of disease. If you’re in hospital, there’s a one in six chance that you landed there because of some modern medical treatment gone wrong.4 Once you get there, your chances are one in six of dying in hospital or suffering some injury while you’re there. Since half this risk is caused by a doctor’s or hospital’s error, you’ve got an 8 per cent chance of being killed or injured by the staff.5 At last count, about 1.17 million Britons end up in hospital each year because of doctor error or a bad reaction to a drug. In the United States, if we extrapolate the results of a 1984 study, over one million Americans are being injured in hospital every year, and 180,000 die as a result.6 Recently, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the official organ of the primary organization representing physicians in America, recently admitted that doctor-induced disease is the third leading cause of death in America, responsible for a quarter of a million deaths per year.7 Dr Allen Roses, the only worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), shocked the world by recently admitting that 90 per cent of his company’s – or any other drug company’s products – don’t work on the majority of patients.8 In Britain, the latest statistics are that 10,000 Britons die every year from a reaction to a drug, and one in every 16 patients is put in hospital because of an adverse reaction to everyday drugs – even aspirin. To put the magnitude of the problem in perspective, the entire population of a city the size of Birmingham is put in a hospital bed every year by medical error. If you live in the US, where about 40,000 people are shot dead every year, you are nevertheless three times more likely to be killed by a doctor than by a gun.9
This appalling track record has nothing to do with incompetence or lack of dedication. Most doctors are extremely well-intended, and probably a majority are highly competent in what they’ve been taught.
The problem isn’t the carpenter, but his tools. The fact is that medicine is not a science, or even an art. Many of your doctor’s arsenal of treatments don’t work – indeed, have never been proven to work, let alone to be safe. It is a false science, built upon conjuring tricks, supposition and blind preconception, whose so-called scientific method is a vast amount of stumbling in the dark.
Many of the treatments we take for granted – for breast cancer or heart surgery, even treatments for chronic conditions such as arthritis or asthma – have been adopted and widely used without one single valid study demonstrating that they are effective or safe.The so-called ‘gold standard’ respected by medical scientists as the only scientific proof of the true worth of a drug or treatment is the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial – that is, a study in which patients are randomly assigned to receive either a drug or a sugar pill, with neither researchers nor participants aware of who is getting what. Nevertheless, despite the fact that thousands of studies are conducted every year, very few of the treatments considered to be at the very cornerstone of modern medicine have been put to this most basic of tests – or, indeed, to any test at all.
For all the science-speak in medicine about risk-factors and painstakingly controlled data, the stringent government regulation, the meticulous peer review in professional literature – for all the attempts to cloak medicine in the weighty mantle of science – a good deal of what we regard as standard medical practice today amounts to little more than 21st-century voodoo.
In their own literature, medical authorities openly acknowledge this fact. New Scientist once announced on the cover of one issue that 80 per cent of medical procedures used today have never been properly tested.10
Medicine as it is practised today is largely a conspiracy of faith. Probably because of the miracle of drugs such as antibiotics, doctors have come to believe that their little black bag ought to be filled, in effect, with magic. The late medical critic Dr Robert Mendelsohn was one of the first to liken modern medicine to a church, with doctors its high priests following the teachings with blind faith: ‘Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It’s a religion,’ he wrote in his book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (Contemporary Books), ‘just ask why? enough times and sooner or later you’ll reach the Chasm of Faith. Your doctor will retreat into the fact that you have no way of knowing or understanding all the wonders he has at his command. Just trust me.’11
Doctors believe so fervently in the power of their tools that they are willing to suspend all reasonable scepticism about current and new medical treatments – so long as these treatments fit in with orthodox medical practice. Most doctors and researchers operate on the assumption of a priori benefit, whether or not a given remedy has actually been proven: we know what we’re doing is right. Enthusiasm for statins, the current favourite for high cholesterol, is so great, for instance, that doctors are willing to ignore the grossest of scientific lapses in safety testing in order to promote what is looked upon prima facie as a good thing. We know what we’re doing is right.
Even if studies have been done demonstrating that a treatment is ineffective or even downright dangerous, so powerful is this faith that these results often get ignored. Virtually every good study of foetal monitoring – devices employing ultrasound testing supposedly to measure the condition of the foetus during labour and birth – all show that this procedure produces a worse outcome for mother and child.12 This information appears well known to many senior obstetricians – the former head of the Oxford Perinatal Unit repeatedly has written widely about this fact – yet foetal monitors continue to be employed in every delivery room in the land. We know what we’re doing is right.
This is probably why doctors make such rotten logicians. Many in medicine get tied into logical knots, attempting to justify apparent contradictions with the most arcane Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning. Robert Mendelsohn used to say that his favourite line spouted by doctors was: ‘Breastfeeding is best, but bottlefeeding is just as good.’
‘High serum cholesterol levels are an important risk factor for coronary disease,’ once wrote noted heart researcher Dr Meir J. Stampfer of the Harvard School of Public Health, repeating the prevailing view. In the next breath, however, he added, parenthetically: ‘but most patients with [heart attacks] have normal cholesterol levels’ (my italics).13
The faith in the infallibility of their tools allows doctors to adopt as the ‘gold standard’ what are usually little more than experimental treatments, and employ these on millions before their effects are fully understood or the procedure has stood the test of time. The favourite line of doctors, when steam-rolling ahead without proof, is that if they had always waited until they had proper evidence, goodness knows how many advances in medicine would have been held up (and how many millions of people would have died). That argument does not, of course, take into account the vast number of people who have died taking unproven treatments later found to be dangerous. The new Cox 2 arthritis drug Vioxx, one of the biggest money spinners of all drugs, was withdrawn by its manufacturers Merck after it was discovered that it doubled the risk of heart attacks. Still others, such as amalgam in dental silver fillings and the radical mastectomy, are treatments devised a century ago and never properly tested or reviewed to determine whether they are as safe or effective as has always been presumed.
Medicine as it is now practised relies entirely on numbers. When judging the worth of any treatment, researchers must weigh the risks of the drugs or treatments (and all treatments in orthodox medicine carry some risks) against their likely benefits and against the risk of the illness being treated. A drug known to be effective but with serious
