The Living Medicine

An engaging and readable look at alternatives to antibiotics. Phages are readily available, proven in other parts of the world, and just coming to light in the West.

Read this if you are interested in medicine, natural healing, or have an antibiotic-resistant illness. I found it fascinating and highly recommend it. At the very least, you'll have something to talk about with friends - and perhaps you'll even gain an alternative to suggest to someone in medical crisis.

I received a free copy of, The Living Medicine, by Lina Zeldovich. from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Bacteriophages or "Phages" are viruses that devour bacteria, first developed in 1917, they have been forgotten about and not used as often as antibiotics. I never knew about phages before I read this book. it is a very interesting subject.

Bury the lead? Bury the lede? Whichever one you choose, that’s what’s happening in this book.

Presumably, the editors chose the title and subtitle for this book. They got it right. They knew the most interesting thing in this book for the average 21st-century reader would be the prospect that phages (viruses that attack bacteria) will be the new generation of remedies available as antibiotics become less and less effective.

However, a lot of this book (especially near the beginning) is taken up with some less interesting score-settling in which the author takes a victory lap along with a group of long-ignored and -belittled phage scientists (mostly from the former Soviet region of Georgia). There's no argument, I think, that scientists who studied phages were, for most of the twentieth century, ignored (at best) or ridiculed (at worst) for their contention that phages could be an effective part of a healer's toolkit. Cold War mentality in the West and murderous paranoia in the Soviet space allowed phages to remain more or less a medical secret tucked away in Soviet Georgia during the long period when antibiotics reigned supreme.

Chapters two through seven, inclusive, take up 32% of the book (so says my Kindle) and are mostly devoted to the history of phage research in Soviet Georgia, with an emphasis on the personal lives of the scientists. This is only of interest, I think, if you are a science historian. I read it, of course, because (although I am not a science historian) I was fortunate enough to get a free copy of this book to review. However, if you are not a science historian, but instead are a person with the average amount of work, family obligations, cooking, cleaning, ironing, exercising, etc., but still likes to read edifying books, you could skim these chapters and start reading more carefully from chapter eight through the book's conclusion if you'd like to know more about how phages work, how they were used in the past, and how they may become more frequently administered to sick people in the future.

Returning to the theme of burying the lead/lede, I think that phages are now ready for their close-up in part due to other, more ballyhooed advancements in medical science, specifically, our new-found ability to see and edit the genetic structure of living things, including phages, so that people can spend longer and healthier lives. Phages will have to be closely monitored and edited frequently.

If I'm understanding correctly, up until recently, the use of phages in the treatment of sick people was a bit of a crap shoot, since phages come in two varieties: lytic and lysogenic. Lytic phages are the heroes – these are the ones that are used in the many, many cases in this book where gravely ill patients who resisted all other manner of more traditional therapy were suddenly, almost miraculously, cured. On the other hand, “[l]ysogenic phages are unreliable and dangerous – if not as much for a specific patient but on a global scale because they can turn relatively mild bugs into brutal killers” (Kindle location 3206). Up until recently, it was impossible to have a high degree of confidence that you are completely separating the helpful phages from the nasty ones – making the 20th-century Western medical establishment's reluctance to deal with them seem less unreasonable.

Phages aren't a miracle cure. The author, while enthusiastic about their potential, makes this clear. A traditional antibiotic could (at least in the 20th century) be introduced and remain effective for decades, giving profit-making companies the incentive to make the enormous investments of time and energy necessary to get them to market. Phages are narrower and more specialized: new ones would have to be developed constantly, and perhaps will not fit well into the time-consuming process currently in place which has (effectively) ensured that supplies of prescription medicines are uniform, uncontaminated, and consistently safe to use.

Since the medical information space on the internet is routinely full of misinformation and hysteria, this book might be an interesting one to read to get the full background on a “new” technology that may play a bigger role in our lives.

I received a free advance electronic copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.