Saturday, May 10, 2025

Primitive or not?

Cisplatin uses a heavy metal (platinum) to differentially kill more cancer cells than normal ones. Even taking care with the dosage and ameliorations, the heavy metal poisoning inevitably does damage to the body (e.g. kidneys, nerves, etc).

That might sound familiar. Paracelsus proposed mercury to deal with syphilis, for humor theory (and magical) reasons. (Inducing diuresis and salivation would excrete whatever mis-humor was causing the disease.) Of course the treatment killed quite a few patients and crippled many more. They kept on using it, though. Why?

Some patients, would "spontaneously recover" from the primary and secondary lesions. This could be attributed to whatever treatment was used (yay mercury! yay guiac wood!). And mercury ointment could aid healing of lesions. And it turns out that mercury is "strongly spirilocidal," so it could cure--provided it didn't kill.

If bismuth hadn't been developed for use, and penicillin not found, I wonder if we'd still be using mercury for the disease--presumably much more carefully calibrated. Heavy metal chemotherapy for a deadly disease...

1 comment:

Thomas Doubting said...

Bloodletting has a kind of similar history. It was widely used for a couple thousand years according to the humoral theory of medicine, then abandoned as we changed medical theories in the 19th century. Then in the 20th century we discovered there are a few conditions like hemochromatosis (too much iron) where bloodletting is in fact the best treatment. Of course, now we call it "therapeutic phlebotomy."

I'm not sure humoral theory should be considered primitive. It was pretty sophisticated, much like Ptolemaic cosmology was pretty sophisticated. They just turned out to be wrong, but that's how science advances. Every new generation of scientists proves the older generations were wrong about some things.