New discoveries, old remedies

We recently posted on the ability of natural aromatherapy oils to kill off antibiotic-resistant bacteria; and now, garlic is being touted as well:

The ingredient which gives garlic its distinctive smell is the latest weapon in the battle to beat the hospital "superbug" MRSA.

University of East London researchers found allicin treated even the most antibiotic-resistant strains of the infection.

Over at Scribal Terror the question is reasonably asked, does this mean that we've been too quick to dismiss the use of oil-scented handkerchiefs, pomanders, and masks in the pre-antibiotic era as laughable and "medieval"? Time will tell.

Not that we should all be abandoning modern medicine quite yet. Though many traditional folk remedies have now been found to be effective, that shouldn't alter our understanding that overall, premodern medicine never permitted anything like the length and quality of life we expect today. The problem back then was that premodern remedies were never subjected to rigorous analysis by the scientific method. Now, we can carry out those studies -- if only we can get beyond our instinctive dismissal of treatments that don't fit our picture of how diseases work.

Which leads to another recent story, this from the New York Times:

Dr. Rubin, director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is reporting that in mice, a simple treatment that does not involve drugs appears to be directing cells to turn into bone instead of fat.

All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform -- and correspondingly more bone.

"I was the biggest skeptic in the world," Dr. Rubin said. "And I sit here and say, 'This can't possibly be happening.' I feel like the credibility of my scientific career is sitting on a razor's edge between 'Wow, this is really cool,' and 'These people are nuts.'"

It is hypothesized that low-level vibrations caused by repeated muscle contractions are the main reason why athletic people retain more bone mass as they age than the sedentary -- high-magnitude impacts perhaps having less proportionate effect than hitherto believed. How this might fit the observation that resistance training is better for bone preservation than other forms of lighter exercise I'm not sure. Perhaps the muscles have to contract with a certain minimum level of force to gain measurable benefits. In any event, it may be time to reconsider the listing of vibration therapy as quack medicine, even if many past implementations might have been ineffective. In fact, a quick Google search suggests that there are some aggressively-marketed vibration platforms out there already, though it seems they differ from the system described in the NY Times article in giving a perceptible buzz, as opposed to a vibration frequency so low as to border on the imperceptible.

Posted by David on November 1, 2007 8:48 AM