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Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#81

Post by paulmd »

maxerickson wrote: post #63
paulmd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the bigger problem is that if society collapses again there are few easily-accessible resources anymore, particularly fuel/energy. Consider the coincidence of factors that led to the industrial age in Britain… some of those can’t be reproduced again. Mining garbage dumps for resources could of course be a thing, but probably not abundant energy. This time there is no plan B. We either become an interplanetary species…

They'd mine ruins of the fallen civilization, not dumps.

Well, you’re not going to find centuries of easily-accessible fuel by raiding gas stations. Good luck drilling natural gas two miles under the gulf with your renaissance era mineshafts.

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#82

Post by MobiusHorizons »

trhway wrote: post #67
paulmd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the bigger problem is that if society collapses again there are few easily-accessible resources anymore, particularly fuel/energy. Consider the coincidence of factors that led to the industrial age in Britain… some of those can’t be reproduced again. Mining garbage dumps for resources could of course be a thing, but probably not abundant energy. This time there is no plan B. We either become an interplanetary species…

well, may be civilization would be much better off if we went straight to electrified industrial society using wind and hydro energy bypassing burning of dinosauruses - windmills and watermills were known for millennia, one only had to add copper winding and some magnetic iron, the things available for the last 2000+ years. > We either become an interplanetary species or this planet eventually becomes our tomb. Yes,…

How do you get the prerequisites for solar without access to large amounts of energy? Solar cells are made from silicon wafers which must be refined and doped to work. Maybe we could build windmills if we salvage copper and magnets, but refining even copper would be challenging without access to high heat fossil fuels. I guess you would have to bootstrap using charcoal, which would be very labor intensive.

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#83

Post by 01100011 »

deangiberson wrote: post #32

I was diagnosed with ulcers at the age of 10, well before Warren's work. For 11 years I dealt with constant pain and people telling me I just needed to learn how to relax. At the age of 21, at my next twice-yearly doctor appointment, my doctor asked me if I had heard about this news. I had, and I was willing to try it out as an experimental treatment. Eight weeks later I was cured. No pain. No after effects. Robin Wa…

Counterpoint: I was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer at 12. It was from stress.

My dad has a large amount of scar tissue in his stomach from repeated ulcers. They magically went away when the doc lit a cigarette and told him they were gonna remove part of his stomach if it happened again. Never had an ulcer after that. Instead he would break out in hives when his stress level rose.

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#84

Post by manmal »

leogao wrote: post #71
manmal wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You likely have chronic heliobacter pylori infection and should really look into that. It’s a silent killer and that way beyond just ulcers since it’s a potent acetaldehyde producing microbe. Tests are often false negative because they can hide in places, eg Candida vacuoles: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8101746/

Is there a better test than the one that is normally prescribed, to distinguish the false positive cases you describe?

AFAIK testing for those just isn’t very good, sorry.

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#85

Post by paulmac_ie »

deangiberson wrote: post #32

I was diagnosed with ulcers at the age of 10, well before Warren's work. For 11 years I dealt with constant pain and people telling me I just needed to learn how to relax. At the age of 21, at my next twice-yearly doctor appointment, my doctor asked me if I had heard about this news. I had, and I was willing to try it out as an experimental treatment. Eight weeks later I was cured. No pain. No after effects. Robin Wa…

I was also diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer when I was 10. In my case, it was the late 1980's and the H. pylori cause of ulcers wasn't accepted or widely known.

I spent a week in bed in excruciating pain, throwing up blood regularly. The doctor visited a couple of times, I'm not sure what he told my mother, but it was a week before he agreed I should go to hospital.

At that stage I was severely anemic and had peritonitis. I ended up in surgery to have a third of my stomach and some of my small intestine removed. A couple of weeks in intensive care and another few weeks in the children's ward before I was strong enough to go home.

When I left, I was told that I shouldn't eat acidic or spicy foods, and that I had an ulcer because of stress. I was 10, and I can tell you, while we didn't have a whole lot, I was far from being stressed.

Nearly 40 years later that surgery still impacts on my life. I still have some digestion issues, but knowing that Warren's & Marshall's work has prevented others from repeating my experiences has been some comfort.

Good on your doctor for trying something experimental which had such a great outcome.

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#86

Post by I_complete_me »

Scoundreller wrote: post #28
redhed wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happened to me about 6 years ago. Told me to relax and not eat spicy foods. Makes me wonder how long medical advancements like this take to really spread to most doctors.

That’s “translational medicine” or “translational science” —> getting lab proven stuff to the bedside. And yeah, it can take a while. My dream is to a have a dumb doctor/mechanic/plumber/blah that just researches even the most basic questions unless it’s something really odd-ball and only then defaulting to their “expert opinion”.

"When you hear hoofbeats in the night, look for horses — not zebras."

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#87

Post by [deleted] »

jiggawatts wrote: post #80
don_neufeld wrote: post #79

I still remember the sound of my doctor’s voice when he looked through the endoscope as 20 yr old me laid on the table. “Man, we find your problem” Fortunately, the Canadian medical system knew about Dr Warren’s work and so I was properly treated with antibiotics and completely cleared up in 2 weeks, never had a recurrence. I owe that guy a lot, I’ve heard many horror stories about ulcer treatments since then, it’s s…

Think about a field that you know, like software development or whatever. Now say: “Surely by now everybody knows about SQL injection!” Meanwhile it’s the third item in the OWASP top ten: https://owasp.org/Top10/A03_2021-Injection/ Now that you know how ignorant supposed experts can be in a highly paid intellectual profession, extrapolate to every other field of study and weep.

[deleted]

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#88

Post by vjk800 »

te wrote: post #60
apwell23 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. It has been bane of my existence for last 3 years.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/8098-hiatal-h...

There are people with giant hiatal hernias and no GERD and there are people with bad GERD and no hiatal hernia. Hiatal hernia seems to at least make GERD worse, but is not the only factor and the causal link between hiatal hernia and GERD seems to run both ways (i.e. people with GERD also develop hiatal hernia over time instead of just hiatal hernia causing GERD).

Other possible explanations found in the literature are at least: small intestine bacterial overgrowth; dysbiosis of the esophagus; food intolerances; postural problems; incorrectly (for some reason) functioning LES (or other related) muscle etc.

It's possible that all of these contribute a little bit to GERD and whether you get problems depends in all of these factors in some non-trivial way.

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#89

Post by vjk800 »

amluto wrote: post #73
vjk800 wrote: post #23

I'm still waiting for a similar discovery to treat GERD. Having the condition, I've become a bit of a couch expert on GERD literature and it seems that everyone and their dog have a completely different opinion on what, in the end, causes it.

This paper was entertaining at least: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9106553/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36059247

With a little bit of search, it's possible to find lots of papers that claim to solve the issue with some kind of novel treatment. Sometimes it's training the LES or other muscle (like in the article), sometimes it's correcting some sort of dysbiosis of the gut or the esophagus (see e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6469450/), etc.

It's possible that they are all true, though, and GERD can either result from multiple different causes or from a sum of different causes. If that's the case, we would need better diagnostics to figure out what is causing each individuals problems in particular.

Re: Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died

#90

Post by nxobject »

tombert wrote: post #13

I got an ulcer about ten years ago, well after Warren's research, I went to a doctor and he told me that the ulcer was caused by stress. I said something like "didn't someone get a Nobel prize proving that ulcers were bacterial?" and the doctor hadn't heard that and "prescribed" me to get more rest and try and be less concerned about work. I got a different doctor after that. Robin Warren is someone who I respected t…

I've always been a little annoyed about the "relax" part – of course stress exacerbates everything. We know how inflammation works globally throughout the body. Of course we would have already thought of that.
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