Chinese scientists develop cure for diabetes, insulin patient becomes medicine-free in just 3 months
Chinese scientists develop cure for diabetes, insulin patient becomes medicine-free in just 3 months
Chinese scientists achieve diabetes cure through innovative cell therapy, detailed in Cell Discovery. Patient, treated in July 2021, no longer requires insulin after eleven weeks, and is now medication-free for 33 months. The breakthrough, praised by Timothy Kieffer, signifies a major advancement in...
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Interesting, but that headline is misleading.
A single patient was weaned off blood sugar medication over a year and hasn't redeveloped diabetes in almost three years.
There's obviously a lot more research into the cell therapy process and many more patients are going to have to undergo this therapy in controlled conditions before we can call it a new cure.
Right now, this is an interesting medical anomaly that occurred over more than a year of treatment in which someone's pancreatic process was restored in correlation with a new cell therapy.
Interesting, but that headline is misleading.
As is standard for science stories, especially medical stories, in the media.
This is how big of a problem it is: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/15/18679138/nutrition-health-science-mice-news
First human trial for a treatment strategy passed (notably, we know that placebo treatments for diabetes fail). This more than passes the bar to justify further large-scale human trials and, clinically, is a very strong indicator of success.
What, is it not a cure until it's available to the public?
I mean, the guy is correct… there are plenty of cases where someone has recovered from something that doesn’t have widespread impact.
That doesn’t make this any less, but a good dose of scepticism is pretty healthy when it comes to broad statements like ‘cures diabetes’
Edit: too many versions of ‘healthy’ haha
It justifies, in fact begs for human trials, but a single unregulated data point from a single moment is hardly a cure.
It becomes a cure after the treatment is isolated from mitigating factors and acutely applied to the same disorder in many patients in controlled conditions with peer-reviewed and independently confirmed repeatable results over time.
Well, the phrase is, "the plural of anecdote is not statistic." In this case, we only have a single case, so it doesn't even escape "anecdote." I think at that point, there isn't yet a scientific basis to call it a "cure."