The doctor who gave himself an ulcer and solved a medical mystery (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The doctor who gave himself an ulcer and solved a medical mystery (2010)

discovermagazine.com

76 pointscamtarn47 comments

Studied at the home University of this Nobel prize winner. Was a good bet you’d get a question on it in the exam every year.

UWA?

I was gonna say I remember always seeing posters around the Uni talking about this guy and his 'gutsy' bet.

It's great practical science but the basis of the research was a photo showing the bacteria in the stomach lining, which was against the accepted belief at the time. So the experiment confirmed what they already knew, at least that's how I remember them explaining it in a documentary

The experiment proved that it was causation, not correlation.

but they could have equally proved it by giving antibiotics to people with ulcers

it would be interesting if there was a body of evidence of people being cured of ulcers following antibiotics around the same time

The mystery being 'what causes ulcers', and the answer being Helicobacter pylori instead of stress.

He discovered an effective treatment for many ulcers, but the older one also tended to work.

Stress harms the immune system so many people who dramatically reduced stress showed meaningful improvement. One of those it’s better than a placebo treatments where the method of action was poorly understood.

H Pylori builds biofilm, and can even hide in fungal vacuoles to avoid immune system action: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8101746/

It’s one of those cases where some bodies might just not be able to finish it off even in ideal conditions.

It was less effective, but treatments that work on say 1/2 the population aren’t useless.

It’s a tricky thing in medicine. In then 90’s people discovered Leptin a hormone released by fat which when given to people dieting significantly reduced cravings and increased energy expenditure enabling long term weight loss. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2430504/

“rodents and humans that become obese on a high-fat (Western) diet do not respond to leptin” Unlike GLP-1 antagonists it did almost nothing to start the process of weight loss, but having a drug to give to people who lost 20+lb which would then help them keep it off could have helped a lot of people.

I remember cheat days in low carb diets were touted as leptin reset days.

Sadly it was BS the underlying mechanisms aren’t so easy to fool. However the information was being transmitted from individual fat cells to the rest of the body through chemical pathways we can fool via drugs.

The previous dogma being that no bacteria could survive in the acidic conditions (pH ~2) of the stomach.

Nice, but most people have some helicobacter without much problems. Some ulcers are not even caused by helicobacter.

Related. Others?

Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41137694 - Aug 2024 (100 comments)

[stub for offtopicness]

The slight pause as your brain parses this headline really shows why it makes no sense to have capitalization like this in headlines. It just adds ambiguity.

It's not the capitalisation it's the clickbait

It would definitely be the capitalisation for people who are familiar with British sci-fi.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who

My mind went to some horrible production accident. The first episode aired only 24 yeas after asbestos snow, after all.

And there are much worse examples too. But maybe that's the idea, write a horrible title that makes readers pause.

Yup. I read the title couple times before realizing it probably wasnt about Darleks.

> Darleks

Something interesting about the actors’ accents is it always sounds like it would be spelled this way. It’s actually Dalek, pronounced in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from a British person saying Darlek. (I also notice the auto-correct on my phone knows the difference, which I did not think about until I saw it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek

That actor undoubtedly calls Canada ''Can-a-der'', as some Brits unfortunately do. Likewise with the Nigerian-British singer Sade (pronounced Shah-day) being called "Shar-day".

> Nigerian-British singer Sade

And I here was sure that the name was French, like the dude who had sadism named after him.

While we’re riffing on the headline:

- I must be one of the few people who did not find it ambiguous.

- I am likely among fewer who don’t mind it being “clickbaity”. I probably wouldn’t have cared to know what an Australian did to learn about ulcers otherwise.

But good to know if the time arises to chronicle the absurdities of modern science.

Yeah, I re-read the headline a couple times after seeing the comments and can't spot the ambiguity. Also, there's a difference between 'attention grabbing' and 'clickbait'. This headline seems like the first. It's literally highlighting one of the most interesting parts of the story and precisely describing it.

(Yes, I know the doctor in the article already believed he knew the answer)

Had a fun time parsing the title as unrelated to The Doctor at first

I am grateful for doctors like them, and for the results they bring, even if the methods can be discussed.

Yeah I thought it was about a Matt Smith, 11th doctor recap, the word broth sounds vaguely mystical.

Did not include David Tennant

Why are all those words capitalised?

> Why are all those words capitalised?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case

I am unreasonably sad that the wikipedia editors couldn't find it in themselves to let this one article break wikipedia's URL capitalization rules.

That reminds me of the debate surrounding Star Trek Into/into Darkness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Star_Trek_Into_Darkn...

It's fairly common in presentations for the heading an a page, maybe in particular. But I do tend to avoid it personally.

Not noted there, but I think use in headlines is restricted to the US (?). This does illustrate the problem with over use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Sentence_case

Other acceptable answers are "Christopher Eccleston" and "Tom Baker".

Anyone else thought from the title alone that this was gonna be about Louis Pasteur and the swan neck flask experiment?

‹mutters something about a blue box›

There have been many doctors.

But The Doctor Who, there’s only one of those. Oh. Wait.

Headlines like this should not be capitalized. The ambiguity is unnecessary.

Click bait headline.

OP here: I agree, actually - unfortunately due to HN title length limitations, I had to cut something out, and I chose to cut out the "gave himself an ulcer" bit. I tried to mitigate it by posting a TL;DR as the first comment :)

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