3 ms·
> Hopefully someday we'll have some kind of tricorder device that can identify disease processes by gas/scents/smells. It can hasten the process of identifying
by wahern 7y ago
> Hopefully someday we'll have some kind of tricorder device that can identify disease processes by gas/scents/smells.
It can hasten the process of identifying these chemicals if people with such a sense of smell present themselves to researchers. To me that's the most important takeaway of this story. Unfortunately, most articles reporting on the story bury the lede as the fact that people can smell disease draws more attention than what they're smelling, and that researchers either didn't seriously consider there might be such a chemical indicator or didn't know where to start until they had access to a super smeller.
This sort of diagnostic approach isn't new. Once upon a time doctors would taste urine samples! It just fell out of favor because machine and chemical tests are more reliable and consistent. But if you're not drinking other people's pee on a regular basis, or running a large scale, shot gun experiment (like a super smeller spending decades learning scents), initial discovery of such markers can become more difficult.
- markdown 7y ago> Once upon a time doctors would taste urine samples! "Ayurvedic physicians (5th/6th century BCE) first noted the sweet taste of diabetic urine, and called the condition madhumeha ("honey urine")." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_diabetes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_diabetes A more palatable way to diagnose diabetes is to check if your urine attracts ants and flies.
- sfgweilr4f 7y agoOr turn your diabetic urine into Single-Malt Whisky because there's sugar and you can filter such things. For artistic reasons. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/pissky https://www.wired.co.uk/article/pissky
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- klmr 7y agoIt’s funny that you cite only the ayurvedic name, since the scientific name, diabetes mellitus, has the exact same etymology: “mellite” is Latin and translates to “sweetened [with honey]”, and the disease was thus named in 1675 because of the patients’ urine’s sweet taste. That said, it’s definitely interesting that this isn’t a relatively recent discovery and was already known two thousand years before the modern naming.
- wahern 7y agoThere are countless recitations of the common practice of tasting for diabetes, but I can't find any example of other urine taste tests despite many sources stating it was used for other diseases and that urology wheels[1] encoded tastes and smells in addition to appearances. Have you found any? The closest I could find was mention of smelling urine to determine pregnancy, which apparently was/is rather reliable. The next best was mention of the surgeon John Hunter discussing the taste of semen, though the author "assumes... [Hunter] was tasting his own". (I wouldn't assume that considering his interests and research. Google Books texts of Hunter's publications contained page after page of discussion about the genital fluids of male cadavers, but after his brief mention of the taste of semen from a live donor he never quite goes where you're fearfully hoping! I didn't get there in my skimming--so much preamble for stuff everybody learns in Zoology and Physiology 101--but I presume he ended up reporting many important discoveries about male reproductive tissues and processes.) I wish Google Books was as awesome today as it was 10 years ago. They expose only a tiny fraction of the material they once provided, even for pre-20th century material that couldn't possibly be under copyright. :( [1] I wonder if they were inspiration, perhaps indirectly, for the wine aroma wheel created by the chemist Ann Noble at UC Davis.