Recently deceased Myths

There are a few myths which disappeared within my working life. ‘Myths’ is perhaps too harsh a description, they were more concepts and hypotheses, though some of them were the accepted paradigm. Of course, progress depends on being unreasonable, and being unreasonable means challenging what’s accepted. For those conditions where the cause or causes are unknown, it’s not unreasonable to allow flights of fancy, to fly a kite, to see what the reaction is.

As students, we were taught some paradoxical physiology of the heart; so strange, that we didn’t believe it, though we had to spout it for the exams. Whatever this strange idea was — I’ve long forgotten — it had disappeared by the time of the post-graduate exams.

Crohn’s disease is a nasty inflammation of the bowels, cause unknown. Both toothpaste and corn flakes were suggested as causes, both fell early on.

The sugar content of cigarettes was thought to be the most important marker of badness; this idea didn’t catch on.

The mantra of ‘no acid, no ulcer’ was the orthodoxy to explain peptic (stomach and duodenal) ulceration, and this was reinforced by the discovery of the Zollinger-Ellison syndrome, where pathological secretion of the hormone gastrin is associated with intractable ulceration. Surgical methods concentrated on acid reduction, either by resection of most of the stomach, or more scientifically by various techniques of vagotomy — division of the vagus nerve to the stomach.

Vagotomy didn’t always work, often because the procedure was ‘incomplete’, and perhaps because of other, associated pathology. When I attempted to make sense of this, and of the investigations, I could find no correlation; I could only conclude that ‘something was missing’, though I didn’t know what it was.

A further orthodoxy was that germs could not exist in the acid stomach, it just wasn’t possible. So it came as a shock to discover that a miserable germ could indeed exist in this hostile environment, and more of a shock to find that if it was eliminated, so was the ulceration. 

The discovery of Helicobacter pylorii, which could be treated with pills, led to the very rapid disappearance of surgery for peptic ulceration. I’d learnt all the fancy techniques for nothing (and, if I’d been a bit cleverer, I might have got a Nobel prize.)

More recently, there was a major scare over the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella or German measles) vaccination. MMR seemed to cause autism, the concept was heavily promoted, and vaccination rates fell dramatically. It did take some time, but the ‘research’ was subsequently discredited.