* Some show antimicrobial or other therapeutic properties, and they have a long history in the treatment of human diseases (5, 6). However, their use is considered to be “naturopathic” medicine, and to date, none have been approved by regulatory agencies for therapeutic applications.
* This deposit differs from other clays such as kaolinite or bentonite. X-ray diffraction shows that KC possesses a low clay mineral content (~24% [wt]), dominated by the presence of biotite (unpublished data). Moreover, as a natural clay deposit, KC has a significant resident microbial community (1,000 to 3,000 taxa), which includes Actinobacteria, which are known to make bioactive small molecules and may contribute to KC activity by the production of antimicrobials (unpublished data).
* More recently, the antibacterial activities and physicochemical characteristics of other therapeutic clay minerals have been investigated in the laboratory (11, 12). Haydel et al. reported on the broad-spectrum in vitro antibacterial activities of a natural iron-rich clay (CsAgO2) that was used to treat patients with Buruli ulcer (12).
* We suggest that the broad-spectrum antibacterial activity of KC may be a valuable option for the treatment of ESKAPE infections, especially in last-resort situations
Looks like they are saying this clay has some interesting physical, microbial, and mineral properties, in other words, it seems like they dont have any idea of why it works but are pretty sure it does.
Is this really true? That we don't know, or only have a very vague idea about the pharmacodynamics, or simply the mechanism of action of various treatments, so the process is more about establishing that they aren't harmful?
> The FDA does not actually require you to have a mechanism – that’s a common misconception. The FDA wants to see safety and efficacy. Now, a known mechanism will probably make the assessment of both those factors easier, to be sure, so all things being equal, you’d rather know how your drug works.
We know the basic mechanism of action behind SSRIs, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that can tell you definitively why they can be effective.
They are some of the most prescribed drugs in America. They have a better safety profile than MAOIs, despite that the latter can be more effective in treating depression / anxiety.
There was a theory behind why SSRIs work that existed when they were developed (the serotonin theory of depression), but this theory was later shown to be wrong - basically, SSRIs do modulate serotonin but that has no relation to whether you are depressed; if SSRIs do work, its through another mechanism. In addition the efficacy is greatly overstated; large follow-up studies have shown that they only have measurable effects on the most severely depressed individuals. The vast majority of people being prescribed SSRIs do not fall in this category and likely receive no benefit beyond placebo.
This, of course, highly depends on what your definition of "severely depressed" is. There are several standards whose ranges don't even overlap on the same scale. [1] Also consider that people who have moderate depression may have episodes that put them in the severe category, which we would like to treat effectively.
From what I've read about some medicines it's something like "We originally used it for this but it turns out it stops this too! (we're not entirely sure why)"
Off-label prescription is prescribing a drug for non-intended purpose.
Viagra for example, was originally studied for high blood pressure.
I've also seen a tv program where they visited a pharmacy company's lab that's literally machines mixing random drugs in order to find their next product. The place was the size of a walmart.
There are several treatments the working principles of which we have more or less no idea about.
The process is extracting active compounds, establishing that they do something (and if so what), finding out whether there are safe dosages, charting what these safe dosages are and looking for a way to mass-produce the compounds.
You may have heard that many medicines are found by testing untold number of Amazonian species for medicinal properties. That sort of search finds things that work, not the reasons why.
I've seen more than one prescription-drug commercial on TV that uses the fine print (sometimes even the voiceover!) to say "we don't know how or why this drug has the effects it does".
Bleach is used to kill bacteria in much the same way as this clay, has been for a long while. Bleach is used worldwide to purify drinking water. It is used, in diluted form, on skin infections. In a way, I personally use it to prevent athlete's foot.
If you swim in a chlorine pool (diluted bleach) as much as I do, nothing lives on your skin for long. Swimmers don't suffer athlete's foot.
Nobody is claiming that bleach is useful in similar applications.
Au contraire!
Sodium hypochlorite is available globally at exceptionally low cost as household bleach in concentrations of 5%-6%.... Sodium hypochlorite has been used as an antiseptic agent in dentistry for more than a century and remains a widely used root canal irrigant at concentrations ranging from 1.0%-5.25%..... The American Dental Association Council on Dental Therapeutics has designated dilute sodium hypochlorite a "mild antiseptics mouth rinse" and suggested its use for direct application to mucous membranes.
By similar application we mean completely injested so that it goes into your digestive system and/or bloodstream and selectively kills "bad" stuff only, even in low concentrations. That's what antibiotics do and that's what's so great about them.
Nobody uses bleach for that. Bleach and alcohol kill everything they touches at high enough concentrations and barely anything if it's too low.
Indeed. But the comment I was replying to said: Lots of things kill bacteria. Bleach for instance.... Nobody is claiming that bleach is useful in similar applications.
I'm not claiming it is any kind of substitute for antibiotics.
It's worth noting this in this context, because the mechanism the clay kills by is unknown. It maybe more similar to bleach and harmful to everything, or it maybe more targeted.
Before that, don't they have to work out some sort of delivery mechanism?
>> When suspended in water, the clay killed 16 strains of ESKAPE bacteria.
Suspended, not dissolved. This is millions of tiny rocks stirred up in water. If that were injected into anything all manner of negative processes would start, all ending in massive clots/strokes. Perhaps this has some application externally, maybe on burns, but it isn't going to be injected into anything anytime soon.
There are anti-microbial agents, e.g., amphotericin B and nystatin, that when taken orally stay in the gut and do not enter the blood stream, which does not make them useless because many pathogens do the same thing.
Moreover, all the therapeutic clays and earths I've heard about, namely bentonite clay, activated charcoal and diatomaceous earth, are suspended in water and drunk.
The process of killing bacteria may be partially physical. If it is the shape or porosity of some mineral that is key, and if that shape also causes clots, then there may be no chance of a safe treatment.
Except apparently the origination of understanding this clay's potential derives from the First Nations people having already safely used it internally for centuries. If it killed large numbers of the people that took it, they'd have stopped using it.
> If it killed large numbers of the people that took it, they'd have stopped using it.
Eeeehh not necessarily, it just needs to be better than not using it or not being trivially linked to the stuff.
Romans used lead as sweetener both indirectly (making defrutum and sapa in lead pot which they'd found gave them a sweeter taste than brass — because of the lead leeching into the boil) and directly after discovering the extraction of lead acetate from litharge using vinegar. And lead acetate remained in wide use as a sweetener well into the european middle-ages as the only alternate sweetener was honey which wasn't that common. Sugarcane sugar imports from India only started after crusaders brought sugar home from raiding sugar caravans in the middle-east, followed by the triangular trade's massive sugarcane exploitations in the new world — and even then it would remain a luxury in most of europe until the 18th century.
> elemental mercury, radium, and phosphorous were also used as medicines even when they did not have redeeming medicinal uses.
Well, mercury is a fairly effective antibacterial agent, it's just that we don't use it much anymore because it's also very toxic to humans. I think it still does have some (limited) medical applications.
Felix d'Hérelle "quickly learned that bacteriophages are found wherever bacteria thrive: in sewers, in rivers that catch waste runoff from pipes, and in the stools of convalescent patients."
Similarly the Egyptians used honey in wound dressings. "We now know that honey actually contains substantial amounts of hydrogen peroxide which can kill bacteria".
Also "moldy bread was used in China, Greece, Serbia, Egypt and probably other ancient civilizations as treatment for some disease conditions, particularly infected wounds. The observed curative powers may have been due to some raw forms of antibiotics produced by the mold growing on the bread".
Hopefully the people of the Heiltsuk Nation will make more samples available to labs hoping to reproduce this work.
Hopefully some of those labs will, in secure containment facilities, explore how readily the bacteria adapt to develop resistance to this clay. It's important to work out protocols that don't promote rapid global adaptation.
You can pretty much show any kind of effect from a treatment by P hacking, not adequatly designing a study or accidentally contaminating your experiment. This is exactly the kind of thing that really doesn't need attention until it's replicated.
Can a handgun kill bacteria? I remember reading about experiments to test whether bacteria could survive meteor impacts. They couldn't come up with a gun powerful enough to wipe them out.
Spores != bacteria. Further, can kill is not the same as sterilize, so yes a handgun can kill some bacteria in much the same way a bullet wound kills some skin cells.
Though, without actually sterilizing a sample it can be difficult to notice, but lot's of things kill bacteria. They are easy to kill, but hard to kill off.
PS: Spore formation in bacteria is not the principal method of reproduction but simply a method of surviving unfavourable conditions. They are like pinecones which can survive forest fires while pine trees tend to burn really easily.
It really is amazing how little we know about the healing and prophylactic qualities of plants and minerals. I mean, sure, we do know a lot.
But we have such a perverse incentive structure - and I'm talking about IP here - that makes it more worthwhile to understand something esoteric and bizarre like a difficult-to-isolate chemical compound, unlikely to have been encountered very often in the history of human evolution, while it's difficult to find motivation to do a simple study like this one.
http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/1/e01842-15.full
* Some show antimicrobial or other therapeutic properties, and they have a long history in the treatment of human diseases (5, 6). However, their use is considered to be “naturopathic” medicine, and to date, none have been approved by regulatory agencies for therapeutic applications.
* This deposit differs from other clays such as kaolinite or bentonite. X-ray diffraction shows that KC possesses a low clay mineral content (~24% [wt]), dominated by the presence of biotite (unpublished data). Moreover, as a natural clay deposit, KC has a significant resident microbial community (1,000 to 3,000 taxa), which includes Actinobacteria, which are known to make bioactive small molecules and may contribute to KC activity by the production of antimicrobials (unpublished data).
* More recently, the antibacterial activities and physicochemical characteristics of other therapeutic clay minerals have been investigated in the laboratory (11, 12). Haydel et al. reported on the broad-spectrum in vitro antibacterial activities of a natural iron-rich clay (CsAgO2) that was used to treat patients with Buruli ulcer (12).
* We suggest that the broad-spectrum antibacterial activity of KC may be a valuable option for the treatment of ESKAPE infections, especially in last-resort situations
Looks like they are saying this clay has some interesting physical, microbial, and mineral properties, in other words, it seems like they dont have any idea of why it works but are pretty sure it does.