Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by autisticcurio 2122 days ago
My understanding based on an expert here in the UK is that Phages only replicate as long as there is the bacteria around that they were bred to infect and replicate in. As soon as the bacteria levels drop, phages die as there is essentially no food for them to consume. Considering the timescales to develop phages for a strain of bacteria (2 weeks), the ideal treatment is antibiotics, then phages to complete the job, because even Flemming stated when he discovered Penicillin, you need to keep taking these antibiotics until the infection is gone, but today many doctors just prescribe a course for 7-14days, and then you have to go back to get another course if they will prescribe another course, at least on the NHS its like that, and thats when you can get an appointment in my experience. Also bacteria can go into dormancy developing biofilms in different parts of the body and creatinine wont work then. As the immune system attacks the food we eat bar some exceptions like starch as the only sugar not attacked, when we do a water only fast the number of immune cells drop as the numbers are not needed to attack the food. So the lower number of immune cells concentrate on attacking pathogens and faulty cells. Considering Lent used to be 40days of water only fasting, and there was no modern medicine back then, it seems observation and trial and error over thousands of years highlighted a suitable way to keep religious followers healthy, a necessary requirement for religions back then. Today science can explain why water only fasting works for so many illnesses. It seems Herbet Shelton was good at observing considering what we know about Vit D https://web.archive.org/web/20110222200902/http://www.soilan...

However, one of the reasons why his Hygienist methods ie water only fasting were not popular is because some undiagnosed health conditions caused sudden deaths when on a water only fast, so this is why water only fasting is not popular in the medical industry, but Socrates called water only fasting the physician from within, so even the ancient Greeks had made their own observations of what worked way back then with their limited toolset.