Quote from 11Blade:
You may be disillusioned with medical care but to say "OFTEN" misdiagnosed is clever catch-all for a very complex science. I guess its true that at least 3 people are misdiagnosed and therefore its OFTEN but make no mistake, the "practice" of medicine is by no means perfect and neither are the best doctors on this planet who also "OFTEN" misdiagnose.
Blade
Often does not cover the half if it.
Your response is ENTIRELY typical.
The CDC used to have a biofilm lab, which they apparently closed during the Bush years. Most MDs never heard of a biofilm, but that is the default mode of living for bacteria, and biofilms are 100 to 1000 times as resistant to antibiotics as platonic bacteria. But most docs are entirely uninformed that they can grow on native human tissue.
In 2006 I was told that it would cost 100K to write a preposal to the human studies committee at Duke to allow histology samples from sinus surgery to be inspected for biofilms with an electron microscope, of course Sanderson at the VA hospital at San Diego did just that and indeed found the biofilm growing. The fact is that humans are studied for days and the modles are studied for years, so we know MUCH more about diseases in rodents (which make their own vitiman C by the way) than we do about the diseases of people. The bureaucratic impediments that have been put in place against research are just mindboggleing
99% of bacteria can not be cultured.
Look up Kim Lewis's work at U Penn on unculturable bacteria.
http://books.google.com/books?id=xT...esult&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Koch was an engineer, and the culture method and induced disease method of proving causality served very well to characterize the capabilities of individual microbiota, but even Koch recognized that if the causative agent could not be cultured that did not mean that it did not cause disease in vio.
The default COMMON, NORMAL habit of bacteria is to exist in multispecies biofilms.
http://books.google.com/books?id=at...esult&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
The biggest misunderstanding in in the area of immune response. The idea common in medicine has been that the inflammatory response has been due to an inappropriate immune response. This theory of the immune system gone wild is a descendant of the theory of spontaneous generation. In the dark ages, doctors thought people spontaneously give rise to worms now we are thought to spontaneously have allergic reactions to harmless antigens in the environment.
However often this is not the case.
It turns out that Bacteria produce sexual pilia, little spikes that allow them to swap plasmids like mad with everything in the neighborhood, other bacteria, human cells etc. Which is why immune cells attack apparently normal cells, because bacteria have pushed Bacterial plasmids into them. It is the signature proteins produced by the bacterial DNA that the immune cells are responding to.
Or take for instance the treatment of people with asthma and high IgE and eosinophil counts. Since eosinophiles are specialized immune cells to fight worms, a doctor could look for antigens associated with toxocara cutis (dog hook worm larva transmittable via mosquito), or hymenolepis nana (carried by mice and grain beetles) via ELIZA.
Worms are some of the most common infections in humans on Earth, and these infections are endemic in North America which has abundant reservoirs of alternate hosts for these parasites, yet is assumed that A. we do not get worms when bitten though our animals do, and that any human infestation is limited by the temperature requirements for development of the larval worm, ignoring that the pest may do that pesky evolving thing.
H Nana has adapted so that it can complete it's entire life cycle at the higher temperatures in the human body. But if you get H nana prehaps on a camping trip, it is likely that you will keep it for life, because in America only the dog and cats are wormed.
What a person having either one of these worm infections will likely get is not a test for worms and a prescription for praziquantel or albendazole, (which are effective and well tolerated) but rather a management for a chronic "allergy" with prescription for a steroid preparation which will over time can cause bone deterioration. Considering that cost benefit ratio, one would think that the test for worms in humans would be as routine for us as for our animals.
Now that we have laser confocal microscopes that allow resolution of biofilm structures, ELISA DNA tests and gene sequencers able to sequence a community genome so that the DNA that code for virulence factors can be detected without the need for cultures,the infectious agents things that cause half of Cystic Fibrosis-like disease in the absence of any abnormality in the CFTMCF can identified and treated.
If the Docs will deign to do so.
