53 Years Between Knicks Championships: Medicine Then and Now

In 1973, Walt Frazier led the Knicks to their second NBA championship.[1] Jalen Brunson was still more than two decades away from being born.

Both championships were crazy nail-biters, this one even more so. If the 1973 championship gave you an ulcer, there wasn't much doctors could do for you. Today, your nerves may still be shot, but your stomach should be just fine.

This just scratches the surface of the changes in medicine over the past 53 years. Let's look at five of them. [2] They're almost as mind-boggling as the basketball itself. It's perfectly fitting that ulcers come first.

Treating (and curing) ulcers

In 1973, ulcers were poorly understood, and there were few good treatment options. Stress, lifestyle, and excess stomach acid were usually blamed.

In 1976, cimetidine (Tagamet), the first histamine (H2) blocker and arguably the world's first blockbuster drug, was introduced. The drug dramatically reduced stomach acid production and quickly became one of the world's best-selling medicines.

An even bigger breakthrough came eight years later. In 1984, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren of the University of Western Australia showed that many ulcers were caused by Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that colonizes the stomach. Their discovery transformed ulcer treatment and earned them the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

But early on, many physicians remained highly skeptical. Marshall's response was simple: he swallowed the bacterium himself.

Within days, he was nauseated, vomiting, and suffering from such foul breath that his colleagues reportedly refused to work near him. Endoscopy showed severe gastritis. He then treated himself with antibiotics and recovered. It is difficult to imagine a more convincing experiment, although it sounds like something the crew of Jackass might have tried.

Today, Helicobacter pylori ulcers can be cured with antibiotics. For others, more effective acid-suppressing drugs such as omeprazole (Prilosec) and famotidine (Pepcid) have made ulcer surgery far less common than it once was (Figure 1).

Figure 1. There is no single authoritative dataset tracking ulcer surgery year by year. This graph is an approximation created by the author, with the assistance of ChatGPT, using published reports on the effects of cimetidine, proton pump inhibitors, and Helicobacter pylori treatment. The shape of the curve is illustrative rather than quantitative, but the overall conclusion is not: ulcer surgery has all but disappeared.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

In 1973, MRI did not exist. Physicians could order X-rays and, in a few hospitals, early CT scans, but the ability to produce detailed images of soft tissues, the brain, and internal organs without ionizing radiation was still years away.

The technology did not originate in medicine at all. It grew out of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), a technique developed by physicists and later embraced by chemists to determine the structures of molecules. By the 1970s, NMR spectroscopy had become one of the most important tools in chemical research.

When the technique was adapted for medical imaging, however, the word "nuclear" became a public-relations problem. Although NMR involves no radioactivity, physicians worried that patients would associate the term with nuclear weapons and nuclear accidents. The "N" was quietly dropped, and magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, was born. It was a concession to public fears, and an unwarranted one at that.

Today, MRI is one of the most important diagnostic tools in medicine, producing detailed images of the brain, spine, joints, heart, and internal organs without exposing patients to ionizing radiation.

HIV/AIDS

Eight years after the Knicks' 1973 championship, physicians in Los Angeles reported a terrifying and mysterious illness affecting previously healthy young gay men. No one could have imagined that the culprit would prove to be a virus, later named human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), or that it would cause a global pandemic that has claimed more than 40 million lives.

The campaign against HIV/AIDS [3] is arguably the greatest scientific collaboration in medical history. Researchers in academia, the pharmaceutical industry, and the federal government worked together to identify the virus, understand its biology, and develop treatments.

Although it would be 15 years before the first effective drug (Invirase, saquinavir) was launched [4,5], the therapies that followed were extraordinary. What was once a near-certain death sentence has become, for many patients, a manageable chronic disease. A person diagnosed with HIV today can often expect to live a normal lifespan with appropriate treatment. An added bonus: these drug combinations prevent the transmission of an HIV-positive person to someone who is not infected, and also an HIV-positive woman to her fetus. 

Organ Transplantation

In 1973, the greatest obstacle to organ transplantation was not surgery. It was the immune system. Surgeons had learned how to replace failing kidneys, hearts, and other organs, but preventing the recipient's immune system from rejecting the transplant remained a formidable challenge.

A huge breakthrough came in the early 1980s with the introduction of cyclosporine, a powerful immunosuppressive drug isolated from a soil fungus. By selectively dampening the immune response, the drug dramatically improved transplant survival rates and transformed what had often been a desperate experiment into a viable medical procedure.

The results were almost too good to be true. Today, kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, and other organ transplants are performed routinely, giving hundreds of thousands of patients a second chance at life. More than a million solid-organ transplants have now been performed worldwide, a milestone that would have seemed almost unimaginable when the Knicks won their last championship.

Childhood Leukemia

In 1973, childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood cancer, remained a frequently fatal disease (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Approximate improvement in 5-year survival for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) from 1973 to the present. Values were reconstructed (ChatGPT) from historical reviews and modern survival statistics and are intended to illustrate the magnitude of progress rather than provide exact annual estimates. The key point is unambiguous: a disease that killed many children in the early 1970s is now curable in the great majority of cases.

There was no miracle cure. Instead, doctors chipped away at the problem for decades, improving chemotherapy, preventing infections, and learning how to manage the disease more effectively. The result was one of the most remarkable victories in modern medicine: today, more than 90 percent of children diagnosed with ALL survive at least five years, and most are considered cured.

1973-2026 (with an assist from Frazier) [6]

Walt Frazier, now 80, remains active as the Knicks' television analyst. Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, 81, has devoted much of his post-basketball life to education through the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School in the Bronx. Bill Bradley, a Rhodes Scholar at Princeton, went on to serve three terms in the U.S. Senate. He is now 82. Sadly, both Captain Willis Reed (center) and power forward Dave DeBusschere have died. DeBusschere died of a heart attack on May 14, 2003, at age 62 after collapsing on a Manhattan street, and Reed died from heart failure at age 80.

Whether living or dead, the five will always be beloved figures to New Yorkers, whether they follow basketball or not.

NOTES:

[1] Without Frazier, that number would be zero.

[2] Any list like this is subjective. The past 53 years have produced far more than five transformative advances. Another author could easily have chosen five others. These are simply five that illustrate how dramatically medicine has changed since the Knicks' last championship.

[3] Looking back, it's plausible to view HIV/AIDS as just another medical challenge that would eventually be solved. But for more than a decade, thousands of scientists worked on the problem and failed miserably. I was one of them. Promising ideas led nowhere, plausible hypotheses fell apart, and experimental drugs ended up in the chemical waste bucket. There was little reason to believe that an effective treatment would ever emerge.

[4] A small number of people still deny that HIV causes AIDS. The technical term for such people is "idiots."

[5] Although AZT was technically the first drug approved for AIDS, it was of little use because of rapidly developing viral resistance. The drug that helped launch the era of combination therapy was Invirase (saquinavir). This marked the time that AIDS deaths first began to drop.

[6] As great as Brunson's game was, Frazier's performance in Game 7 of the 1970 Finals remains one of the greatest championship-clinching performances in NBA history. See for yourself.

*Frazier won five of six statistical categories despite Brunson's 45-point performance. The red ovals highlight how mind-blowing his performance was.