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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."
This is cool becasue Barry Marshall was a junior doctor who saw something he couldn't explain and decided to investigate and test it, in classic geeky fashion. He even tested the theory by drinking H.Pylori and got the mother of all stomach aches afterwards.
This proves that it is still possible to do great medical research in the mould (sorry) of Fleming and Penicillin, and you don't need a $100m research budget.
He suffered a lot of problems getting the medical establishment to believe him, and it took at least 20 years, but once it did, the Nobel was bound to happen sooner or later.
Good on you Bazza
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
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?
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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)
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.
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After his work in .au, the good doctor came to work at the University of Virginia (just up the road from me) where he treated, among other people, a fair chunk of my wife's family. It seems the bacteria in question is rampant throughout the ground water system in Natural Bridge VA.
Re-infection can be a serious problem for people in areas like that. Apparently much of his work at UVA dealt with susceptibility studies and clustering. Fascinating guy.
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No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
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
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Perhaps another reason for delay in acceptance of these findings, was that up until the early 90's the * worlds biggest selling drug * was one that inhibits stomach acid production and under patent - unlike cheap as beans & generic broad spectrum antibiotics.
Rather chilling when you consider one of the body's mechanisms of protection against bacteria is stomach acidity. Hence why European versions of this drug include the ancient antibiotic bismuth (also found in a famous pink stomach medicine)
So treating a symptom and possibly making it worse in the long run; good business plan - almost as graceful as nicotine enlarging airways and easing breathing: early adverts recommended cigarettes as a cure for bronchitis!
I am not sure if there is an English translation, but the web site has some excerpts.
"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.
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.
It does have its dupes too.
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.
Well, you can do two things to have proper cholesterol and blood pressure.
:) will get rid off the salt builtup.
OPTION 1. Excersise. Muscle fat will cause more BP problems than fat on outside. Salt buildup is the major cause of high BP. Aerobic excercise for a few hours every week (you have to sweat
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.
So excercise and eat good fats (poly/unsat to sat ratios matter. Good is olive oil. Bad is pig lard or coconat oil) instead of crap and your cholestorol and BP will be good.
My BP used to be 160/90. Now excercising for two years and it is 110/70. Still have to watch the salt intake and if I eat too much I'll have to go "excrete" it, but whatever.Salt retention in the evolutionary time scale was a good thing because you need it to prevent dehydration hence most people's bodies tend to store too much of it. And now they eat too much of it and you have the results we have.
OPTION 2. Get pills and pills for pills. You will need statins that can screw you liver. These will set you back a few hundred $$$ a year. Then you will need some high BP medication. That will set you back a little too. Now the problem remains with extra fat causing all sorts of problems including cancers. You will probably need drungs for that...
Now you are old, fat on all sorts of drugs. Probably can't move around very well. Well, you will probably get some drugs so you can stare out the window.
But whatever. Most people WILL chose the 2nd option because it *seems* easier. It is, in the short term. Very short term.
A human body is a machine that will break if you DO NOT use it!
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.
A ground-breaking discovery usually confers little to no "benefit to humanity" in the year it is made. Sometimes it does take decades for humanity to benefit from the discovery (and more importantly prove the discovery is valid).
If the awards were given out in the manner you recommend then the two new Lauriates would never have received thier prizes. Thier discovery was not recognised in the year they made it. Just because it takes a long time to convince the medical comunity that your discovery is valid should not mean that you are inelegible for a prize.
Wouldn't it be irritating if two amazing, world changing discoveries, were made in the same field in the same year (a cure for cancer and a vaccine for AIDS perhaps). Who would you pick? The way they currently allocate the awards they have a degree of flexibility
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).
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