An Abandoned Nobel Prize Winning Treatment for Syphilis started with Infecting Patients with Malaria
A nobel prize winning treatment for syphilis might have a modern day use for treating lyme disease, too. But research stalled in the 1980s when the CDC updated its ethics protocols. Nonetheless, this fascinating deep dive into the history of “pyrotherapy” might give clues about what directions medicine could take should antibiotics stop working.
Before the invention for antibiotics, the most promising cure for syphilis involved infecting dying patients with malaria in the hopes that the extremely fever would burn away the disease. Much to everyone's surprise, "pyrotherapy" (also known as "malriotherapy") actually worked about half the time. This was a medical miracle and huge leap forward, because before then syphilis killed just about everybody who contracted it. And while the protocols were mostly abandoned by 1970, there is a chance that a similar approach could work for Lyme disease or other similar conditions if our antibiotics start losing their efficacy. This video is about the bizarre history of the Nobel prize winning therapy that revolutionized medicine and then was promptly forgotten.