This is a rather primitive method to reduce killer peanut allergies, but it does work.
There's no fancy drugs or treatment, just feeding the patients minute amounts of peanut, starting with milligram amounts, and slowly increasing them until they can eat whole nuts without going off the rails. Teams of doctors and nurses stand by to treat any severe reactions immediately, reducing the risk and suffering for the patient if the method does go wrong for them.
It can't be cured and doesn't work for everyone, but managed so that the deadliness of the allergic reaction is removed and these unlucky people have a more or less normal life. To be honest, I'll be really excited when scientists figure out an actual cure. This is much better than nothing, but it's really only a stopgap measure to prevent the allergy from killing the patient.
For all our fancy 21st century medical machines, technology, procedures, drugs and volumes of scientific knowledge, I don't think we're really that far advanced with medical science. The way I see it, incurable conditions and illnesses are just an unsolved technology problem, no matter how complex or intractable. For example, did you know that the human body has the raw ability to regrow severed limbs? I'm not joking, I saw a science article on just this a few years ago. What stops this happening is that we evolved to live without missing body parts due to the high cost of energy and other factors as this gave us a greater chance of survival in the wild aeons ago. Geckos for example, can regrow their tails if they're caught by them in dangerous situations and must lose them to survive. A similar system is within all of us, just forever dormant. Wouldn't it be nice to reawaken it if needed?
Give it another 100 years and if mankind hasn't wiped itself out by then, or sent itself back to the stone age due to climate change and / or wars, then perhaps we might really have something and make most of today's ailments a thing of the past, including creating replacement body parts which we can already do in a limited way.
www.bbc.co.uk
There's no fancy drugs or treatment, just feeding the patients minute amounts of peanut, starting with milligram amounts, and slowly increasing them until they can eat whole nuts without going off the rails. Teams of doctors and nurses stand by to treat any severe reactions immediately, reducing the risk and suffering for the patient if the method does go wrong for them.
It can't be cured and doesn't work for everyone, but managed so that the deadliness of the allergic reaction is removed and these unlucky people have a more or less normal life. To be honest, I'll be really excited when scientists figure out an actual cure. This is much better than nothing, but it's really only a stopgap measure to prevent the allergy from killing the patient.
For all our fancy 21st century medical machines, technology, procedures, drugs and volumes of scientific knowledge, I don't think we're really that far advanced with medical science. The way I see it, incurable conditions and illnesses are just an unsolved technology problem, no matter how complex or intractable. For example, did you know that the human body has the raw ability to regrow severed limbs? I'm not joking, I saw a science article on just this a few years ago. What stops this happening is that we evolved to live without missing body parts due to the high cost of energy and other factors as this gave us a greater chance of survival in the wild aeons ago. Geckos for example, can regrow their tails if they're caught by them in dangerous situations and must lose them to survive. A similar system is within all of us, just forever dormant. Wouldn't it be nice to reawaken it if needed?
Give it another 100 years and if mankind hasn't wiped itself out by then, or sent itself back to the stone age due to climate change and / or wars, then perhaps we might really have something and make most of today's ailments a thing of the past, including creating replacement body parts which we can already do in a limited way.
'My peanut allergy nearly killed me - now I eat them every day'
Just a few years ago, Chris Brookes-Smith could have died from eating peanuts - but taking part in a clinical trial has changed his life.
www.bbc.co.uk
