Back to the Middle Ages

We learned about a cool disease this week. Since there are probably going to be lots of posts about cool diseases from now on, let me just make clear from the outset that by "cool" I obviously mean "interesting, thought-provoking, unexpected" and not "cool" as in "a good thing to have"! Obviously diseases are not good things for anyone to have - if I didn't know this I'd have very little motivation to spend ten to twelve hours each day poring over molecular biology textbooks to learn how to treat diseases. Ok, end of digression and back to the cool disease: so, we learned about a disease called hemochromotosis. This happens to people when their bodies don't realize that they have plenty of iron, and so their epithelial cells keep on absorbing iron and pumping it into the blood, and no regulatory mechanism thinks to say, "hey, hold on, there's plenty of iron in here! You epithelial cells: stop being such workaholics and take a break from the iron pumping already!" As a result, those epithelial cells keep on pumping in the iron, and this is very bad because too much iron in the blood ends up in organs like the liver, and it does very bad things to the tissues there. Left untreated, hemochromotosis is often fatal. 

Now you might be wondering, how does one treat this disease? Is there an expensive high-tech drug out there that can cure this condition? What about surgery? What about gene therapy? Actually, as it happens, there is a treatment for this disease, but it doesn't involve any of these high-tech responses. Instead, it is an extremely cheap, low-tech, uncomplicated treatment - so uncomplicated that as a qualified phlebotomist, I could carry it out! What is it? Bloodletting! Yep, those medieval medicine men were on to something... well, at least with respect to this disease: because the body has no way of purging iron once it's been absorbed, and because blood is the most iron-rich substance in the body, it turns out that bloodletting is the best way to treat hemochromotosis. Patients are bled as often as twice a week, and as you might imagine, their frequent phlebotomy treatment and their iron-rich blood makes them absolute champion blood donors. One patient whose case we studied bled 100 units in one year! One unit is equal to a pint, so this man donated over a dozen gallons of blood in the course of twelve months! So even though thinkers from times past were wrong about the four humors and their impact on the body, this medieval treatment is amazingly effective against this very common disease. Bring on the leaches...