MY BODY GUARD (via Tom Morin):

Quacks over the ages (Druin Burch, Times of London)

Expert opinion is treacherous. Consider a paper from last year’s British Medical Journal, looking at four decades of trials on new cancer treatments. The theory behind each treatment was excellent, the understanding of the molecular processes was first-rate, and initial small studies had shown some evidence of benefit. Doctors thought the new treatments would work; but the trials showed that they harmed as often as they helped. That is to say, without the benefit of large-scale, randomized, double-blind controlled trials, doctors were unable to pick out the treatments that worked from those that were total failures.

To an extent, the dangers of expert opinion explain why doctors have spent most of human history killing their patients. Women giving birth in hospitals frequently paid for the privilege with their lives, while physicians, apothecaries and surgeons all doled out bad advice and poisonous drugs. Therapeutic nihilists were the best the medical profession had to offer, like the seventeenth-century Italian who defended himself by saying, “I take the money not for my services as a doctor but as a guard, to prevent some young man who believes everything he reads in books from coming along and stuffing something down the patients which kills them”. Thomas McKeown first pointed out that the vast twentieth-century improvements in health came about before doctors developed much that was an effective therapy. We know that most medicines were worse than useless.

It all just comes down to hygiene and nutrition.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 21, 2006 11:55 AM