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US doctors are conducting tests on a British man who no longer uses insulin to treat his type 1 diabetes.
Daniel Darkes, from Daventy in Northamptonshire, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes seven years ago. But his recent tests have baffled doctors as his pancreas has shown signs of working properly again. Branded 'Miracle Dan' by his friends, the 30-year-old recently travelled to America so doctors could run tests to further understand what had happened to his body.
Speaking to the Northampton Chronicle and Echo newspaper, he said: "I had numerous tests, about four or five, to confirm the main reason why my pancreas had started producing insulin again.
[...] Mr Darkes says that doctors are now 80 per cent convinced he is cured of the condition, which has never before been reversed. The findings from Mr Darkes' test results are set to be published next week and it is hoped they will help find future treatments for the autoimmune condition.
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 22 2017, @08:33AM (4 children)
"The findings from Mr Darkes' test results are set to be published next week and it is hoped they will help find future treatments for the autoimmune condition."
So, let my AI get this straight.
A guy finds a CURE for diabetes (be it a miracle or a method or a rare genetic portfolio).
Medical research says YAY! maybe we can get a TREATMENT out of it.
So this freudian slip means you have to massage the definitive CURE until it transform into a steady source of income generating TREATMENT.
Go on, people, keep focusing on anti vaxxers and the holistic bulshitters, while the mindset of these guys probably has already surpassed a world war in terms of indirect responsibility for death and suffering.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday March 22 2017, @09:26AM
Well no. The guy has not "found a cure", he has (apparently) spontaneously cured himself somehow without even trying. Probably some rare genetic mutation that means he has a backup endocrine system or the ability to heal / repair / adapt his faulty pancreas.[1] This is not something you can necessarily apply to somebody else. The reason it's exciting is that the causes of type 1 diabetes still aren't fully understood. If this case can lead to a better understanding of the causes, then a treatment (or cure) could be a lot easier to find
[1] Or maybe he was just misdiagnosed in the first place - could be he had the symptoms of diabetes but they were caused by some passing environmental factor rather than a problem with his own body.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @02:49PM (1 child)
"Cure" is the desired result of a "treatment". Antibiotics used to "cure" a bacterial infection is still a "treatment".
Understanding a case study of a man who recovered from type I diabetes may lead to treatments in the same way that study of HIV-infected long-term non-progressors (don't progress to AIDS) has led to some limited success (including one curative treatment - the Berlin patient).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ray_Brown [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday March 24 2017, @05:52AM
But all the same you are admitting treatment is the intermediate step and not the objective.
"I hope in the future we will..." usually denotes desired achievements. Not wishing for something is also the first step for not getting it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 02 2017, @07:08AM
I agree with you that any wording that takes away from studying what has happened with Mr. Darkes' being what it is, a complete remission of established type 1 diabetes is unacceptable and plays to the medical establishment wanting to profit off of a disease that costs the US, on the order of a quarter Billion dollars a year and it is rising! that sort of blow off is disgusting and short sited. With all the crazy political talk about health care costs recently, blowing off diabetes cure research is beyond stupid, it is actively sending us as a society in the wrong direction. We deserve better and I demand better than that.
That being said I do not believe that there is some cabal that is sitting on a cure. There is a continuum where one end would have you believe that Big Pharma has cures for everything and wants to kill off 90% of the population and lots of people believe it but they have exactly 0 tangible evidence to prove one iota of it. The other end of the continuum is the belief that Diabetes or cancer or whatever other incurable disease are currently incurable because they are wickedly complicated, multi faceted and nuanced by their very nature and to "Cure" a disease like type 1 diabetes in this case would require a set of specific actions in the right amounts and in the right order to achieve a complete remission and we are at a loss to say what those actions and their parameters are exactly. I am a believer that we don't have a cure yet because we don't know what we don't know about this disease and we need to jump on opportunities such as Dan's circumstances to illuminate the landscape of the unknown unknowns of this disease, thereby turning them into things we know we don't know that can be experimented upon, giving us more stuff in the container of things we know we know and can confirm through the peer review process. This is how we learn things kids!
SO I ask: Does anyone know what lab and university this research was done at and where these test results are now that it is more than a week after this story has hit the news? If this just gets swept under the carpet, that is a red flag that this story might be complete BS, but if what was claimed, that some university group did these tests on Dan a couple of weeks ago is true.. there should be some sort of facts and paper trails to back it up.
Come on Soylent News!!!! Follow up on this !!! Inquiring minds want to know what is going on here!!!! Don't leave us hanging!!!