Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[falconer66a]

The CNS Disease Semmelweis Factor

"--lots of words for sure--with zero fukin approval---seems like no one is listening !!!!!! or cares !!!!! [that blarcamesine actually works]

No, lots of medical professionals are listening, even reading about blarcamesine. They've got to have answers for medical topics. They are the recognized professionals.

But, understand, in the history of modern medicine, from the 17th century when diseases and conditions began to be explained by observable physical and biological factors, not by "humors" and "miasmata," medicine has always been reluctant to embrace or utilize new, seemingly contrary or inexplicable explanations and understandings of both diseases and their therapies. What medical practitioners and researchers learn from their vaunted professors in med school or post-graduate studies and research always holds sway; is always the "real answer."

New explanations are not well received; they bring into question the competencies of those working with and dependent upon the accepted, "proven" explanations. We see that, of course, with the reluctance to dismiss the amyloid basis/explanation as the cause of Alzheimer's. Those that "know" know that it's the accumulation of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. There are 40 years of data that "prove" this. Two generations of really smart and accomplished medical researchers have devoted their professional lives to the concept. They can't be wrong.

How, then, could some unknown start-up biotech, with no approved drugs to sell or produce revenues, have the audacity to claim their simple little new molecule can work wonders by attaching to a previously unknown protein, the sigma-1 receptor, and thereby cause all sorts of good things to happen in nerves? It's a "magic bean" concept. On the face of it, can't be true.

It took several generations, many decades, for the medical profession to accept the "germ theory," to believe that microscopic organisms are the real cause of most infectious diseases.

Read the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, and how physicians for decades refused to accept his evidence-based proclamations that doctors, with pathogenic germs on their unwashed hands (literally) caused the deaths of hundreds of mothers following birth procedures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Today, in CNS disease research, there are a multitude of 21st-century people reacting just as did Semmelweis's critics.

Today, Semmelweis is a hero in medical history. His critics are forgotten. They, tragically, were lethally wrong.