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Nobel Prize Awarded for Stomach Ulcer Discovery
gollum123 writes to tell us the BBC is reporting that the Nobel prize for medicine has been awarded to two Australian scientists for their work with ulcers. Their research has shown that the majority of ulcers are caused by bacteria and can be cured with a short-term course of drugs and antibiotics. From the article: "Dr Marshall proved that H. pylori caused gastic inflammation by deliberately infecting himself with the bacterium. The Nobel citation praises the doctors for their tenacity, and willingness to challenge prevailing dogmas."
The Nobel Prize committee is almost as slow as Slashdot. The actual discovery, per TFA, was made in 1982.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Are not caused by stress?
PHew! Thats a load off my back!
.....that's giving me indigestion.
Their research has shown that the majority of ulcers are caused by bacteria and can be cured with a short-term course of drugs and antibiotics.
How stringent are the doctors in testing if you have an ulcer or not before handing out the drugs?
"Dr Marshall proved that H. pylori caused gastic inflammation by deliberately infecting himself with the bacterium. The Nobel citation praises the doctors for their tenacity, and willingness to challenge prevailing dogmas."
:)
Only in Australia would scientists prove how a medical condition occurs by deliberately infecting themselves with it.
Nice one mates
Several years ago, I had an ulcer because of that bacteria. It's quite something to think about what life would have been if something like this was never discovered. I wouldn't be doing so well right now I would think.
He actually found a cause, and proposed a cure. Most modern barbers are happy to continually treat symptoms since that's what brings in the big bucks.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Dr Marshall proved that H. pylori caused gastic inflammation by deliberately infecting himself with the bacterium.
Yeah, yeah. I'm sure he was trying to find the cause of ulcers. Pffft. Why doesn't he just admit it. He wanted to become a super-hero so he infected himself. He forgot one important step. The bacteria was supposed to be radioactive first!
This was one of the first discovieries but today we know that inflammation is the cause, or at least plays an important role, in lots if other diseases. Heart disease, rheumatism, diabetes, etc.
In related news, Anonmyous Coward recieved the Nobel prize for his work with the renound slashdot community. Allowing moderators to use their extra karma points, rather than loose them. Also mentioned was the work by the world famous D.U.P.E. group for their constant disemination of the same information, over and over again.
I would love to see a similar discovery for the IBS.
How much is can someone pay for a cure of something that can not be cured?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Infect the researchers.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Now if only the evolutionists had someone like that working with them!
Oops, here come the monkey police to mod me into oblivion, proving the point.
Possibly the best quote from a scientist ever (my emphasis):
From another BBC article
Mr Warren said he was a "little overcome" by the award.
"It is nice to be officially recognised and it gives some sort of a stamp of approval, but we believed it within a few months because it was so bloody obvious," he told reporters.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Stomach Ulcer or 'Brain' from Ninja Turtles?
Dr. Marshall was aided in his research by four unnamed heroes. Says Marshall: "When the stomach ulcer attacked, those boys didn't cut it no slack."
About time this happened.
;) ), and a month later, she's fine!
My mother was the unfortunate sufferer of a stomach ulcer for almost 30 years of her life.
One day, her doctor finds out she has it (after all, who keeps trying to fix a 30 year old condition that hasn't killed you yet?), and gives her the newly recognised course of broad-spectrum anti-biotics & neutralisers (since the stomach is kinda hard to treat, acidic n all, tends to destroy the anti-biotics before they have an effect
It's scary how long it took for the standard opinion to get torn down, and how simple the final answer really was! In hindsight, the original theory sounds decidedly suspicious. Stress, indeed.
ashridah
It's too bad that the Nobel Prize was created to reward promising new scientists and to give them enough funding to continue pursuing their research unabated. I know that the society deviates from its original purpose, but the fact still remains that the Nobel Prize selection procedure is about 10-20 years too late to make the impact it was designed for.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Smart thinking. You either get a Nobel Prize or a Darwin Award. A win-win situation.
They are actually indeed caused by stress. When your immune system's function is severely inhibited during long-term stress, your body's ability to fight bacterial infection is weakened to the point that H. pylori can easily reside in your stomach and cause the ulcer.
So, stress is involved, albeit indirectly.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Dr Marshall proved that H. pylori caused gastic inflammation by deliberately infecting himself with the bacterium
just 1 step away from winning the darwinian award.
There's also the problem of the committee unofficially rotating the prize among subdisciplines in a given field, and sometimes a glut of important work. To me, this is somewhat weak for a Nobel prize (which naturally still makes it an incredible discovery), so it isn't surprising this one waited for a while.
And all this time I thought it was the pizza, beer, nachos and salsa I cram into my face daily. Now that I know it's bacteria, I have to make a call for some anti-biotics...and another double pepperoni!
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
I found out I had and ulcer and all I got was blood in my stool?
Dr. Marshall worked for my dad while he was in Perth. My father said that he was not especially brilliant, although competent - but he was extremely hard-working. Perhaps this is why he did get the Nobel Prize.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Does anyone else feel that the Nobel Prize organization has started to loose its stature? Not to say its meaningless, but just doesn't carry the wait it use too.
The way I see it is that it could be for a few reasons; it seems that they give out too many, they have become overtly political (we all remember during the iraq war, regardless what side you fall on). Maybe you have other reasons? Maybe I'm way off.
Does anyone else feel the same way as I do?
While Dr Marshall's courage and technique are richly deserved, hopefully, the good doctor will find an occasion to acknowledge the giant from whom his technique originated.
Dr. Jekyll was too much before his time to be considered for a Nobel Prize, but certainly the evidence suggest Dr. Jekyll was the true father of Dr. Marshall's technique.
Ever heard of a bleeding ulcer, vomiting blood and all? Yes, people have died from this.
The only reason you don't hear about this anymore is the cause is known now. It was a very serious problem when I was a kid.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
According to the schedule on the website, chemistry gets awarded tomorrow and peace on Friday.
Meanwhile, on September 29th, the 2005 Right Livelyhood Awards, also known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize', were announced. (Link to RLA homepage)
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Years before this discovery was made, stomach ulcers like so many other health problems always used to be labelled by the doctors as a "stress" or "lifestyle" related condition, without any proof that anything more definite than that was really directly responsible. Even to this day, it is amazing that medicine still has literally thousands of loosely-defined medical "conditions" and "syndromes" which have no known specific cause but which are nonetheless given proper names for doctors to use as convenient diagnostic labels. Doctors are still trained to diagnose these "conditions", rather than to think harder about possible underlying cause(s). The two scientists in this story were brave enough to challenge the conventional wisdom of their peers that stress and lifestyle factors cause stomach ulcers. It's interesting to wonder how many other "conditions" are actually caused by undetected bacteria or viruses which are waiting to be discovered by scientists prepared to challenge the prevailing dogma.
Scroogle
And to think that I managed to make the same mistake TWICE...
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
One of the more interesting items about this bug is that while it appears to cause stomach cancer, it also seems to protect against esophageal cancer:
y lori.shtml
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/04_03/p
It also seems to have some sort of effect on reducing acid reflux. Scientific American had a great article about a year ago or so about this bug and how it works. Very interesting reading.
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
I had h. pylori, was treated for it, and had an ulcer 6 months AFTER I was treated.
m eCHAR=item2&methodnameCHAR=resource_getitembrowse& interfacenameCHAR=browse.cfm&ISSUEID_CHAR=4A323396 -2B35-221B-6CAC6761F49DBCB0&ARTICLEID_CHAR=4A41516 6-2B35-221B-66FE5BDD02F9CA34&sc=I100322
http://www.sciamdigital.com/browse.cfm?sequencena
This is a protection element, and is not the cause of ulcers, but they are related.
Google 'TMS sarno IBS'.
I found out about this from an AC on Slashdot, and it has radically improved my life. I'm passing it on.
He infected /himself/? I thought that was what TA's and Post-grads were for.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fortunately, this is a very easy thing to diagnose and treat. I'd never had a problem with heartburn, but in the past several months it has become unbearable. The doctor gave me a blood test for H. Pylori, which came with very high levels of the bacteria
I'm actually currently taking a treatment for it. One of the common ones is a combination of three drugs. Two antibiotics (for me Amoxicillin and Clarithromycin), and a PPI (Proton Pump Inhibitor - like Nexium, Protonix, or a few others - I'm taking Prevacid).
The only draw back to the treatment is its a LONG 14 days of strong medicine. Makes your stomach feel horrible to say the least.
But the point is, I'd rather a couple weeks like this, then years of popping antacids. My thanks go out to these pioneers.
"The Nobel citation praises the doctors for their tenacity, and willingness to challenge prevailing dogmas"
. pdf
/Zdzich
It's now obvious for me that Cold Fusion is real but the researchers still have to fight with similar dogmas.
Hope, that in a few years this case will be finally clarified.
Documents library:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
Recent news:
http://www.newenergytimes.com/news/NET12.htm
Book about CF:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona
There is conference planned in Japan (November 27 - December 2):
http://iccf12.org/
Have a nice reading!
I am not sure if there is an English translation, but the web site has some excerpts.
This discovery was made in 1999 at Trinity College Dublin? http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:GzTA7YEzxLgJ: www.trinitybiotech.com/data/press/17_07_00.doc+pyl ori+trinity&hl=en&lr=lang_en
What's been done here that's any different?
How come the good Dr hasn't patented this method of curing stomach ulcers ? He should by rights be a very rich man by now, the fact he has been awarded a Nobel prize for his discovery proves it was certainly non obvious.
What exactly is "stress", and why is is still being used as an explanation in the medical establishment. This sounds less like science and more like voodoo. (apologies to any voodoo priests in the audience)
Mohandas Gandhi
"We propose that this condition is not precipitated by an agitated state of humors, but by tiny microbes". The stress model of disease has always been a bit too subjective and artificial for me. Stress is still generically cited as being responsible for heart disease and depression. It's not even so much that stress is blamed, but the assumed endpoint of a personal reaction. Stress is supposedly something we can control... a reaction to the events of our day. Treating as it presently is, it's almost like a supernatural power. Stress may be associated with events and feelings, but it's also a cascade of chemical messengers that are amenable to study. Why not dig deeper into what reactions and dynamics the release of glucocorticoids and norepinephrine induce? There is a medical prejudice against things brain related. If diabetes was primarily associated with a mood disorder, would it have been researched as well? I guess the special case argument for the ignorance of microbes in ulcers has to do with the assumption that bacteria don't grow well in the environment of the stomach, but still. Any identifiable condition that is currently written off as an intangible artifact of one's personality type seems ripe for rediscovery, and there are still plenty, especially in gastroenterology and physchiatry. It's no surprise to me that this discovery was in the GI field. It's this lack of basic research that keeps open a market for herbalists, homeopaths, and their ilk.
Well said! The sooner we accept that we are no different from plants or animals (ie: just a bunch of chemical reactions), the sooner we'll start doing real science.
Do we really want that? I am looking forward for another high budget commecial telling me the side effects of taking thier drug will do to me. The treament is worst than the disease.
Chris Rock said it best. "The last thing in this country that was cured was pollio." "thier ain't no money in the cure."
Dude, do you have to work that contentious subject into every thread no matter how thin the connection? You are giving me an ulcer! (Maybe I'll get a Nobel citation in 20 years for discovering this ulcer causing item.)
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Ulcer
First: Does H. pylori eradication lead to increased incidence of Barrett's esophagitis and esophageal cancer? Maybe. The jury is still out. The Japanese have just published a pretty comprehensive review (Japanese Journal of Clinical Medicine. 63(8):1383-6, 2005 Aug)on the subject. The increase in one may be more common with the eradication of the other. Fine. Are they casually related? That's a more complex question that I think the research is sorta investigating. I dont think Scientific American really has the answer.
But that's not the major issue. Stomach ulcer is a condition that PRIOR to the triple treatment (bismuth + antibiotics + acid inhibitors) would take months to years to heal. Some anecdotal stories as long as 6 years. More. Sometimes never. Leading to serious, serious complications that have even worse prognoses. You see what I'm getting at here. Quality of life years lost are huge, affecting huge chunks of the population. Known risk of causing stomach cancer, perforation of your guts (think your guts spilling into your abdominal cavity) and iron deficiency due to chronic bleeding just for a start. Now we're saying... OK. It MAY result in reflux, eosophageal cancer and Barrett's (cells in your eosophagus changing morphology).
Hardly the "eliminating H. pylori is worse than the symptoms created by too much of it." If anything, what this might suggest is that there might be some unwanted complications to altering the internal milieu of the stomach, and they should be addressed. Full stop. Sky's not falling yet, pal.
Drug companies don't like this kind of science (i.e.. that actually gets to the science behind the illness). Antibiotics are a few bucks for an entire course. They want you on chronic meds, not "cured."
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Excellent points... however... I had an H. Pylori infection and no ulcer. Doc gave me strong AB's and after the regiment, my stomach WAS worse off. The key here is to add PRO-Biotics because the regiment of AB's kills ALL bacteria (bad: H. Pylori as well as good: L. Acidophilus, L.Rhamnosus,L. Plantarum, B. Longum and B. Bifidum,,etc...). After I returned and told my doc that I feel even worse than before, he just told me to get some Pro-bio's. The key here is to take the AB's alongside with PB's and you will be fine.
I mean, just think about what faith is... No matter how much evidence goes against what you believe, you will still believe it anyway.
Faith is an essential means to remain optimistic in an uncertain world. Faith is belief in the face of doubt / the absurd. Faith is arguably very important to scientific discovery, lest one doubt their hypotheses.
On the other hand, blind believe in the face of evidence strikes me more as dogmatism. And there certainly has been a lot of that in the history of science.
-Stu
Didn't we already know that a bacteria is what causes ulcers??? I could have sworn that I've been hearing this for years now. Am I wrong???
It's similar to Lynn Margulis' discovery that the mitochondria were originally their own organism and have since been integrated into our cells. She first made that claim in the 1980's, and only now has it started to become accepted dogma. It takes time to change minds, and she's still working on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
I saw the story about this discovery about 10 years ago on CBC's The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. The ingrained medical community was very slow to pick up on this important discovery, which is a shame. Antibiotics met similar resistance [pun intended] when they were first discovered, and I think it took about 10 years for them to be finally put to widespread use, during WWII.
After I saw the TV show, I told anyone who complained in front of me about ulcers, that it was probably treatable with antibiotics and drugs if their doctor did some research into a cure. I still meet people who don't know about H. Pylori bacteria, and I suspect that a great deal many other inflictions of our bodies could be caused by as of yet, undiscovered microbes making us sick.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
But can someone tell me which drugs and antibiotics I should give to my PHB in order to cure my ulcers?
On the other hand, there is a radio Doctor that I used to listen to, Dr. Gabe Mirkin that has preached for years about treating adult onset asthma with anti-biotics. As far as I'm aware, he's not an internist- but he does read a lot of medical journals with a doctor's eye, so he was one of the early ones to pick up on the work on ulcers and infection, and preach about that on his radio show. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any doctors that were willing to try and treat my Asthma with antibiotics. I can only hope that sometime before the asthma kills me, I at least get a shot at trying to cure this disease, rather than just playing catch-up with the symptoms.
N.B.: Dr. Mirkin was also one of the early people to preach about using Fen-Phen for weight loss. While it was effective for some, it could also be dangerous. I think this is the risk of any new treatment- but unless we take some risks, we will never have progress in medicine.
The very same people who you claim are on the search for "truth" are the ones who laughed at Marshall when he first put forward his claim. In fact at a speech he gave he said "I see some of you big shots in here are the very same ones who denied me funding".
Truth is not always something you can measure with a ruler. Is there some sort of absolute measure of the beauty of a sunset or the value of a child's laugh? Yet it is absolutely true that these things are valuable. Science unifies based on scientific principles yet scientists are just as capable of being greedy, hateful and prejudiced as any other person on the face of this planet.
The "discovery" that ulcers were caused by bacteria was by accident - when someone having "ulcers/stomach problems" took PepTo- Bismul. Voila no more uclers! The Bismuth killed of the bacteria. Imagine the millions of people who were tortured by medical doctors for 20 years and more - operating on assumptions, rather than on scientific research. The only thing we don't know is how many other dis-eases that exist in medical schools have no basis - no scientific basis.
For example, initial research shows that the build up of plaque in the arteries ("hardening of the arteries") is caused by bacteria! Yes the same bacteria that cause plaque on teeth!
Even worse, there is not one scientific study that shows that cholesterol has anything do do with heart dis-ease!
Nor is there one scientific research piece published in a scholarly scientific journal with peer review that states that "HIV is the probale cause of AIDS"! And on and on. How many treatments, drugs has no basis for being using? At least 50%!!!
By the way I am tired of getting a troll designation or 1 or zero for my replies/posts etc. on the site. Just because some of you are illiterates (like most medical doctors) shouldn't prevent you from expanding your horizons and using google more - rather than relying on Wikis or your limited knowledge.
How is this offtopic? Sure it's offensive and crude but bearing in mind that Dr. Marshall infected himself with the bacteria to prove his theory the above post is most assuredly not offtopic.
Concerning an excess of heat. Don't forget that putting interstitial hydrogen into a metal is an exothermic process. We could generate heat, in fact we scared the h*ll out of ourselves with one of the 'deuterium gas in titanium' experiments. It generated so much heat that we were afraid about the strenght of the container. Pure hydrogen exploding into air could really ruin your day. This also produced counts in a neutron detector, but these were consistent with the known temperature sensitivity of the detectors. So, we did see heat, but only heat that could be understood in terms of basic chemistry.
I will state that I was rather skeptical of the whole topic, but I did work for the DOE and I would have been happy to be proven wrong. Free, clean energy is worth more than my pride. So, even if the odds were a million to one against success, the DOE is justified in studying this topic. There just were not results that could be reproduced. As Fermi noted, 'Anything worth doing once is worth doing twice.' If you can't do it twice, it isn't science.
Please, prove that this works. But extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Finding a way to overcome nuclear forces (potential barriers of millions of electron volts) with electrostatic forces at THERMAL energies (tens of milli electron-Volts)is an extraordinary. Perhaps something like sonoluminescence can produce very high localised temperatures in a jar of water, but this produces light with a few electron volts. The probability of particles tunneling across a barrier varies as exp( -E/kT) as long as E is millions of electron volts and kT is around 60 meV, you have a number like exp(-10^7). These basic considerations make CF an extraordinary claim. Where is the extraordinary evidence?
Think global, act loco
This Nobel-winning research open up some people's minds that other chronic diseases might be due to infectious agents also. Some people have suggested that artery plaques and inflamation- the precursors of heart attacks and strokes- might be caused by germs such as a variant of the clymadia bacteria. Some people suspect a role in cancer too. Only a couple of cancers are known for sure such as Karposis and Hep-C liver cancer, but others are suspected. Considering that decades of low-level research havent firmly resolved the issue one way or the other, its still somewhatof an open question. Should the answer be "yes, some", then other kinds of phrophlactic treatments could be suggested.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fair enough, fair enough. And you've made some reasonable (although unsubstantiated) points that, while unconventional, are certainly not trollish. I don't necessarily agree with them, but that's just fine.
Oh, and there you go. Now since that's pretty much the textbook definition of a comment deserving, "-1 Troll," being both innacurate and inflamatory, you'll probably get dinged for this one too, as well you should. Just not by me. But if and when it happens, it's not for the main body of your views - or at least it shouldn't be.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Flame bait? No! - ha ha ha like I said - illiterates
I think that this label is a little misleading. If memory serves, the "short term" course of drugs and antibiotics involves four different antibiotics used in pairs over several months. Heliobacter are some truly resilient critters. You have to use them in pairs partially because the heliobacter become resistant, and partially to avoid completely ruining your intenstinal ecology.
Admittedly, this is short term compared to the years of antibiotics that some people wind up using, and it's better than living with an ulcer for the rest of your life.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Nor is there one scientific research piece published in a scholarly scientific journal with peer review that states that "HIV is the probale cause of AIDS"!
I doubt there's a scholarly scientific journal with peer review that states that the sky is blue, either. I'd better go outside and check.
"...starting sentences in the subject line and finishing them in the body is annoying. Just so you know."
Just because you think so?
I don't have a sig.
... is an autoimmune condition. Not even remotely viral in origin.
The anticipation... waiting by the phone for a Nobel. Man, would have given me an... oh, nevermind.
Well, it took two decades, but Robin Warren and Barry Marshall are finally being honored for making sense of something we pathologists had all seen right in front of our noses but ignored.
What I really love about their work is that it was done with the conventional clinical tools that had been available to pathologists and gastroenterologists for decades, even in non-academic venues. Their example illustrates that great work can still be done without employing multimillion-dollar labs, big grants, and multi-institutional cooperative groups.
Ed Uthman, MD
Pathologist, Houston/Richmond, TX, USA
No one is really sure about the differences between IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrom) and IBD (Inflamatory Bowel Disease), but they very likely may be either related or different stages of the same disease.
Crohn's Disease, which is a subset of IBD, has been show relatively conclusively to be primarily caused by a bacterium -- Mycobacterium Paratuberculosis (PARA -- see http://www.crohns.org/) and can be treated relatively effectively by antibiotics.
Unfortunately there is little drug company money available for research for using antibiotics to cure diseases. Drug companies were the source of much of the resistance to the Helicobacter theory of ulcers, for ulcer medications used to be a huge source of profit for them which was largely wiped out by the simple, effective cures developed by these researchers.
Similarly, in Crohn's research, there are millions of dollars being poured into monoclonal antibody researched based on the autoimmune theory, while very little into finding effective antibiotic regimens -- or into preventing the contamination of our food supply with PARA which is a primary cause in the first place.
IBS in particular may or may not be bacterially related, but there is another theory that one of the primary causes of IBS in particular is actually simple lactose intolerance, but few doctors will warn you about how harmful drinking milk can be.
Score one for the aussies. In best American fashion, Dr Marshall was snatched up quite some time ago and has been a professor at Univ of Virginia for the last fifteen years, where he's been proving and developing techniques out of his discovery.
l l_barry.html
http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/10_04_2005/marsha
Many of us who went through med school there figured he'd win it eventually. It was interesting that I'd never know Marshall was at UVa from the BBC article.
Hello Phreak
I bet Dr. Barach was not alone when he thought ulcers were caused by bacteria. Then again, that's not enough to make a discovery. Surely, just like him, there were hundreds others who though it was bacteria, or something else.
There is confusion in general, about who is recognized as the inventor or discoverer of something. You might think that the first person to have the idea shall be the one prized with the discovery. It normally is not like that. The reason is that, along we having the idea, you must do the research and publications that comes with an idea. Its easy to say, ulcers are caused by bacteria, or the world is round or planets move around the sun... but to prove it beyond doubt, that's the difficult, and, now days, expensive part.
This is why Columbus is credited with discovering America, not the Vikings or Chinese, that are known to have been here first, or, why Copernicus is credited with discovering that planets move around the sun, though Greeks and others knew it before, and this is why the guys who risked their life eating bacteria are the ones credited with this.
What do you think ?
He suffered a lot of problems getting the medical establishment to believe him
:P
Do "a lot of problems" include stomach aches?
In hindsight, the original theory sounds decidedly suspicious.
I've heard that, after Hans Selye's work on stress, there was a period of sloppily using "stress" as a default "diagnosis" to explain away the unknown disease processes, such as gastric ulcer.
I remember discussing this with my graduate advisor in chemistry around 1992; he was glad to see someone persist in the face of criticism to understand what was really going on.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
He was willing to inoculate himself to prove his theories.
From the link:
Apparently Pasteur himself was among those awed by his stunning demonstrations of power over life and death. He developed a remarkably robust faith that he could do no harm. When, in an incident that Geison omits, Dr. Grancher, one of his assistants, accidentally stuck himself with a syringe filled with a virulent emulsion, Pasteur proposed that Grancher inoculate himself with the rabies vaccine and then, as if to conjure away any possible doubt about the wisdom of this procedure, offered to receive the first injection himself. Grancher, while more than willing to risk his own life, refused to jeopardize Pasteur's. Pasteur then ordered his nephew, Adrien Loir, to inoculate him. Loir refused but offered to submit to inoculation himself. Finally, Loir inoculated Grancher, whereupon Grancher treated Loir and a third assistant, while Pasteur looked on. It is hard to read this episode as anything other than a ritual of expiation: for all their profession of faith in science, these were men anxious at tampering with the deepest mysteries.
(Later, in the same link: )
one veterinarian had gone so far as to agitate the tubes containing the lethal serum (lest Pasteur inject some sheep from the top of the liquid and others from the bottom) forswore his doubts once the results were in and even proposed to inoculate himself with the most virulent strain of anthrax--after immunization, of course, with Pasteur's vaccine.
This is both amazing and interesting, since both scientifical discoveries (vaccines, ulcers) were related to bacteria.
My father in law has gastritis - he usually picks a piece of aloe leaf and simply puts it into water for overnight and drinks it the next morning.
,and according to wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastritis/
It really works. Also with wounds, scratches, whatever else, we just pick a leaf (it is a thick meaty leaf that has a gel inside) and rub it on the wound. It is the same idea with gastro problems, it helps to heal wounds.
Damn I even use it on my dogs (big rotweilers that like to play rough and have bleeding ears and stuff sometimes).
O.K. it's about gastritis
is not necessary an ulcer or cancer, but I thought that might be interesting and relevant here.....
For proper cholesterol, well, stop eating *#$#$#* crap fats. Cholesterol is made by your liver based on the type of fat you eat.
Polyunsaturated fat - lowers total cholesterol levels
Unsaturated fat - increases good cholesterol
Saturated fat - increases bad cholesteros
Transfat - liquid plastic that'll make sure you get a quad bypass.
Much more important is to stop eating ALL polyunsaturated oils (hydrogenated oils/transfats are usually made from polyunsaturated oils), and replace them with saturated oils.
Fats that are less-than-fully-saturated quickly go rancid when exposed to oxygen.
The saturated fat in beef has been slandered in recent years as being unhealthy. It's not that the beef itself is unhealthy, but that most beef cattle are raised with an unatural diet that includes a great deal of polyunsaturated fats, in the form of grains/soybeans in feedlot animal feed.
Coconut Oil and its Virtues
The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the Fallacy That Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease. (intro chapter in PDF form)
The Tragic Legacy of CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest - instigated the anti-saturated fat campaign of the 1980's)
Also see the rest of the articles on fat at the Weston A. Price foundation site.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Inflammation caused by bacteria. Bah! This is old news. I cured my Crohn's Disease with this diet.
t y_information.jsp
http://www.breakingtheviciouscycle.com/
I spit in the face of all drug companies that make drugs that cure you of one thing and give you Lymphoma.
http://www.remicade.com/global/understanding/safe
I can speak from experience that there are still many unknowns regarding why ulcers occur, even though H. Pylori is the main culprit. Before my freshman year of college I had never had any history of ulcers, but one day I started feeling a slight pain in my stomach. Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night in the most horrible pain I have ever been in and started throwing up everywhere. The pain was so terrible I couldn't even move out of my bed, but fortunately my room mate was there to call 911. It turns out I had somehow developed an ucler that caused a perforation in my stomach. A hole had been literally eaten into my stomach and it wound me up in the hospital for over a week.
The scary part about this was none of the doctors I went to had any idea what could have caused it. The H. Pylori tests came up negative, I was too young to have an ulcer that severe from stress, and I didn't have any family history of it. How can you develop a hole in your stomach over such a short period of time and not be able to explain it? Very scary.
They must have improved on the technique since I read about it (like seven years ago, I think). I'm curious, was it tetracycline? That was the major one on the original list.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Nobels aren't generally rewarded for utility; I've seen that they're awarded for major turnovers in science. This may not be the greatest treatment in the world, but realizing that ulcers were caused by bacteria after several decades of the medical community saying that it was stress is pretty impressive.
Be glad life is unfair, otherwise we'd deserve all this.
Well, according to Kimball Atwood IV of Skeptical Inquirer (here [csicop.org]),
Ahem. Why are you dragging religion into this?
Mod parent down. Nobel prize is not about utility. It is about the depth of the discovery, and while the discovery might have not been "against all odds" (whatever that means) it was most definitely against the (overwhelming) prevailing consensus. This is why the discovery is scientifically so remarkable, these guys were able to go against the current and find the explanation for ulcers. All the power to them, and well deserved Nobel. By the by, it also speaks well of the scientific community that they can recognize the error in their ways and so honor those who did so.
I thought there was a phase back in the 30's or so of trying penicillin as a treatment for everything? I'm amazed this connection wasn't made until 1982. How long have we been treating open sores with antibiotic ointment? I know since at least 1982, since that's the year I was born, and my mom's always had a tube handy to smear into my wounds, exacerbating the pain.
This whole story becomes even more interesting when you understand that vets and farmers have known that ulcers in pigs were caused by the same bacteria since the 1940's. Suggestions that the same mechanism might apply to humans have been made since long before 1982 and were soundly rejected by mainstream medicine until this "breakthru"
Yet this very year, 2005, my mother's GP refused to give her antibiotics for her ulcers. When I asked about it, I was told not to interfere in the dr-patient relationship. When I finally got her to another Dr., she immediately issued antibiotics. I have been heard to wonder aloud how many people have suffered needlessly, or even died because mainstream medicine refused to look at this "discovery".
My hat is off to Dr. Marshall for his tenacity. We need more like him.
I don't see why this is relevant. Doctors who prescribe medications see not a penny of profit from their sale.
I am a physician, and I have received the occasional pen, note pad, or (once in a long while) a meal from drug reps. Put together, the value of all the freebies I have received from drug companies in my entire career is certainly less than I make from my practice in a week. I have not asked for lavish junkets or cash payments, nor have I ever been offered them.
I prescribe what will work best for my patients, without regard for who profits. Not only do I not take orders from the drug companies, but much of the time (to the drug reps' immense frustration) I can't even remember which company makes which drug. Nor do I care.
The same goes for the AMA, which the conspiracy mongers seem to think controls the brain waves of every doctor in the country. I'm not a member of the AMA, and if someone turned up in my office saying he was from the AMA and intended to tell me how to practice, I'd call the sheriff to throw him out.
Barry Marshall has the respect of every physician, and deserves it. To say that his ideas were intentionally suppressed to protect drug company profits is beyond ludicrous.
The whole affair is just a manifestation of Occam's Razor: extraordinary claims (which his indeed were at the time) require extraordinary proof.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
who discovered the origins of flatulence? sadly, his useful work will never be recognized.
Unsubstantiated? Most points of view expressed here by most people here - are unsubstantiated. And it appears to me - that as long one sticks to the "status quo" viewpoint - its OK. But - if one (me) deviates from those "Status Quo" viewpoints - then that makes me a troll or some other bullshit label.
Again no scientific proof that: HIV=AIDS, that people cause global warming, that "global warming" exists, that most prescription drugs do anything positive blah blah. On the other hand its unlikely that that software writers understand anything about learning, that Creationists are not Phsychotic, that Apple gives a crap about its consumers (the bottom line?= monopoly) and so on.
Lastly - when I use the term "illiterate" - def. "3 : showing or marked by a lack of acquaintance with the fundamentals of a particular field of knowledge."
Is the sky blue? And how much do you want to bet that I can find several articles published in a scholarly scientific journal with peer review - that states that the sky is blue? The fact is that you (and others) are illiterate - def: "3 : showing or marked by a lack of acquaintance with the fundamentals of a particular field of knowledge" and have been schooled so well (brain washed?) into believing anything that comes from "authority" figures - especially people in white lab coats. Have you heard of Pavlov?
I did follow the SI link and the article is garbage. It uses numbers in an attempt to argue that the discovery was received warmly, while if he had read the actual articles that cite it, or attended the meetings where it was discussed, he would have seen that the result was received rather harshly.
And isn't this how science usually works? Or does it merely involve routine research in which nothing contentious happens?
I remember reading about this in Discover magazine back in the 80's... early 80's too...
The cure was Salts of Bismuth - which is basically 90% of what's in Pepto Bismol... Antibiotics are nice, but depending on the level of bacteria, you can usually knock it out with the Pepto... 6 weeks of Pepto if I recall correctly...
>We noted an excess of counts in the neutron detectors only once, and that was during a thunderstorm when the electronics could be expected to be exposed to electrical noise.
/.), maybe they have confused noise with the real stuff, but maybe you have dismissed something interesting (thunder producing neutrons) as 'electrical noise', funny no?
Or due to the thunder? I've read that some have measured that thunder create fusion which release neutrons..
Take it with a *large* pint of salt: I'm not a scientist and don't remember where I've read it (maybe on an article linked by
Sure, the discovery was a slam-dunk, but the real story is how it was supressed by what is now Glaxo. They were making a pantload of money off proton pump inhibitors- if people actually got cured by a simple 8 week course of antibiotics, they could kiss an $US 2 billion dollar a year revenue stream. They literally made these guys' life hell for years- research grants were yanked, and worse.
It's nice to see the good guys win for a change.
And of the many meetings where it was discussed, in what context were these meetings and how many did you attend?
You don't need to attend a meeting to know what happened. There is such a thing as minutes and/or witness accounts. I read about the controversy very early on, perhaps around 1987 or so. The article had direct quotes of some rather harsh attacks on the original proponent including IIRC pointing out the fact that he was a doctor (not a researcher) employed in a not so well known institution, while on the other hand, many famous researchers at very famous places had systematically searched for evidence of bacterial infections as cause for ulcers and had found none.
Now, one can argue that skepticism about a result that contradicts previous research is a healthy thing, but this does not make the reception to the original research any less harsh than what it was, and many people expressed such skepticism in rather impolite language.
Or does it merely involve routine research in which nothing contentious happens?
Most science involves routine research. Only a few privileged minds ever get to make breakthroughs. Those lucky few are usually awarded prizes, just as in this case.
Well, the benefits have to be weighed up next the side effects. In this case it is an elegant solution. It is relativly easy to isolate helicobacta infection as the cause of the ulcer or stenosis (either gastrocopy-biopsy or or a simple urease breath test) and treat it through tripple drug therapy : amoxicillin plus clarithromycin plus omeprazole(proton pump inhibitor).
One might ask why some people are effected worse than others (for example in poor countries childhood infection seems to lead to greater adult ulcer and cancer rates) but these guys found an important solution to a real life problem.
Instead of "knowledge management", I've often wondered if it's more appropriate to talk about "ignorance management". What can I responsibly not know....
-Stu
Could one be more correct in saying he drank it? Which is what he said on news reports here in Australia. Unless i'm totaly off my tree :|
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
It's kind of funny - I've just be going along, living my life.. Then a couple years ago I "develop" a typing injury. Bump from one incompetent M.D. to another. I didn't think they were incompetent at the time, they just didn't know how to help me.
Finally I end up going to an Doctor of Osteopathy who specializes in Osteopathic Manipulation. He's like, "yeah, you're fucked up. I can fix you, no problem." And he does his ten-fingered medicine, and I slowly but magically start to feel better. Neat.
And over the course of the treatments, I realize that my being "fucked up" didn't start with the typing injury, or the head injury which preceded it by a year. My mom reminded me constantly last fall of what a "difficult baby" I was, as I was always crying for not provocation. Especially compared to my younger brother, who "would just coo...". I was crying because I hurt - "mom, please help". Mom takes me to my M.D. pediatrician, "nothing's wrong with him, he'll grow out of it." It's kind of weird to realize that I've been "fucked up" for my entire life - I have no idea what it means to be normal.
While it's true that some osteopaths go to D.O. school because they're somewhat easier to get into, more and more students are CHOOSING D.O. colleges because they believe in the philosophy. My Osteopath discovered the benefits of Osteopathy when a D.O. took away back pains that he'd had since injuring his back in a martial arts class 7 years earlier. 3 visits. Now he has the occasional patient who's been dealing with a health problem for TEN YEARS, and he's able to fix them in a single visit.
My D.O. isn't cheap. Unless you consider what I would go through with an M.D. - expensive tests, expensive drugs, expensive surgery. So, when I look at how I could be throwing money at not getting any better (at worthless tests, worthless drugs, and worthless surgery), I'm perfectly happy with his payment policy (cash or check, $175/20 minute visit, bill your own insurance).
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I can say for sure that it was not 20 years.
His technique for a cure for ulcers was starting to spread around the world by the mid 1990s, so 13 years after his discovery.
I know that for sure because around 1995 or so, I had an ulcer, and the initial diagnosis said to put me on a diet and give me a Zantac like medicine. The diagnosis including an endoscope and a video tape of it.
A few months afterwards, the same physician has moved back to the country we are both from.
I visited him in his clinic there, and he said there is a new technique which relied on taking a sample from the stomach lining and putting it on a test slide which turned from yellow to green if there were H pylori in it. Lo and behold, it did turn green. An antibiotic course for some 6 weeks cured me from it.
He told me that he asked for the new tests at the expensive hospital but they would not listen.
Now, it seems to be even easier, the test is conducted through a breath analysis: no need for endoscope or biopsy.
These bacteria thrive in a highly acidic environment. Acid does not protect us agains them, that's the point why they are in our stomaches in the first place. They are (1) very acid resistant and (2) generate ammonia to neutraize the acid down to acceptable levels.
H.pylori is eradicated with a combination of an antibiotic[s] (e.g. amoxicillin) and a proton pump inhibitor (e.g. omeprazole). The latter one radically lowers stomach acid levels, to allow the stomach lining to heal. If low (vs. normal) acid levels would help the bacteria to survive, this scheme would never be used.
I am afraid this is a very arrogant or very naive view, but one that most doctors take.
Take your head out of the sand mate:
http://www.nofreelunch.org/
The lightning neutrons that RenoX referred to are here: http://www.physorg.com/news6674.html
I have also worked with BF3 neutron detectors around high electrical fields, and I have also seen noise effects on the detector. In my experience, the counts which were caused by electrical disturbance only occurred during nearby spark-out incidents. If you were working indoors without high electrical fields present, it is most likely that your spikes were caused by the lightning neutrons, and not by the electrical effects. This of course, presumes that the neutron events that DYAIZA saw were not actually broadband noise events. My Russian is rusty, so I haven't checked out the original paper to see if that might be the case.
With regards to cold fusion, I used to hang out on sci.physics.fusion back in the day, when cold fusion was still fairly controversial and Jones, Blue, Mallove, and others would discuss their experiments. I have always thought that the interstitial energy explanation was the correct one, and I think it should be brought up whenever cold fusion is discussed. The claims of excess energy never seemed to take into account the energy of putting the hydrogen into the interstices, and the process of doing this was always the bugaboo when discussions of "If it works, why don't you build an engine" came up.
I do think that using the so-called "cold fusion" process as an energy storage mechanism could be interesting.