Thought for the Day Doubt - Four

Sunset

Yesterday, I was thinking about how physicians overcame their doubts about penicillin.

Nowadays, a new medicine will be put to the test in a formal process that lasts, perhaps, ten years and costs millions of pounds.

But this is a new approach. Some would say that Randomised Controlled Trials began in 1947. That was when the MRC, the British Medical Research Council, examined the value of streptomycin as a cure for tuberculosis.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, tuberculosis was the cause of death of about twenty percent of the population of Europe. There was need for a medicine that would kill the responsible organism – Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

It was Selman Waksman and his colleague Albert Schatz, working in the United States, who discovered the antibiotic streptomycin, a chemical lethal to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, in 1942. Waksman was the first scientist to use the term ‘antibiotic’.

Without delay, the MRC set up a trial that would compare the curative effect of streptomycin with that of traditional care in a sanatorium on young adults with tuberculosis. Only half of the patients, fifty-five of them, received the streptomycin, chosen by random number allocation. I expect that there was debate and concern about this, but the MRC accepted it because of shortage of streptomycin at the time.

At the end of the trial, there was no longer any doubt about the value of streptomycin.

Sometimes it can be costly to us to get the upper hand on our doubts.