ating that fats are necessary, that there are good fats and bad fats as well as good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. All the while people who follow these strict diet and exercise regimens for many years and are apparently in excellent health are still dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes. The closest the consensus can come to a cause is the concept of risk factors. Studies can show that certain aspects of people’s lifestyle and biology are statistically associated with increased risk of artherosclerosis. When such an association occurs by chance it is accepted as a risk factor for the disease. But still none of the risk factors for the disease appear to be the primary cause of the disease. Because for each of these risk factors, many people can be found who do not have one risk factor, but still have the disease. With that fact at hand many researchers have begun to think that such diseases originate as a composite sum of the various risk factors. Yet if all of the risk factors are combined they explain only half of the cases of people with the disease (Ewald 65). In 1979 the fifteenth edition of the Cecil Textbook of Medicine, peptic ulcers were attributed to many risk factors: gastric acidity, stress, smoking, alcohol consumption and genetic predisposition. A belief that continued for several years after Australian internist Barry Marshall introduced his theory of an infectious causation the bacterium Helicobacter Pylori. The medical community dismissed his research and added to their lists of risk factors many possible mental conditions. Marshall’s research wasn’t accepted until the late 1990’sThe curing of his patients with a lengthy course of antibiotics showed the irrefutable evidence, that it was indeed an infectious cause. This seemingly backwards attitude of medicine appears primitive in today’s apparently advanced society. Perhaps the admission of an infectious cause for diseases such as i...
