Our favourite reference story: the ulcer conqueror

[whyRwehere]

There was just an interview on the BBC World Service with Dr Barry Marshall, and the parallels are all there.

[frodo]

There was just an interview on the BBC World Service with Dr Barry Marshall, and the parallels are all there.

It is a pity that medical institutions do not learn from their mistakes. They had a disease with no explanation, and they did not care about developing theoretical models, nor used scientific methods to disprove them. In retrospective, medical institutions behaved more like tribal healers that scientist in the case of stomach ulcer.

And they are doing the same now. Even if at the end CCSVI theory were false, this would not change the fact that all that I have seen comming from medical institutions is closer to superstition than to science. They try to keep on patients on their superstitions about drugs like CRABS, which are based in autoimmune theories, proven not valid in general (EAE reacts quite different than MS). They behave like the 15th century church with Galileo.

[whyRwehere]

Thanks for bumping this with a comment Frodo. I just listened to this again with my husband, and it really tells the story. I hope everyone takes the time to play it again, even if they already know about Dr Marshall's struggle. It's nice to hear it from the source...

[AJMcE]

I have not posted before, but here goes.
I am so pleased that the parallels between the Barry Marshall ulcer work and CCSVI have been pointed out. He spent a lot of time fighting against the then accepted medical view, that surgery was always required. He had to go to the extent of dosing himself with the bacteria before he was listened to. He was in the position of actually having firm scientific evidence, and it still took years before he was taken seriously.

[ConstableComfortable]

Great interview. One part jumped out...

"Here's the lesson, if you want to find the cure for ulcers there's 2 strategies .OK, What's the thought about ulcers? Oh they must be caused by acid. Lets study acid. That was the conventional wisdom. However, if people are studying acid for 20 or 30 years and not coming up with a cure, it might be a good idea just to scrap all that research and start from scratch. Hey what else is going on?..."

[Thomas]

Stress and peptic ulcer: life beyond helicobacter

BMJ 1998; 316 : 538 (Published 14 February 1998)
Susan Levenstein, adjunct research physician

Abstract

The discovery that Helicobacter pylori is a cause of peptic ulcer has tempted many to conclude that psychological factors are unimportant. But this is dichotomised thinking. There is solid evidence that psychological stress triggers many ulcers and impairs response to treatment, while helicobacter is inadequate as a monocausal explanation as most infected people do not develop ulcers. Psychological stress probably functions most often as a cofactor with H pylori. It may act by stimulating the production of gastric acid or by promoting behaviour that causes a risk to health. Unravelling the aetiology of peptic ulcer will make an important contribution to the biopsychosocial model of disease.

For this review of the role of psychological stress in the aetiology of peptic ulcer disease, I undertook conventional journal tracking and reference tracing, supplemented by Medline searches using Paperchase. The important keywords used in this search included peptic ulcer; duodenal ulcer—psychology; stress; life change events; and personality.

http://bit.ly/asp56S