Not every salacious morsel of squick from Lewin's More on Merde was regurged by clickbait churnalism sites or incorporated into the moraine of Scientific Common Knowledge by laundering through a succession of citations-of-citations-that-noone-ever-checks. These closing sentences have been sadly ignored:
If the story could be made true by sufficient repetition, it would create a new niche for Riddled's 'Celebrity Fecal Transplant' business. It would also dovetail nicely with this recent report, for in combination they explain the continuing existence of royalism.
Naked-Mole-Rat Queens Control Their Subjects by Having Them Eat Poop
This is all a tangential way of introducing
In previous episodes, of course, we encountered the pill-mill pimp Peter Rothschild, who lent his fertile though unsavory imagination to the cause of advertising an Alt-Med scammer's crapsules: thereby inventing an entire alternative history of microbiology in which Bacillus subtilis was not discovered until 1941, by German Army doctors working out why Arabs ate camel poop. Dr Jörg Bernhardt believed Rothschild's lies, and you know how that stovepipe ended.
Not satisfied with an alternative past, the pill-mill advertisement created further corroborative detail:
For many years afterwards, cultures of Bacillus subtilis were sold worldwide as a medicinal product (sold in the U.S. and Mexico, for example, under the brand name Bacti-Subtil) rapidly becoming the world's leading treatment for dysentery and other intestinal problems. Unfortunately for Americans, this popular bacterial supplement that cures intestinal infections began losing favor in the late 1950's and 1960's, upon the advent of synthetic antibiotics which were heavily touted by the giant pharmaceutical companies as "wonder drugs," even though they cost five times as much as Bacti-Subtil, and took three times longer to accomplish the same results.At the Riddled Institute of Irrefutable Truths, old-fashioned and slavishly enthralled as we are to the cause of "reality", we marvel at the notion that crapsules from Bio/Tech and its precursors dominated the pharmacopoeia for over a decade (continuing to dominate the market in enlightened parts of the world), without leaving a trace. Where are the old textbooks, prescribing guides, advertisements?
...Bacillus subtilis is still used widely today in Germany, France and Israel, where safe, effective all-natural therapeutic products are more highly esteemed by the health-savvy public than the more expensive synthetic drugs espoused by the orthodox medical establishment with all of their dangerous side effects.
But in October 2012 -- which was when wikieditor Ashashyou incepted the narrative into a Whackyweedia page -- it was a more innocent time, before the expectation that implausible or outrageous assertions need to be accompanied by some form of evidence:[cit. needed]
Cultures of B. subtilis were used throughout the 1950s as an alternative medicine due to the immunostimulatory effects of its cell matter, ... It was marketed throughout America and Europe from 1946 as an immunostimulatory aid in the treatment of gut and urinary tract diseases such as Rotavirus and Shigella,[11] but declined in popularity after the introduction of cheap consumer antibiotics, despite causing less chance of allergic reaction and significantly lower toxicity to normal gut flora.*'Ashashyou' was drawing directly on the Bio/Tech origin story, which by then had become a specimen in the Wunderkammer of conspiracy ideation at Rense.com. Independently, Dr Bernhardt (2000) had made his own inquiry into these claims and was able to elaborate on them:
Even today B. becomes subtilis used in human medicine. In the Red Liste® available in Germany finished product by 1997 (Rote Liste ®, 1997) are encountered, for example, on the preparations Utilin®, Utilin N® and Bactisubtil®, the cells or spores of subtilis as present as lyophilizates or suspensions and Treatment of chronic dermatoses or diarrhea, fermentation and putrefaction dyspepsia, enteritis, enterocolitis or intestinal disorders of chemo- or radiolabelled cancer patients.
Had he looked up the details, he would have noticed that the Bactisubtil® product does not contain B. subtilis, but rather is a compound of Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium lactis (unless you buy the French product with the same name, which is based on B. cereus... as well as a bacterial species, this is an exclamation I often hear from the Frau Doktorin). As for Utilin®, it is nominally derived from B. subtilis spores, which are indeed lycophilized: but wait, according to the manufacturer Sanem-Kehlbeck, they are also sterilised. And then diluted by 106, for Sanem-Kehlbeck is an Alt-Med griftery of the homeopathic persuasion (the presumed rationale for treating diarrhea with B. subtilis is that it causes diarrhea in non-homeopathic quantities).
Dressed up in Latin Cosplay so it must be homeopathy
This is all by the way, however, because Lewin did not cite that aspect of Dr Bernhardt's disjecta membra. So that particular provenance of nescience ended.
Speaking of disjecta membra, now is the time to prepare my Sexy Naked-Mole-Rat Hallowe'en Costume. This serves as a distraction from the medicinal-motions saga (it is too depressing to contemplate that the main purpose of the Intergrids is copy-pasting some random grifter's self-serving fabrications, legitimising them, and alchemising them into History). It's either costumes, or revising, in the still days at the Adrogué hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.
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* Ref [11] there is Mazza (1994). It does not help us much with bolstering the Bio/Tech backstory, for few libraries around the world have archives of Bollettino Chimico Farmaceutico. The journal has no on-line presence, and indeed stopped publishing in 2005. After many iterations of Wikirevision the citation was removed in 2017, the Wikieditors collectively deciding that the dressed-up version of a supplement-scammer's advertisement was too well-known to need any supportive evidence at all.
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