Words about science and hiking
Not much to say about this that I didn’t say in a previous post. Once again, researchers are claiming to advance the field of phage therapy by using mice as animate test tubes: mice are injected with pathogenic bacteria, followed shortly (or concomitantly) with a dose of phage. The phage kill the bacteria, the mice Read More …
One can sum up the 100-year history of phage therapy concisely: works great in the lab, fails in the clinic. Not a single Phase 2 or 3 clinical trial has yet shown phage therapy to be effective. This failure is not due to a lack of research effort. Search for “phage therapy” in PubMed and Read More …
This one comes to us from the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC and is particularly heartbreaking: a 2-year old with congenital heart disease suffering a post-surgical Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Pseudomonas infections are particularly liable to become resistant over the course of antibiotic treatment, and in this case treatment options were limited by allergic reactions to Read More …
Our healthcare system is oriented toward cures, not prevention. Outlays for public health measures have never been more than 2-3% of total healthcare spending, and this small amount is falling – even though we know that every dollar spent returns several dollars in benefits. We could blame greedy doctors or pharmas or hospitals, or more Read More …
As I’ve mentioned before, PT suffers from a lack of well-designed clinical trials. Part of this lack can be attributed to a mind-set of true-believerism among PT practitioners. Part of it can be attributed to a dearth of funding required to design and execute trials – not just for PT, but for anti-infective therapy in general. Read More …