It seems all to often that the medical profession as a whole of late is not interested in research into the root causes of ailments, only the imediate relief of symptoms. Whether that is caused by the seemingly boundless lengths people will go to relieve those symptoms or simply a loss of focus in the education of future generations. Ultimately history is being writen, and is showing this disturbing tend quite vividly.
For example:
Stomach Ulcers. I remember quite vividly how much during the 80s these had been attributed to "stress" and spicy food. It was virtually a done-deal. Eventually somebody wasn't content with the phantom "stress" trigger so many other scientists and doctors had decided was the cause and found out that in fact there is a root-cause to Stomach Ulcers. Its a baceria, Helicobacter pylori, and also pain killers such as Asprin that weaken the stomach lining allowing ulcers to form. Yes when people feel "stressed" they medicate themselves commonly. But nobody prior had taken it to the behavior of the person to find the root cause. Now what is also amazingly interesting about this is how it leads to my next item.
Migranes. The bussiness for migranes is gigantic, virtually every over the counter pain killer is and can be used to treat them as well as other assorted headaches. There are two very interesting things: a) all over the counter migrane medications, and all but one or two prescription migrane treatments have caffeine in them b) all treatments take approximately the same period of time to relief the symptoms of a migrane c) no migrane studies have attempted to control the caffiene intake and metobolization of the participants. Now there have been studies associated caffiene as a drug addiction and the withdrawl symptoms are well documented. In fact the varying degrees of caffiene withdrawl match in totality to those documents in migrane studies. Given how much money people make from migrane treatments and the fact that they aren't generally considered life-threatening, it could be a very long while before the connection is decidedly proven. Until that point simply think about the number of "triggers" exist for migranes. Everything under the sun has been listed a trigger, all the way down to Saturdays. All those triggers can be narrowed down to two items: things that cause the human body to motobolize caffine faster, and b) things that alter a person's daily caffine intake.
And after all that the real purpose of this post was to take note of an article I read this morning. And that one of the most common mental illnesses, Schizophrenia, is very likey caused by a parasite. One commonly found in cat stomachs and whose life cycle involves infecting other mammals such as mice and rats and affecting their brain function to make them more likely to be eaten. This parasite goes by the name of T. gondii and causes something called
Toxoplasmosis. The article detailing this can be found
here.
Now we have known about the parasite for a long time, we have known about the behaviorial problems of rats infected with it. There are also a great number of people infected with the parasite, and we also have a treatment for it to eliminate it. Why haven't we made the connection before? One can only guess.
As a follow up I also found out that John Hopkins Hospital is now conducting studies in which they are suplimenting routine anti-psychotic medictions with T. gondii treatments.
Labels: medicine, rant, root cause analysis
