Ulcer Docs' Nobel Prize Illustrates the Dangers of Dogma

[UPDATED 10/14/05]  Regular readers have repeatedly been reminded here that on occasion, what we think we “know” turns out to be wrong.   In case we moderns think we’re immune from this phenomenon, I’ve previously cited the example of peptic ulcers as providing a useful warning about the dangers of dogma. 

Doctors long thought peptic ulcers were caused by stomach acids resulting from stress and diet.  They treated ulcers with special diets, stress-reduction advice, acid-blockers, and sometimes even surgery to remove the affected part of the stomach.  People sometimes died from ulcers, or from complications arising from the surgery.

In the 1980s, two Australian physicians, challenging longstanding medical dogma, argued that peptic ulcers are caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, and could be successfully treated with antibiotics.  The medical establishment was skeptical and even scornful. 

[UPDATE 10/14/05:  See this NY Times article by Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., for an account of how dogmatic opposition to the Ozzie doctors' thesis came from drug companies and surgeons, who had vested interests in other, less-effective or more-dangerous ways to treat ulcers, and from inertia and conventional-wisdom thinking.]

But eventually the establishment was persuaded by what the Nobel committee called “irrefutable” clinical evidence.  The two Ozzies, Dr. Barry Marshall and Dr. J. Robin Warren, just won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The lesson?  The universe is what it is.  Our knowledge is always provisional, always subject to reappraisal in light of newly-revealed evidence.   Borrowing from David Pailin, if we claim that some particular dogma is immutable, we worship human wishes instead of Ultimate Reality.

There’s a corollary, like unto it:  God is what he (or she or they or it) is.  Moreover he has done what he has done, and he desires what he desires.  Ours is not to decree these things, but to discover them — and to delight in them.