Two of the deadliest conditions people in advanced countries face are sepsis and antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. Since most doctors don’t know how to treat critical sepsis cases yet you need to read this.
Heart disease and cancers are serious, but sepsis is actually the leading cause of death in hospitals. Hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and millions around the world are dying each year from sepsis and many more are dying of bacterial infections which can’t be treated using antibiotics.
Fortunately, there are four recent breakthrough medical discoveries which address these threats.
Sepsis is far more common than MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aurea), the most important hospital-acquired infection which can’t be treated with antibiotics, so sepsis first.
Sepsis is not an infection, it is the body’s immune system’s overreaction to an infection. Until recently the only way to treat sepsis (a.k.a. Septic shock or blood poisoning) has been to determine the nature of the underlying infection which the body is reacting to.
Unfortunately, this takes time, sometimes days, and once sepsis sets in, the chance of it killing the patient goes up 8% EVERY hour it goes untreated.
The numbers don’t lie and they show that if you are diagnosed with sepsis there is a 40% chance that it will kill you, even if you are in the best hospital in the world. In a less developed country or rural hospital, the chance of death is 60% either because the laboratory tests take too long or because antibiotics aren’t available.
Once detected, which often comes too late (more about that below), doctors generally start the patient on a cocktail of various mild antibiotics which may or may not treat the actual infection.
Two recent discoveries in U.S. teaching hospitals promise to have broken the cycle by treating sepsis itself directly, easily, and without antibiotics.
I have reported on these in my medical blog criticalmedicalnews.com but additional advances have made it essential that I bring the news to a wider audience.
Someone you know or are related to is likely to develop sepsis and this article can save their lives because it takes years for this sort of new development to reach every hospital and doctor.
Sepsis Cure No. 1
The Marik Cure, named for the doctor who discovered it. Over the years since double Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling suggested that vitamin C in high concentrations was a treatment or cure for many diseases including some cancers, new research has shown that he was more correct than otherwise and his early critics are regularly being shown that they were wrong and he was right to look at vitamin C.
Paul Marik, M.D. of the Eastern Virginia Medical School had a terminal patient in ICU. It was obvious she would die in a day or two so he gave her intravenous Vitamin C and steroids which wouldn’t have harmed her even if she were healthy.
She walked out of the hospital two days later, cured of sepsis.
The Marik Cure consists of intravenous vitamin C, some mild steroids (hydrocortisone), and vitamin B1 (which helps the body absorb vitamin C.
Total cost for the drugs? About $60.
So far the Marik Cure has been tried for over a year with a 100% success rate.
Sepsis Cure No. 2
This one is still in the experimental stage but since it uses a common chemotherapy drug in extremely low doses, and because sepsis is so often fatal, doctors are looking at using this as a last resort treatment for advanced sepsis.
Now Molecular biologist Ivan Marazzi of the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and colleagues have found that a chemotherapy drug, Camptothecin, can reduce mortality in septic mice by 90%.
New Sepsis Test
The test for sepsis often takes too long, but a UK scientists group led by Dr Roman Lukaszewski has come up with a quick test which is 97% accurate. This is reportedly a test for sepsis itself so is much faster than the multiple tests usually necessary to determine any underlying infection.
MRSA
Researchers have found a way to treat antibiotic-resistant infections without using antibiotics.
The overuse of antibiotics both by doctors and by ranchers who use it on animals which people later consume has caused bacteria to develop which can’t be cured with existing antibiotics.
Researchers at Case Western University and University of PA Medical Center (Pittsburgh, PA. U.S.A.) have found a class of chemicals which eliminate the poisons produced by bacteria which are what actually cause damage to the patient.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32829-w#Ack1
Unlike the Sepsis cure with Vitamin C or the experimental treatment with a chemotherapy drug in low doses, this MRSA treatment isn’t something you can demand at any hospital, it is very early in the development of the treatment but is extremely promising and may be the way hospitals treat serious infections in the future – use these chemicals to protect the patient while leaving the person’s own immune system to tackle the actual infection.
