“In the early twentieth century, before antibiotics, patients with syphilis were intentionally infected with malaria to create a fever. In the 1920s Julius Wagner-Jauregg, a Viennese psychiatrist, began to treat neurosyphilitics with induced P. vivax malaria. Three or four bouts of fever were enough to kill the temperature-sensitive syphilis bacteria (Spirochaeta pallida also known as Treponema pallidum).”
That got me thinking, what other maladies/infections/diseases can cancel out others of its kind? Are there any modern treatments that use the enemy-of-my-enemy kind of approach to medicine?
That’s how vaccination was invented – Edward Jenner discovered that those who had had cowpox where then immune to smallpox. As cowpox is a fairly minor disease (at least compared to smallpox), and so he had people infected with a small amount of the cowpox virus, which then gave them immunity to smallpox.
The first thing that came to my mind was basically the history of Vaccinations/Innoculations. Edward Jenner used Cowpox innoculations to prevent others from catching the more severe illness Smallpox. Cite:
Many vaccines use this mechanism- developing Antibodies to a certain less virulent strain of an illness, may protect one from other more virulent strains (but then there’s mutations and all sorts of other fun things in the background too).
Another example would be Immunizations vs. Hepatitis B can prevent Hepatitis D infections, since Hep D (a cause of a more severe* fulminant hepatitis*) can only infect/spread in its host if there is a Co-infection with Hepatitis B.
However, being treated with the HepB vaccine will confer protection from Hepatitis B, and thus also help prevent Hepatitis D inadvertently.
Or if you’re thinking more about needing one bug to kill another- then it can be as simple as increased risks of yeast infections (mostly in females) after a course of antibiotics. The antibiotics can help wipe out the “good/normal” bacteria (Lactobaccillis if memory serves me), and that can lead to other bugs not normally dominant in the environment to have a chance to take over- such as Candida/Yeast.
Not a disease, but there’s a condition known as achilles tendonosis where the injury to the tendon has gone on so long that the body no longer mounts an inflammatory response to it. They can use a radiofrequency ablation procedure that basically puts a grid of small holes in the tendon provoking an acute inflammatory response to get you back in the business of restoring homeostasis.
That worked only because the two diseases were so similar biologically, so much so that if the body’s defenses could handle one, they were prepared to handle the other.
Unless you can show that malaria has a lot in common with syphilis DNA-wise, your analogy doesn’t work. Besides, the OP was postulating that the increased temperature caused by a fever is what killed the syph. He wasn’t suggesting that the two had much in common – supposedly elevating the body temp with heat would have had the same beneficial effect.
Some people are looking into using hookworm infestations to cure allergies. The scientific studies look promising but I suspect that more needs to be done before it really turns into a legitimate treatment.
I won’t give cites (but I assure you they exist) and will just state that both kidney cancer (renal cell carcinoma) and certain skin cancer (malignant melanoma) were both known to occasionally undergo what seemed to be spontaneous regression. It was rare but quite well documented (in fact, some of those testimonials you hear about how “I had two months to live but then I tried Dr. Jones Antineoplastin Syrup™” are from people with those cancers).
In any case, a bit of detective work showed that in some of those cases where there had been regression of melanoma and renal cell carcinoma, there had also been a recent viral illness. That started the search for the mechanism and eventually it was determined that the interferon produced by the body in response to some viral infections can induce melanoma and kidney cancer to regress. The field of cancer immunotherapy (especially for melanoma and kidney cancer) was born.
And then of course you can swallow a cow, (I don’t know how you’d swallow a cow)
But you’d swallow the cow to catch the goat,
You’d swallow the goat to catch the dog,
You’d swallow the dog to catch the cat,
You’d swallow the cat to catch the bird,
You’d swallow the bird to catch the spider,
That wriggles and jiggles and tickles inside you,
You’d swallow the spider to catch the fly,
I don’t know why you swallowed that fly,
Perhaps you’ll die