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[Sheb]

There. Fixed.

[scrdest]

Uhm, you guys do know that quite a few of those alternative medicinal substances actually are effective treatments, right??

It's very simple.

If it's effective, it's not alternative medicine. It's regular-ass medicine (not to be confused with regular ass-medicine, with which it has a degree of overlap).

A major part of modern pharmacology is derived from random assorted natural substances which were found to work, from the famous penicillin to taxol, a chemotherapeutic. Hell, before penicillin one alternative treatment in my parts of Yurop was pressing moldy bread to a wound - people found out something about it works, found out what, purified it, boom, it's now a drug.

[Culise]

Indeed, and one of the most ubiquitous would be common aspirin.  Salicylic acid in willow bark = alternative medicine.  Salicylic acid in a pill = medicine. 

That said, I would also say that medicine should be confirmed to be effective without overly deleterious side-effects.  That seems to be one of the issues that was brought up earlier; that medicine, at least in principle, requires testing and time to ensure confirmation of the fact that it won't kill the patient in the process of curing them. 

[Sheb]

So, some more response to stuff, some of it old.

No, that's like me citing formal studies by actual researchers and asserting that they carry more weight than some random journalist or guy selling stuff on a homemade website.

Sorry, when you were referring to these links as "the nih.org" sources, I assumed you meant you though it was from the NIH.

Comparitively trivial problem. Personally, I'd suggest looking into vibrating them to death. That way you don't leave loose chemicals floating around and your nanobots aren't limited to a single delivery.

Those bots are basically small boxes that can open and that's it. They look like this:



Sure, they could help, by delivering an agent which isn't as specific as an antibiotic to bacterias preferentially, but suggesting it's trivial to make them vibrate bacteria to death... I mean, no, simply no. No.


Regarding teixobactin, it's important to keep in mind that resistance to any of those antibiotics is bound to become common at some points, because the resistance gene already exist in nature (in the bacteria producing the antibiotic, or in bacterias living in close assiociation with it.) once we start using it on a large scale, those genes will spread.

Also, in the interest of full disclosur, my grandmother died of a combined MRSA + Vancomycin Resistance Enterococcus infection this summer. She wasn't in good shape, but resistant bacterias killed her before she had a chance to fight her other diseases. So yeah, it's hard for me to see people claim antibiotic resistance isn't an issue.

[wierd]

I now work in geriatric healthcare, and resistence most certainly is a very big problem.

I think that ultimately the best that human kind can bring to bear is a large collection of effective compounds with wildly diverse methods of action, such that it becomes too energy expensive for the microbes to retain resistences to all of them, thus essentially catch-22ing evolution. (eg, resistence to X class of agents places a strain on efficiency of the organism, such that resistence to Y and Z classes of agents are not logistically possible. As total arsenal is increased, the odds of reaching this catch-22 against natural selection increases. As such, evaluation of radically novel antibiotic agents that work via radically different mechanisms is ultimately the only viable approach, and is why I would like to see more unusual things tested with rigorous in vivo studies. Sadly, getting funding for a proper in vivo study is... hard.)

There are plenty of in vitro studies of novel compounds, which is usually the wasteland in which alternative medicine gets stuck-- mostly because testing on germs in dishes is inexpensive and requires little oversight, where a proper in vivo trial requires live animals, blessing by an ethics comittee, and money to care for, house, and evaluate the animals being experimented on. 

Due to these greater costs, only candidate compounds with absurdly high in vitro characteristics typically get to animal model testing.

That's why I specifically brought up lemon grass oil. That shit kicks the crap out of MRSA in petri dishes-- but the XKCD cartoon aptly points out the issue there.  However, the heliobacter trials in mice with that same active compound helps remove that criticism. It helps suggest more strongly that the compounds can be used effectively for internal medicine, and can contribute to human health without causing extensive collateral damage.

I would LOVE to see an in vivo trial of it against MRSA.  Current data suggests it would have greater efficacy than vancomycin, the current heavyweight used against aggressive MRSA infections.

[Bohandas]

This is what happens when people don't fi ish their antibiotic regimens and patients don't have private rooms in hospitals. The use of antibiotics on ranches is a pro lem as well.

[Sheb]

Well, that's why I love phage. You have a medicine that you can evolve to counter whatever bacterias come up with. And it's super targeted!

Did you know that phages kill about half the bacterias in the entire world ever day!

Anyway, I like phages.

[wierd]

The problem is that you typically can't be certain what pathogenic species are present inside a patient or wound, and that information is necessary for proper administration of phages.

[Sheb]

Well, that's something we're becoming much better at, what with cheap dna seq and so on. Plus, it's always possible to devise a cocktail of phages active against most common pathogens and inject that.

[Radio Controlled]

Well, that's why I love phage. You have a medicine that you can evolve to counter whatever bacterias come up with. And it's super targeted!

Did you know that phages kill about half the bacterias in the entire world ever day!

Anyway, I like phages.

Unfortunately, your immune system does not. 

(there's ways of working around that problem, but still. And there's other problems, but that's one that jumps to mind readily when people talk about phages. ))

[Starver]

That said, I would also say that medicine should be confirmed to be effective without overly deleterious side-effects.

This brings up a bugbear of mine.  There are people who say they use 'natural' remedies (or, indeed, unnatural but alternate ones) because "they don't have side-effects".

Yes, something can have greater or lesser amounts of side-effects, to counterbalance the intended curative action (I don't reach for pain-killers for minor aches, personally, because I'd rather not dull the pain of a strain and end up straining it even more, but I know that's not a view subscribed to by everyone¹), but if something doesn't have any side-effects, then it likely doesn't even have effects.  Please protect me from those who are selling new-age snakeoils that have a psychokinetic ability to cure high blood-pressure, low blood-pressure, both types of diabetes, under/over-reactive thyroids and any other number of individual ailments without regard to how they're apparently not swinging other biological factors (that they otherwise promise to raise/lower, on demand) out of whack, or whether the exactly opposing effect perhaps is happens, but only for those with the exact opposite problem.

...also a 'chemical' (as if all the rest aren't chemicals, strictly, unless it's an impossibly dilute solution where the only chemical of relevance is H₂O) can generally be purer and thus less adulterated by potentially nasty compounds, compared to 'natural extracts'.  Especially since the realisation following the errors with thalidomide, when even chirality is investigated and properly selected for...


¹ Yes, occasionally there's a pain related to some movement or other that causes me to tense up in automatic, which might be doing me more damage to the affected joint than if I just had a dull ache that didn't.  I'm not saying I've made a totally rational decision, there...

[wierd]

Also, some pathogenic microbes are "intracellular", in that they actively invade a host cell and live inside its cytoplasm as a parasite.

Getting phages inside a host cell, to where they can then attach to and subesquently kill those microbes is difficult. Broad spectrum, low molecular weight compounds are typically easier to get into the host cell's cytoplasm.

[Sheb]

Well, that's why I love phage. You have a medicine that you can evolve to counter whatever bacterias come up with. And it's super targeted!

Did you know that phages kill about half the bacterias in the entire world ever day!

Anyway, I like phages.

Unfortunately, your immune system does not. 

(there's ways of working around that problem, but still. And there's other problems, but that's one that jumps to mind readily when people talk about phages. ))

Not entirely sure what you're referring to here.

[Sheb]

I'm thinking it's more "your immune system might destroy the phages", but I'm really not sure.

[Helgoland]

Did you know that phages kill about half the bacterias in the entire world ever day!

Seriously? That's pretty awesome.