Helicobacter pylori

Sometimes, with a fight, the truth gets through. Robin Warren and Barry Marshall have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Back in the eighties Warren, a pathologist, realised that inflammation of the stomach lining, all the ulcers and pain, were probably caused by bacteria, and not spicy diet and high living like the doctor said.
Radio 4 six o’clock News had the story of this Nobel prize on Monday, at admirable length, but never mentioned the name of the offending bacterium. I wonder why.
In the summer an old friend came back from distant parts where he works, for a holiday and routine check-ups. On the day he was leaving he told me he had been prescribed antacids by the doctor because of his chronic gastric problems, indigestion and discomfort. Did the doctor mention helicobacter pylori? I asked. My old friend gave me that look that is a very English thing, the dismissal of someone who has pretensions to knowledge which is not officially or by custom and practice theirs. I clattered on anyway, casting little bacteria shaped pearls. But no, the doctor hadn’t mentioned it. And now my friend is back in distant climes, and he’ll still be suffering from burning pain below the ribs.
There were always big problems with Warren’s and Marshall’s discovery. It was an item of faith in the medical world that bacteria could not survive the acid bath of the stomach. It was an item of faith to which drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline would tolerate no heresy, because GKS made a lot of their profits out of Zantac, an antacid that ineffectually treated the symptoms of helicobacter pylori infection without addressing the cause. People could swallow the stuff for years on end, never getting better, slowly getting worse. And the worse they got, the more dependent they became on Zantac, which at least briefly alleviated the pain. So a simple one-off cure for gastric ulcers would be a disaster for GSK. The result was huge rubbishing of Warren and Marshall’s new theory, slagging off and belittling of Warren and Marshall as scientists and human beings, lies and denunciation worthy of an Ibsen play.
The battle of GKS against two Aussie researchers with nothing but the “bloody obvious” truth on their side wasn’t so difficult anyway. A lot of medical training, and medical wealth, is predicated on the products of the drugs industry, and most doctors are not naturally attuned to science. And it’s got to be said that, though things should be getting better with the huge rise in standard of entrants to medical school over the last thirty years, some doctors still seem a bit dim, and no doubt my friend’s GP was just such a one. So he suffers. But it’s his own fault because he did that very English thing of looking at me with embarrassment and fear when I used an unauthorised octosyllabic term.
That’s my main point. We should get over it. The BBC should have named the bacterium involved. Without that name, sufferers are powerless. And I suspect that’s the idea, even if it’s half formed and latent. The term helicobacter pylori is still presumed by BBC News to be the rightful property of an élite. To give it to the rest of us would demystify that élite, would turn us from patients who were “under the doctor” into people who could say, ”What about helicobacter pylori, then, mate? Have you thought of that?”
I assumed both the BBC and the medical profession had got over this mystifying élitism years ago. Seems not.