I’m realizing that in modern medicine there are these conditions that are viewed as unpopular siblings in certain disciplines. For instance in rheumatology it might be Sjogrens and in neurology it might be POTS.
Those who study more well defined and understood conditions scoff at the poor research in these areas, question the clinical practices, and often label patients with those conditions as difficult or likely falsely attributing symptoms that might not be real.
I wonder if it was the same many years ago when there were other conditions that weren’t well understood. If doctors had the same gall and presumptions. Or maybe back then there was a much more prevalent acceptance that knowledge was limited.
In becoming more learned, have we also become blind to being able to see where our expertise ends? What is the penalty for behaving this way? I fear that there is not a clear consequence for this bad behavior. It goes unpunished.
But that doesn’t mean that no one suffers. It’s our patients that take the brunt of the pain and anguish of our insolence. When we are proved wrong there is no gloating but just a deep sense of sadness and anger that we should have known and done better.
So then what to do now? I think we need to tread more carefully. In a pandemic where the experts are few and too many questions are left unanswered, we should put away our academic intellectualism and rush to judgment. We should be listening not speaking.
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Aptamers. Oligonucleotide or peptide molecules that bind to a specific target molecule. I’m almost certain that this is the one big medical advances that is going to come out of this pandemic.
You already see companies including BioNTech doing something similar by deploying mRNA to treat early MS which is an autoimmune disease. These short segments of mRNA get coded into what are the equivalent of aptamers.
These aptamers can then bind to specific target molecules with a certain degree of specificity depending on the proteins encoded. That could include autoimmune antibodies or other disease causing molecules.