2-Minute Tips: 39# Taking on Conventional Wisdom

Dr Barry Marshall sits in a Western Australian hospital staring intently at his mug. He’s about to drink a brew containing a live infectious disease. This is not how he expected his gastroenterology internship to play out and certainly wasn’t advised in any medical textbook he'd ever read. 

However, this act will eventually help tear up those very textbooks, saving millions of lives in the process.

To explain, let us go back five years earlier to 1979, where Dr Robin Warren is peering down a microscope on an unusually wet day in Perth. Warren, a pathologist, is studying tissue from a patient’s stomach, when he spots something unusual – bacteria. 

Common knowledge for over 80 years, dictates that bacteria can’t survive in stomachs due to the high acidity, but here it is.

His fellow researchers mocked Warren’s findings, but he wasn’t dissuaded and upon investigation found the same bacteria in many other stomachs. For 2 years, no-one took him seriously, until Marshall joined as a research partner. 

The pair, freed of the dogma of the sterile stomach, didn’t take long to find a link between these new bacteria subsequently named H-pylori and stomach ulcers that afflicted 10% of the population.

It was not stress that caused ulcers, but H-pylori. Instead of a lifelong condition, which caused great pain, potentially leading to stomach removal, cancer and sometimes death, ulcers could be treated with just a week of antibiotics.

You might expect that these two revolutionaries would be heralded, and that ulcer treatment would change rapidly. You would be wrong. For gastroenterologists this was the equivalent of being told that their world was flat and all the duo received was criticism and indifference.

Marshall became increasingly exasperated. He watched patients lose their stomachs or even bleed to death when all they needed was antibiotics. Unable, to conduct a human study on ethical grounds, he did the next best thing and infected himself by drinking the disgusting mug of H-pylori!

Within 5 days, he was very ill, developing gastritis - the precursor to an ulcer. After confirming the bacterial outbreak, he took the necessary antibiotics and fully recovered. Source

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t convince the naysayers. Scientific or medical dogma is incredibly powerful. Even smart, well-educated individuals will find all sorts of reasons before changing their core beliefs. 

Also, multi-billion-dollar industries had been built out of ulcer sufferers – both gastroenterologist check-ups and ongoing antacids. There was a strong disincentive for handing out just one dose of antibiotics as a cure.

Regardless, what Marshall did achieve by self-infecting was publicity. In the US he became known as ‘The Guinea-Pig Doctor’. Interest grew and eventually the FDA forced the issue, changing the whole landscape in the early 90s. 

Finally, ulcer sufferers were treated correctly, and Warren and Marshall deservedly received the Nobel prize in 2005!

WISDOM 💎

“There’s nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

Robin Warren

Tip 1 - A SMART PLAY ✅

Be curious and don’t just accept what you’re told. Every now and then the whole world moves to believe that which was previously inconceivable.

Tip 2 - AVOID 🚩

Being so certain that you miss the truth staring you straight in the face. H-pylori had been hiding in plain sight in multiple medical photos and even a textbook over the preceding 100 years. Everyone ignored it, as everyone knew the stomach was sterile. Everyone was wrong. Source

Tip 3 - ACTION 💪

Is there some pursuit that you’ve stopped due to negativity or criticism? Might it be worth giving it another crack?