The Doctor Who Drank Infectious Broth and Solved a Medical Mystery (2010)
17 comments
·January 29, 2025jiehong
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.
ben30
Yeah I thought it was about a Matt Smith, 11th doctor recap, the word broth sounds vaguely mystical.
camtarn
The mystery being 'what causes ulcers', and the answer being Helicobacter pylori instead of stress.
Retric
He discovered an effective treatment for many ulcers, but the older one also tended to work.
Stress harms the immune system so people who dramatically reduced stress often showed significant improvement. One of those it’s better than a placebo treatments where the method of action was poorly understood.
thomasfedb
The previous dogma being that no bacteria could survive in the acidic conditions (pH ~2) of the stomach.
throw83489448
Nice, but most people have some helicobacter without much problems. Some ulcers are not even caused by helicobacter.
chgs
Did not include David Tennant
Why are all those words capitalised?
CoastalCoder
Other acceptable answers are "Christopher Eccleston" and "Tom Baker".
thomasfedb
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.
refurb
A great example of scientific dogma being overturned.
Dr Marshall was ridiculed as it was “settled science” that bacteria couldn’t survive in stomach acid.
Great example to bring up when people tell you to “trust the science”. Remind them at one time “science” said stress caused ulcers.
jmcgough
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.
bell-cot
To paraphrase Feynman:
"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.
Dalewyn
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.
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.