.....If you want to know how tough it is to write this column sometimes, try, as I had to do this month, to come up with an easy 5-7 word definition for “ulcers”, which as it happens, is the one-word topic my editor fed me for this month, so after an hour or so of hard thought (well, OK, it was only 2 seconds, but it was 2 seconds of very hard thought) I did what everyone in my shoes would surely do: I cheated.
.....I cheated by going to Wikipedia, which alas, offered up at least 12 definitions for “ulcers”, so because I like things to be as simple as possible (mainly because, my wife insists, I have a simple single-celled brain, and you know, I’d love to argue with her but I can’t ever think of a good comeback), let me say right off the top that since ulcers may be described as “breaks” or “sores” or “erosions” that can occur practically anywhere on the body (skin, eye, internal linings), I thought it would be best if I narrowed my focus to a discussion of ulcers that occur in the first part of the small intestine (the duodenum), which no surprise, are called duodenal ulcers.
.....And the reason I want to focus on duodenal ulcers is that they offer up a terrifically interesting tale of medical research and medical thinking, a story about why we in the medical |
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business should always be ready to reassess what we think we know because we may not know nearly as much as we think we know, and at the end of this
article, there’s even a free gift and a famous lesson for you, too.
.....So, let’s start by going back a few years to when I was still an intern.
.....OK, so it’s more than a “few” years back, more like 40 years ago (but I swear it really does feel like yesterday), to the late 1960’s, when there were only three pervasive ideas about why people |
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get duodenal ulcers: 1) stress, 2) stress, and 3) stress.
.....This attribution of duodenal ulcers to a stress-filled life stemmed from several sources, but the most intriguing was a series of studies done on monkeys who were put under a great deal of stress in the lab (they were taught to hit a bar to get a treat, but after a while, that treat was only delivered occasionally when they banged the bar, and sometimes when they didn’t; for a monkey, that’s apparently very stressful, for a Hister kid, that’d be a neat game, until, that is, they destroyed the bar).
This stress was said to be equivalent to the stress that business executives suffer in the real world, which is why the monkeys became known as “executive monkeys”, and since executive monkeys generally developed ulcers when subjected to enough stress, the view that took hold in the medical world is that if you can reduce your stress load, then you can eliminate your risk of getting a duodenal ulcer.
.....So when an upstart Australian dude called Peter Marshall |
