The Patriot Post® · Why Ulcers Went Away

If … and when … health-care reform ever actually comes to pass, the nation’s lawmakers should put a sharp-toothed rule into effect that would require every doctor’s office to have good and current magazines in the waiting rooms. The other day I was being held as a hapless prisoner in one such facility and all that was available was a two-month old copy of “Discovery.”

In this particular issue there was a story on “synthetic biology,” another on “ice fishing for neutrinos” and “20 things you didn’t know about light.” If you haven’t guessed by now, I’d much prefer a racy copy of Cosmopolitan over an article about “slicing the cosmos.”

So I’m flipping the pages and come to one where a paragraph in an interview with a brilliant doctor reads, “I realized that at least 50 percent of patients were undiagnosable.” I paused, studying the other waiting patients in the room, and they all looked pretty healthy to me. But Barry Marshall, a Nobel Prize-winning physician from Australia, then went it one further.

“In medical school it is quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and everything. But then you get out in the real world and find out that for most patients walking through the door, you have no idea what is causing their symptoms. You could slice up that person into a billion molecules and study every one and they’d been completely normal,” he said in the March issue of the magazine.

Maybe this is why Dr. Marshall always kept an open mind when he got started as a general practitioner and that may best explain why he, the son of an Australian gold-mine worker from rural Kalgoorlie, would later be laughed at and ridiculed by the world medical community before they realized he would bring relief from ulcers, of all things, to the modern-day man.

Prior to his startling discovery in the mid-1980s, every doctor would tell you emphatically that ulcers were brought on by stress, a temptuous lifestyle, and depression so deep it called for mind-numbing narcotics. Gastritis was the culprit and a duodenal ulcer – a hole in your stomach – could be so bad that surgery was required. Heck, “gut surgery” was how Mayo Clinic was originally founded.

But Dr. Marshall, who saw many patients fighting the common disease, had to do a medical paper in his third year of medical school and marveled at the fact when biopsies were performed on the extracted parts, they all had one thing in common. It was a hardy, corkscrew-looking bacteria called “helicobacter pylori,” or “H. pilori” for short.

He kept piddling around and knew he was onto something but the exacting field of science requires a “double-blind study,” which is basically two totally different studies that say the same thing. So the good doctor, not daring to tell another soul, actually got some “H. pilori,” then brazenly stirred it in with some of his own lunch-time soup, and belted it down into his own goozle.

Sure enough, within about five days Dr. Marshall had a roaring case of the dreaded bacteria in his own gut. But instead of taking all the ulcer medicines like Zantac and Tagamet that were bringing in billions to the pharmaceutical companies, he instead took an every-day antibiotic.

You see, the ulcer drugs worked in that they healed the ulcer but the acid remained. The bacteria was causing the acid. So when he eliminated the acid rather than the irritation and agony they caused, he healed his malady. But when he presented papers to the medical community, Barry Marshall, an unheard-of doctor from “down under,” nearly got laughed out of practice.

But, no, he insisted, and – to cut it short – he absolutely changed the face of modern-day medicine. Today every doctor in the world knows that he is right; just stop the H. pilori. Dr. Marshall went as far as to develop a breath test to indicate the presence of the bacteria in the human body. Giant manufacturer Kimberly-Clark paid him millions, the test is used all over the world, and he’s set for life.

But, wait, now he’s even got a vaccine – one that is so simple to make he can easily stir up 100,000 doses in his bathtub. Further, by using H. pilori as a new friend instead of an old enemy, he thinks he can take a derivative of his ulcer vaccine and use it in the same way to stop malaria. How about that?

Finally, if you aren’t amazed by such a story, add the phenomena that I would have never known about any of this had it not been for an old, dog-eared copy of a magazine I normally wouldn’t get caught read on a deserted island. That’s how smart I am.

And that’s why we should embrace what we each of us can learn – whether we are Dr. Barry Marshall or stumbling me – on any given day if we’ll only dare to grasp each and every glistening moment.