Thursday, January 21, 2016

Sometimes the side effects matter

Via Thomas Lumley:
As the OneNews story says, there has been a theory for a long time that if you wipe out someone’s immune system and start over again, the new version wouldn’t attack the nervous system and the disease would be cured. The problem was two-fold. First, wiping out someone’s immune system is an extraordinarily drastic treatment — you give a lethal dose of chemotherapy, and then rescue the patient with a transplanted immune system. Second, it didn’t work reliably.
The theory behind this treatment (for MS) is that if you did it earlier then maybe it would become more reliable.  But one can see why this might not be the first thing that somebody tries.  Lethal dose of chemotherapy would be an eye opener for me at the informed consent stage, I tell you, as it rather suggests the potential for things to go . . . wrong.

This might work, and it would be wonderful if it did, but an aspirin a day it is not! 

No comments:

Post a Comment