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Comment by catalogia | Hacker News Reader

> "With early diagnosis, another experimental treatment includes massive doses of penicillin to stimulate the liver’s defenses."

The solution to fungus is... more fungus! Really goes to show the incredible breadth of this form of life.

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I mean the main cure is milk thistle extract, I think the penicillin is/was just thought to potentiate it slightly if you can't get silbinin intravenously. In the U.S. it's still not FDA approved, so IIRC if you get poisoned you need to somehow get to Washington DC because that's where the clinical trial is happening.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00915681

How so? This is pretty much the same idea as an Irish petty king inviting in some Norman troops to show the other petty kings who's boss. (It turned out to be the Normans, of course.)

Penicillin works by killing other similar things.

Sort of a "hair of the dog" (except it's another dog species)

Some mushrooms kill you, others save your life, and yet others expand your mind. It's subjective, but I consider it incredible.

In other words, they're all edible. But some of them only once.

Edible does not mean "can physically be eaten" it means "is safe to eat". So no, poisonous mushrooms are not edible.

There was a 50yo man in Lithuania that made bet that he will not die from Amanita phalloides (because scientist are hiding the truth etc.) as he didn't die from Amanita muscaria previous year.

So he died in 5 days.

https://www.15min.lt/naujiena/aktualu/lietuva/vyras-sumane-p...

> Penicillin works by killing other similar things

Pencillin is an antibiotic derived from fungi (Penicillium spp.). It kills bacteria. Bacteria and fungi are in two different kingdoms on the tree of life. These two groups of organisms are just about as dissimilar from each other as any two living things can be.

Other than they cohabit the same environments, hence why evolution/adaption has favoured the one that produces more bacteria toxin.

They live in the same environments and compete with each other for the same resources. Depending on your point of view, this is enough to make them more similar to each other than, say, lions and whales, which are both mammals.

Taxonomic closeness is only one kind of similarity.

Penicillin kills bacteria. The two are not similar at all! Nor is penicillin (a fungus) even remotely similar to a virus. Doesn’t stop people from taking them for any illness I guess.

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