Category: Basic Science
Old drugs, new tricks
What does honey bee colony collapse disorder have to do with a potential new cancer treatment? They both relate – in a convoluted manner – to an old antibacterial drug called nitroxoline. True to my devotion as a natural product pharmacologist, I’m proud to say that new life would not have come to nitroxoline had not a fungal natural product called fumagillin...
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January 21, 2011
Followup: More Evidence against the XMRV Virus as a Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
A mouse leukemia retrovirus, xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV retrovirus), has been under consideration as a possible cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS, and also prostate cancer). In a study published in Science in October 2009, Lombardi et al. found XMRV in 67% of CFS patients and 3.7% of controls. Several subsequent studies in the UK, the Netherlands, and the US...
Of SBM and EBM Redux. Part I: Does EBM Undervalue Basic Science and Overvalue RCTs?
During the most recent kerfuffle about whether or not Evidence-Based Medicine can legitimately claim to be science-based medicine, it became clear to me that a whole, new round of discussion and documentation is necessary. This is frustrating because I’ve already done it several times, most recently less than a year ago. Moreover, I’ve provided a table of links to the whole series...
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Lots of Speculation
Humans love to find patterns in the world. Sometimes patterns exist, sometimes they are imaginary. Sometimes you can see a pattern that may be interesting and ignore its significance. As a resident I used to say that anyone who smokes three packs of cigarettes a day has to be schizophrenic, it was meant more as a joke, when, in fact, it was...
Fields, Alternative Medicine, and Physics
In 1996 the American Physical Society, responding to a request from the National Research Council, was asked to examine the potential health hazards of power lines. One of the concerns was that electromagnetic background fields of 2 milligauss might cause cancer (for comparison the earth’s magnetic field is 500 milligauss and fields generated by human physiological processes are hundreds of thousands of...
NDE Update
Back in 2008 I wrote on Near Death Experiences (NDE’s). I have an interest in this topic as I have frequent exposure to near death; my wife has a predilection for watching Judge Judy. Since 2008 there have been a few studies on the topic of NDEs as researchers try and find evidence that consciousness transcends the brain, if that is what...
The case of John Lykoudis and peptic ulcer disease revisited: Crank or visionary?
One of the themes of SBM has been, since the very beginning, how the paradigm of evidence-based medicine discounts plausibility (or, perhaps more appropriately, implausibility) when evaluating whether or not a given therapy works. One of our favorite examples is homeopathy, a therapy that is so implausible on a strictly scientific basis that, for it to work, huge swaths of well-established science...
H. Pylori, Plausibility, and Greek Tragedy: the Quirky Case of Dr. John Lykoudis
Mark Crislip is on vacation, but through an arduous series of shakings and succussions (beating his head against the wall?) we have channeled part of his essence: This post mostly concerns itself with infectious diseases, thanks to several recent posts on SBM that discussed the plausibility of health claims† and that touched on the recent discovery that most peptic ulcer disease (PUD)...
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Retroviruses: Jumping the Gun
When I first heard that a retrovirus had been identified as a possible cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, I withheld judgment and awaited further developments. When I heard that two subsequent studies had failed to replicate the findings of the first, I assumed that the first had been a false alarm and would be disregarded. Not so. It’s a classic case of...
The Microbial Metagenome
First some background. I was first directed to the Marshall protocol by a reader who wondered about the information the found on the web. So I went to the web and looked at the available information, much as any patient would, and discussed what I found there. I have subsequently been lead to believe that none of the information on the website...