Medieval remedy for eye infections found to cure MRSA
48 replies, posted
I always wondered how they figured this stuff out. Like even when you stumble upon something from trial and error how do you know they didn't get better by themselves, or if it was something you gave them earlier?
[QUOTE=Mingebox;47428432]I always wondered how they figured this stuff out. Like even when you stumble upon something from trial and error how do you know they didn't get better by themselves, or if it was something you gave them earlier?[/QUOTE]
After generations and generations of doctors who tried things by trial and error and wrote down the stuff that stuck, there's plenty of opportunity for the random successes to stick out.
Their medical method wasn't really all that hugely different from today which is based on trial and error just as well, they just had much more limited diagnostic tools and less opportunities to try stuff, but you have to keep in mind it's often knowledge that accumulated over thousands of years, first passed by word, later by written tomes. And I guess there's a bit of intuition that comes to play when you have people die on you all your life and your whole daily task is trying to figure out how to make it stop.
[QUOTE=Mingebox;47428432]I always wondered how they figured this stuff out. Like even when you stumble upon something from trial and error how do you know they didn't get better by themselves, or if it was something you gave them earlier?[/QUOTE]
There was fuck all else to do back in the day. Might as well mash random things together and see what happens. Plus, once they figure a certain something out, they can mix it with a certain other thing and then apply it to random shit and see what happens.
this is how we kill the superbugs
goddamn witchcraft
[QUOTE=artDecor;47428557]this is how we kill the superbugs
goddamn witchcraft[/QUOTE]
Until it becomes resistant again.
What if a lot of those old home brew remedies did work (ones like this, not drilling a hole in your skull for headaches), but the diseases became resistant to them long ago, and now aren't resistant anymore because nobody uses those remedies?
[QUOTE=Swebonny;47428634]Until it becomes resistant again.[/QUOTE]
We just gonna need stronger witchcraft.
Power up these soul burners, boys.
[editline]31st March 2015[/editline]
Seriously tho, these bugs can't build resistance to everything indefinitely. Each new resistance they build is always at cost of some other vitality feature. You can't evolve efficient flight above certain size without having hollow brittle bones. Similarly a bacterium can't become resistant to everything indefinitely and stay as contagious and deadly as it is. Each new resistance is going to make the previous resistances weaker and/or compromise the bacterium's overall ability to rapidly expand or breed. There's no reason why wide enough variety of very different antibiotics couldn't keep us able to fend of worst of every illness, we just have to keep researching new antibiotics thoroughly and not use the current ones unless it's actually necessary.
Remember what antibiotics essentially are. They are a poison that kills whatever we want to not to be in the body, without killing or severely hurting us. The options for that are next to unlimited.
There's also quite perspective developments outside of antibiotics that could give us quite an advantage, like nanorobotics and advances in immunology, which aren't something you can very easily become resistant to.
Don't get me wrong. Rise of antibiotics resistant strains is a big issue and has to be taken very seriously, but as long as it doesn't go ignored, it's not all doom and gloom, either.
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;47426287]Wait, this is fucking [I]huge[/I], we have a working cure to a superbug. At least this gives us hope that, even in the worst-case scenario that antibiotics go tits up, we still have some chance.[/QUOTE]
It's really not that huge at all, to be honest. Acetic acid from the onion, anticilin (a known antibiotic) in garlic, more acid from the cow stomach, all applied to MRSA in vitro is of course going to kill it. Try injecting that into someone and the chances of it doing anything meaningful is unlikely. This sums it up:
[url]https://xkcd.com/1217/[/url]
I'm sure someone will argue that it's a great breakthrough because it was tested in infected rat tissue, but unless it was an actual live rat (it wasn't, it was just a sample in vitro again), that doesn't show much.
My mother almost died of MRSA, it was super scary because they just had to "wait it out"
She got if after a routine operation
hope we figure out how to stomp these antibiotic-resistant shits soon
[QUOTE=Deathtrooper2;47426079]Makes you wonder how many herbs or other strange remedies back then actually did work.[/QUOTE]
From what I gather though, its the herb salve not the dung and mysticism involved with it, like adding leaches and bloodletting would counteract any benefits this has, it makes you wonder how many good treatments were ruined by shitty mystics
I'm betting that the key to the remedy is some sort of friendly bacteria in the "bullock's gall".
[QUOTE=Buck.;47426278]And if you get one part wrong it doesn't work.
How did they come up with that shit.[/QUOTE]
Even before people embraced rationalism as a staple of early modern society, there were probably still those who practised the mystical art of science, men and women who lived apart from others and pursued the secrets of the universe without accepting ancient dogma handed down from social manipulators under the illusion of higher powers.
They were probably what the ancient world called "witches" and "sorcerers", with their works being misunderstood and perceived as dangerous magic and possible pacts with demons. After all, as Arthur C Clarke once said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Also, "they fear what they do not understand, and they despise what they fear". (not Arthur C Clarke specifically)
[QUOTE=ironman17;47429651]I'm betting that the key to the remedy is some sort of friendly bacteria in the "bullock's gall".
Even before people embraced rationalism as a staple of early modern society, there were probably still those who practised the mystical art of science, men and women who lived apart from others and pursued the secrets of the universe without accepting ancient dogma handed down from social manipulators under the illusion of higher powers.
They were probably what the ancient world called "witches" and "sorcerers", with their works being misunderstood and perceived as dangerous magic and possible pacts with demons. After all, as Arthur C Clarke once said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Also, "they fear what they do not understand, and they despise what they fear". (not Arthur C Clarke specifically)[/QUOTE]
Well yeah, Shamans basically. But it fascinates me how much trial and error goes into coming up with a recipe like this, ayahuasca or others. Especially how specific they get and plants sometimes don't even come from the same area and don't work on their own.
I wonder what other kinds of useful things the past has had and we've forgotten.
This kind of makes sense, when you think about it. It's a lot like penicillin in a way, what was otherwise a harmless but disgusting fruit mold turned into one of the most powerful antibiotics almost overnight.
[QUOTE=deadoon;47427762]You didn't read the article did you?[/QUOTE]
Rats =/= people, and preliminary results in rats =/= actual treatment.
Popsci is one of the worst offenders for breathless, sensationalized reporting on extremely minor, preliminary, incremental research. They are one of the reasons why nobody trusts actual science; because they report a bunch of sensational, groundbreaking science that either never pans out or is completely contradicted six months later...because that's how science works. Sensational medical research stories are guaranteed clickbait, so the media ignores the negative effects of destroying faith in science in pursuit of clicks right now.
The vast majority of research goes nowhere, and it's full of red herrings and dead ends and new findings that overturn old findings. There is no reason to waste ink reporting on anything before it at least gets FDA approval for human trials. Even then, the trial process is hopelessly broken because it only tests new treatments against placebos, NOT against the current best treatment to see if it actually makes progress.
You know why the anti-vaxxers have so much power? Because people don't trust scientists. People don't trust scientists because they read trash reporting in Popular Science and think "Wait, didn't I read about something to cure this five years ago? What happened to that? Don't those dumb scientists know anything for sure?"
At the same time, MRSA is MRSA no matter what it's infecting, so this has some merit.
Will it become a standard treatment? Probably not, considering the availability of cow's gall, but it might give some insight into more useful procedures for dealing with MRSA in general.
But yeah, medical reporting is garbage right now, exactly for the reasons you mention. Hype kills everything.
mrsa is fucking scary, i picked it up on a roadtrip down the west coast
in oregon it just looked like a pimple on my knee, by the time i got to LA it had swollen up to the size of a golf ball and i couldn't walk
It's funny, when a virus becomes so advanced against modern medicine it becomes vulnerable to john doe's premium snake oil.
It's like a circle of life for bacteria coming full circle :v:
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;47428384]Well you are just now presented with case of something that current medicine didn't recognise as something that works even though it clearly does, so no, it's clearly shown that there's cases of old remedies that work and aren't currently considered medicine.
[/QUOTE]
I think his point was that if something is proved to work, it is medicine.
So if we figure out how and why that works, and what makes it work, that part of it will also be medicine.
If there are other cases like this, an old remedy that works for whatever reason, that reason will also be medicine.
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