Abstract
It is somewhat sobering to write about gold therapy in the 1980s when as long ago as 1927 Lande drew attention to its possible role in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Robert Koch reported the inhibition of growth of tubercle bacilli by gold compounds in 1890, and early twentieth century physicians used gold in rheumatoid arthritis, believing the pathology to be similar to that of tuberculosis. Lande’s observation was substantiated by Forester in 1929, but it was not until 1945 that a controlled double-blind study was reported by Fraser from Glasgow. Despite essentially favourable results from this study, acceptance of gold therapy in rheumatoid arthritis only became widespread after the report of the Empire Rheumatism Council in 1960, which again demonstrated its superiority over placebo. It is interesting to speculate that the proper study of gold as a therapeutic regimen might have been retarded by the dramatic introduction of corticosteroids in 1948, which overshadowed the use of other drugs for many years.
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Further Reading
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© 1983 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Capell, H.A., Daymond, T.J., Dick, W.C. (1983). Gold. In: Rheumatic Disease. Treatment in Clinical Medicine. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3113-7_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3113-7_15
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-12622-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3113-7
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