I got dysentery in a human challenge trial

Well I have not had dysentery but I have read "Infinite Jest" and had no trouble finishing it. It's an amazing book and particularly so for someone like me who was obsessed with "Hamlet" as a teen. That said it's a serious modern novel and while it contains a lot of very funny parts it's also at times difficult.

If you like David Foster Wallace his other two novels "Broom of the system" and "The Pale King" are also great. The Pale King was left unfinished when he died and was completed (from various drafts and notes) as a labour of love and respect from his notes by his editor. It's genuinely extraordinary and could possibly even have been his greatest work if he had been able to fully complete it. As is there are certain minor things in it that I'm sure he would have revised (eg I noticed some sentences are repeated etc).

If you're not sure about David Foster Wallace I can really recommend his essays and literary criticism as consistently insightful and extraordinary and also his journalism. From his essays for a starting point I would recommend "De Unibus Pluram" and also "Fictional futures and the conspicuously young", and also "Roger Federer as Religious Experience"[1]. Of his journalism I would strongly recommend "Getting away from already being pretty much away from it all" which is an amazing write up of the experience of visiting a rural state fair and "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again" which is the same sort of thing about going on a cruise ship. Both are very funny and perceptive.

If you like those you know what you're getting into with this novels.

[1] Especially if you like tennis. He also wrote an amazing essay about a tennis player who is very good but not quite good enough to make the top level and is struggling to break through. THat one is amazing but the title escapes me.

Getting paid $4,000 to participate in a trial that could potentially save thousands of lives for a disease is incredible. But even better that it's a somewhat neglected disease that doesn't often occur in the western world. Sounds like the experiment was a success and I am hopefully/excited to see this rolled out!

Haha, yeah phags is barely a contraction as is ignoring it's unfortunate homophone. You're saving one letter not typing phages.

The bacteria develop resistance fairly quickly, but you can somewhat get around that with cocktails of phages (like a bunch of phages at once).

> For a sick person after antibiotics therapy and after culture test results, those days/weeks to raise another culture of phages might be deadly

The hope is that you'd have a bunch of phages ready to go from a variety of patients. So you wouldn't need to make a new culture. However, right now they often do personalized phage therapy because they can only get it approved as a last-hope kinda deal. But then it makes the scientists only target chronic infections, because it does take a couple months to get another cocktail of phages ready to go.

If you’re already sick, you probably have a raging bacterial infection going on. Waiting three days for a culture is unlikely to improve the choice of therapy for someone not sick enough to be in the hospital.

My eustachian tubes plugged up while I was flying home from my honeymoon. Three days later, my ears were still stopped up. I was in medical school at the time, so I went to the student health clinic (run by senior residents). I said that I had ear infections commonly as a child, that this ear had been plugged for three days, and could I have antibiotics? He said, let’s look first. He did. He then said, “no pain, just dulled hearing? No fevers?” Correct. “That’s the worst-looking eardrum I have ever seen in an adult. Here’s some amoxicillin-clavulanate.”

Antibiotics are broadly classified as bacteriostatic (prevents multiplication) or bacteriocidal (kills living bacteria). Amoxicillin (like all beta-lactam antibiotics) is bacteriocidal. Thirty minutes after I took my first dose, I vividly experienced this. Chills, fever, shivering, sweating that lasted for almost two hours as millions or billions of bacteria died and their dead cells entered my bloodstream. The second dose was not as bad but still unpleasant. By the third dose, I just felt a few minutes of unpleasantness. And after three days, my ear finally unplugged.