people would serve their own best interests better using a little more self control. Stop having sex? No, but Jesus, use some fscking discretion. Be careful where you stick it(and for the ladies, be careful who you let stick/lick you). Testing for STDs is available and no decent person on the planet would object to that. It's not a matter of morality, it's a matter of self preservation.
So individual choices might have more of an effect than you think. I remember an interview with an industry exec where he explained that his children (I think) had cystic fibrosis, and that gave him perspective that inspired him to push for new and better drugs.
People keep cynically pointing out that you can make more money by simply treating symptoms rather than curing a disease, but that is a simplistic model that doesn't take into account a free market.
Suppose you make AIDS maintenance medications that keep people alive. Your lead researcher comes to you and says that he has discovered a medication that may cure AIDS completely. Do you research it? Hell yes, because if you don't your competition eventually will. And while the market might dry up for AIDS treatment, there is money to be made in the cure. Anyone who doesn't keep up with the market WILL wither and die. Just look at what happened to buggy makers, or what is currently happening with the **AA companies.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Curent HIV vaccines rely on the fact that people seem to suffer no ill effects of not having this receptor and are currently a main focus of vaccine research.
..........FULL STOP.
A much bigger story this week is the striking result of a clinical trial of male circumcision. Apparently circumcised men have a 70% lower risk of contracting HIV than uncircumcised men (see here). Though others have shown this anecdotally, proof in a large clinical trial could revolutionize HIV prevention -- particularly in sub-Saharan countries where HIV incidence is high and male circumcision is currently rare.
A word of caution: anything one puts in one's body can conceivably be either beneficial or detrimental. People have far too strong a tendency to believe that anything plant-based or "natural" cannot harm them.
You in particular sound like you've done your homework on the things you're taking, but I get nervous at the hordes of people who fill themselves with many plant-based drugs thinking they have nowhere to go but up.
Good luck with your struggle with melanoma; that's a rough lot.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Don't think "how good it would be", just open a site like /. and put bioresearch news, use RSS, tell everybody you opened this site, ... Maybe it's interesting enought to become an important site (I hope so).
Naturally occuring != homeopathic
You're quite right about tumeric, etc, but they're effective in strong doses.
To make a homeopathic preparation of tumeric you put a drop of tumeric solution in a swimming pool full of water. Then you let it dissolve, and take ten drops from that swimming pool and put it ten other swimming pools full of water. Then you bottle the water from those ten swimming pools and sell it as 'homeopathic medicine'.
If you believe (as in blind faith) in this technique, by diluting the molecules you're imparting the cosmic energy of tumeric onto the water and it's amplified by the dilution. You'll have trouble finding good studies on this in PubMed.
The best part is, thanks to the hydrological cycle, every drop of water on earth is, by now, a preparation of every kind of homeopathic medicine known to man.
So, grab a glass of tap water and slug it back. It's at least known to cure dehydration.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They do certainly shed some doubt on the treatment of aids.. with drugs such as AZT. None of the articles that counter the aliveandwell stance focus on the history of AZT. They rather just talk about how HIV causes AIDS... and even in that fail to tackle the faults that AliveAndWell point out in the correlation of HIV and AIDS. There is no causation... and limited correlation between the two afflictions. I'm not saying Alive and well is right... It's just there is insignificant evidence to fight for either side of the spectrum.
The reason I mention the simple solution is that I would prefer to see the money going to cure other issues that aren't behavior related. Certainly the various birth defects, alzhemier (sp?), etc... are better places to research as a behavior change won't solve them. I
Sure those birth defects are related to sexual behavior, if sex weren't involved then those births wouldn't happen more than likely. I've only heard of one case where a lady got pregnant without having sex, and that was during the US Civil War when a man got shot in the balls and the shot passed through and hit a lady, she ended up pregnant.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Imagine the peace the world would have if they would do that and legalize marijuana... for medicinal purposes of course
Legalize hemp altogether! The only reason it was made illegal via the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937 was because it posed a threat to some wealthy and powerful individuals. But even during WWII the governmemt encouraged farmers to grow hemp, making the movie Hemp For Victory to show them. Hemp is one of most if not the most industrially versatile plants there is. Hemp can be used to make things from cloths to rope to vehicles and can power the vehicle even. Rudolph Diesel designed his diesel engine to run on vegetable oil including oil made from hemp. Henry Ford, on his Iron Mountain Estate built a car that used plastic made from hemp and was powered by methanol he made from hemp. Thomas Jefferson wrote the first and second draft of the Declaration of Independence on Dutch Hemp paper.
FalconShould there be a Law?
According to this story [chinadaily.com.cn] (previously reported on slashdot), two women in China were found to be immune to AIDS. Why don't we just study what's different about these two chicks and mimick that!?!?! We already have the human genome mapped out, it can't be that hard for the proper gene therapists to replicate.
Actually there is some research going on like this. Some prostitues in Africa, Nairobi, Kenya , were found to have an immunity to aids so a vaccine was developed and was being tested. This story is almost 4 years old so I don't know if anything came from it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A tragic aside -- in the late 90's, there were several studies of prostitutes in Kenya who did not become HIV+ despite huge numbers of exposures. Some then took a break from prostitution, headed back to their rural homes, etc. but eventually wound up prostituting themselves again. After the break, several became HIV+, showing how tenuous "protection" can be (see here [jci.org].
CNN has an article on these, The search for an AIDS vaccine, 20 years on
FalconShould there be a Law?
I guess it's going to be a long weekend of explaing WTF is up with the pinapples slices in my hefeweizen.
If you brew maybe you can do what I think I'll try, adding some pinapple to your mash. I like how the Dutch brew using different fruits like strawberries and such and have wanted to try it myself. Now I've got a good reason to try pineapple.
Heading off to the Brew Shop
FalconShould there be a Law?
hefeveizen, to my knowledge, is a very yummy wheat beer (as opposed to barley).
I prefer a good red beer made with crystal barley, especially if I brew it, though it's been too long since I had a good weisenbeir (sic).
FalconShould there be a Law?
How many Americans know how to type special characters on an American keyboard? I know I don't recall how so I ended up finding a webpage that tells how then saved it. I think I'll be finding it even harder next year as I hope to be taking a class in Portugese. Then again maybe with practice I'll get better.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Oh great, does this mean Gays can fuck eachother and not worry about AIDS?