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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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".
- 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)
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 :)
The main difference between Dr. Marshall and people tha just dismiss science because every once in a while science was wrong is that Dr. Marshall made his experiment, the experiment was replicated, the evidence seemed solid enough to end the dogma and it spread among scientists. The scientific community didn't burn the guy at a stake but gave him the highest recognition.
Before the proof, Marshall and Warren had little more than a suspicion (not enough to topple an accepted theory). Their first H. pilori cultures were in 1982, with little success. Their results of the famous bactery drinking after giving up the culture experiments were published in 1985, only three years later. It's not realistic for a scientist to expect a theory to go away because you have a hunch, even if that hunch turns out to be correct! If anything the Marshall experiment show that in science you can go against the main theories and turn them around if you have proofs.
That's very different that something like "I don't believe in evolution because this sacred book written thousands of years ago says otherwise".
I agree that it's good to be critical of science, but it is also good to be critical our own existing beliefs when they conflict with 95% of the scientific community. For every story like this one, there's a hundred thousand people who are convinced that the world is flat based on YouTube videos that feed their confirmation bias, or poorly designed studies that they lack the academic background to know are poorly designed.
"Settled science" is nothing resembling a homogeneous body of certainty. It's a huge, chaotic mish-mash - of everything from actual rock-solid results, to "it sound reasonable at some point...then human nature took over" baloney. Everybody <cough/>knew<cough/> the latter, so nobody ever carefully checked.
And the worst part? Even long-tenured experts, specializing in the specific scientific niche, seldom know how certain their various facts actually are.
Yes, but science can't "blink" into existence with all proofs already provided. We need to do the work.
We created the scientific method and now we're basing more and more knowledge on demonstrated facts/truths. Some of the knowledge will be invalidated and removed.
In non-science that doesn't happen. In non-science (religion, flat earth, or whatever domain you want), facts/truths only change when a figure of authority orders the change, but even that is problematic and many practitioners will refuse.
We'll never reach a state where all scientific knowledge is demonstrated. Some parts are currently impossible to demonstrate. And even if we could immediately validate everything we know, some new knowlegde can still invalidate old demonstrated knowledge. See newton mechanics vs. relativity. We use the best science that we have.
Science is predicated on healthy skepticism, especially if something has fervent support. Anyone who argues that science is "settled" or that it should be "trusted" is a priest trying to evangelize, not a scientist.
That healthy skepticism likely won't cause any paradigm shifts in most cases, of course, but the point here is that is no reason to surrender the skepticism.
