Tag: medicine

2017 wasn’t all bad: a good news story that will change the world forever

Now that the end is nigh for 2017, I think we’d all agree that the last twelve months have had more than their fair share of memorable moments. We’ve seen Donald Trump begin his reign of power, Kim Jong Un shoot off his shiny new intercontinental missiles, the Grenfell tower block burn down in the UK, and the bell ring for round one of the political bout that is Brexit. It’s hard to remain upbeat with a steady trickle of terrorist atrocities, a never-ending migrant crisis, and Middle East conflicts that show no sign of ending. There has, however, been a lot of good news that has slipped under the radar. This blog post is about my choice of what didn’t get the publicity it deserved. Not everyone will agree, and I’d be interested to know what other people would choose (feel free to comment below).

Get ready to say ‘bye bye’ to some very nasty diseases

The past year has witnessed some incredible advances  developments that look set to revolutionise our lives for ever – and in a very good way. My pick of this year’s most important medical breakthroughs came in the form of a new type of medical treatment called gene therapy. 2017 has seen the coming of age of a new gene editing technology that has been the talk of science town. Called CRISPR (pronounced ‘crisper’), this is an innovation that lets lab workers precisely write to and edit a person’s genetic code. It’s getting so accurate that next-generation ‘CRISPR 2.0’ (which debuted in October) has made it possible to snip and chop just as you would correct a spelling mistake on a word processor.

With this emerging therapy, it is quite possible that conditions like haemophilia and sickle cell disease will go the way of smallpox and be eradicated from planet Earth. The source of the problem – the faulty DNA code – will be fixed with a bit of genetic jiggery-pokery. Back in March, a French teenager was apparently cured of sickle cell disease with a gene therapy. It was causing him agonising ‘sickle cell crises’ in his limbs and abdomen, each bout lasting up to a week. His internal organs were also slowly failing. Now the 14-year-old boy has been “given his life back” – the genetic error he was born with has been erased.

In November, gene therapy was used for the first time in a 44-year-old man afflicted with Hunter’s Syndrome – a hereditary condition causing stunted growth, low IQ, and progressive disability. And just last week the USA drug approval authority (the FDA) gave the all-clear for gene therapy to treat a rare form of blindness. The countdown has now begun until we create ‘cures’ for the evilest of degenerative diseases, like Huntingdon’s disease and Motor Neurone disease.

It doesn’t stop with the hereditary conditions that you are born with. Researchers have realised that Type 1 Diabetes could also be consigned to the history books with these advances – they have been devised a way to genetically program the liver to produce the insulin that the body lacks. For people with diabetes, this should mean no more daily injections and finger-prick sugar tests.

CRISPR also means that we we have a serious chance of healing many types of cancer – or at least keeping them at bay better than ever before. A fantastical new cancer treatment, called CAR-T therapy, sees doctors taking a big slug of a person’s blood, extracting a sample of their immune cells, then genetically programming them to attack their cancer. These super-powered infection-fighters are injected back into the blood so that they set about killing the cancer as if it were a virus. A few days ago, research results showed that it worked against lymphoma (a cancer of the blood) and right now it is being piloted in brain tumours and a host of other cancers.

As exciting as they are, none of these advances have the shock and awe of a Harvey Weinstein sex scandal, so don’t sell papers or get the clicks. Neither do they usually arrive in ‘Eureka!’ apple-dropping breakthrough moments, but from the slow drip-drip-drip of steady progress from countless researchers chipping away at the rockface. It’s going to take patience –many years – until the investment pays out. But these good news stories will probably go on to effect all of our lives, and is certainly a far better bet than any bitcoin.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to add your thoughts and share important news stories that you think slipped under the radar in the comments below.

 

Fireworks image credit: chensiyuan via Wikimedia

Fatigue: the problem most people don’t understand

If you’ve never experienced extreme fatigue, then it’s difficult to appreciate. It’s all too easy to say that someone is “lazy” if they complain of no energy or go for a lie down at two in the afternoon. For a long time, many doctors haven’t understood it. For people who are constantly exhausted, us doctors would scrawled ‘TATT’ in the medical notes when someone said they were ‘tired all the time’. They are letters I had often scribbled, but until I felt real fatigue after brain tumour surgery nine years ago, I didn’t truly understand it. Read more

The time I saw demons: let’s remove the stigma of mental health

Paul Hollywood‘The witch’ first started speaking evil thoughts into my mind when I was working in a hospital in Gambia, West Africa. To everyone else she was a concerned-looking 50-something woman crouching over a feverish relative. My supernatural sensitivities told me otherwise. Utterly oblivious, I was suffering the horrifying symptoms of schizophrenia and was utterly convinced these hallucinations were real.

It was several weeks later, after returning to the UK, that reality slowly returned and I stopped hearing voices*. It took me years to gain the courage to tell anyone about my experiences – and even longer to write about it. For this is the nature of mental health illnesses: few people want to talk about them, it is shameful to suffer them and – even in 2015 – those affected are often branded ‘mad’ or ‘weak’.
Read more

Test yourself: Could you spot a skin cancer? Never miss a melanoma.

Test yourself: which do you think are malignant skin cancers? Click to enlarge. Answers at bottom of post.
Test yourself: which do you think are malignant skin cancers? Click to enlarge. Answers at bottom of post.

If you ever doubted humankind’s ability to do great things for our planet, just look at the sky. Or rather, look toward the ozone layer high in the stratosphere. If you cast your mind back, you will remember that there was a lot of talk of the ‘hole in the ozone layer’ brought on by CFCs in the eighties and early nineties. Today, no one seems to mention it anymore, even though climate change is still a very hot potato. This fragile ozone layer is the Earth’s way of blocking out the worst of the sun’s harmful UV rays and without it everyone would die of cancer. But ever since all the world’s nations outlawed all CFC-releasing chemicals in 1987 – such as those in fridges and aerosol cans – ozone layer damage has stopped. Better than that, the ozone layer is now actually repairing itself and the ‘hole’ is shrinking. Read more

Strokes are NOT rising among people of working age, despite news reports

A strike of lightningIf there were an award for the world’s most stupidly named medical condition, ‘stroke’ would win. We use it when talking about petting a dog or caressing a lover – the complete opposite of what a medical stroke is. A serious and life-threatening condition, strokes frequently cause paralysis, slurred speech, confusion – or worse. For those who survive, a stroke can be a wholly terrifying experience – the word originally meant “stuck by God” (a far more befitting term). A stroke is caused by lack of oxygen to a part of the brain – similar to what happens during a heart attack – and any brain function can be affected. To you and me, it’s good enough just to think of stroke as a medical emergency that needs an ambulance. Read more

Three parent babies: it’s not what you think

feet in bedMost of us came into this world through a moment of passion between our father and mother. Not so for everyone. In the world today there are 200,000 people who were not conceived in the conventional way – but in a Petri dish. For the past 35 years, IVF (In Vitro Fertilisation) and similar ‘test tube baby’ techniques have transformed the lives of millions of couples with fertility problems, offering them the chance to have children when they otherwise couldn’t. Lauded as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, it nevertheless remains controversial. For example, the process often results in fertilised eggs being discarded – something many religious organisations object to. A few weeks ago, however, fertility techniques just became a whole lot more contentious when the UK became the first country in the world to allow three-parent babies. By next year there will probably be children born of two mothers and one father. It sounds truly bizarre but it’s not what you think. Read more

How to heal paralysis: modern day miracles

Darek FidykaWithout doubt, Geoffrey Raisman is in line for a Nobel Prize. The little-known British professor has been the brains behind a breakthrough that ‘cured’ a paraplegic man. Bulgarian Darek Fidyka was left paralysed after a knife attack four years ago; images of him now standing upright shot across the globe a few weeks ago. For the first time in history, surgeons had successfully fixed a severed spinal cord. In a bizarre act of surgical jiggery-pokery, surgeons removed nerve cells from Darek’s nose and then transplanted into his damaged spinal cord. Once there, the nose cells stimulated nerves to grow across the 8 mm gap in the spinal cord. And amazingly, this ultimately gave him feeling and movement back in his legs. Read more

Granny’s Marvelous Medicines: 3 traditional treatments that actually work

Cod liver oil bottleImagine a time before the internet. Go further back: think of what the world was like before mobile phones. Now go even further back… back to when computers weren’t around. I know that in today’s touch-screen age, it’s hard to imagine – but not so very long ago all knowledge was passed down through spoken word and books (paper ones). That’s right kids: no Gameboys. For it was a mere fifty years ago that technology was a slide-rule and a wireless – and back then most medicine was more hearsay than science. And the advice doctors gave you in the post-war era probably wasn’t much different to your grandmother’s wisdom.

Today, the majority of traditional remedies have been shown to be nonsense (like giving Guinness to pregnant mums) or wishful thinking (like treating a cold with chicken soup). But a handful of ancient remedies have stood the test of time. Here are just three old-fashioned medicines that can actually do some good. Read more

What is Ebola? Why is it scary? A really simple answer

Ebola in Guinea by European Commission DG ECHO, on Flickr“Ebola Virus outbreak” is a headline that produces terror. Well, it should… but I’m not sure that it does. There’s been an outbreak of Ebola in Guinea and Liberia in West Africa, but how many of us actually know what Ebola is – let alone why it is so scary? A quick poll of friends showed that they didn’t know what it was either (i.e. “flesh eating bug”).

So let us find out what Ebola is, and whether we should be scared about it: Read more

Could Sir Elton John be immune to HIV?

Elton John in NorwayIt is a little known fact that some people are born with an immunity to HIV/AIDS. Such a person could be exposed to infection again and again and yet not contract the illness. They are the lucky ones. But more than that, they could also be the ones who hold the cure for the world. Some suggest that Elton John may be one such person who is immune to HIV. I today’s post, I look at what causes someone to be immune to HIV and whether Sir Elton John might have this special gift… Read more