The Curious H. pylori Story
Let's now narrate the story of the man who drank H. pylori and won a Nobel prize for it!
It had long been established that peptic ulcers are duo to stress, spicy foods and gastric acid, stated in all major medical books and taught to medical students, and the doctors would heal gastric ulcers based on these etiologies, or would they?
It would have been a fact now, were it not for Dr. Barry Marshall from #Australia who challenged it. At first the idea was ridiculed by fellow doctors and experts, because "no bacteria would survive in such acidic environment." But Dr. Barry Marshall knew better. He started testing on piglets but couldn't succeed, and because it's illegal to test harmful experiments on humans, he poured the Petri dish that contained #Helicobacter_pylori in a glass and drank it!
He expected the ulcers to appear in years to come, yet the symptoms started only three days later. (This definitely fulfills Hill's criteria of causation :D)
Dr. Marshall treated himself with antibiotics and marched on to claim the 2005 Nobel Prize of Physiology and Medicine.
Harrison's Principles of #Internal_Medicine, probably the most acclaimed medical textbook after the Canon, acknowledging the H .pylori as the foremost cause of #gastric ulcers.
We owe this fact, and the consecutive healing of millions of patients to the daring experiment of Dr. #Barry_Marshall, who sacrificed himself to challenge "facts". Thank you, Hero! 💜💜