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Dangers of medicine: But isn't it scientific?
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If your heart gives trouble, maybe it needs some talcum powder.
Ridiculous? At one time, doctor considered it scientific. They would open up the chest of heart patients, sprinkle talcum powder on the outside of the heart and close back the chest.
This operation, called poundage, used to be a very popular, until one day a surgeon was brave enough to do an experiment. He opened the chest of a number of heart patients, but sprinkled the powder on only half of them. The results were exactly the same. They all felt the same after surgery!
It is not always possible to conduct experiments like this. It is not always ethical to be scientific.
Poundage may be history. But history, unfortunately, repeats itself. Today, poundage has been replaced by the coronary bypass and balloon angioplasty, both of which have not been proven to be beneficial.
Dangers of medicine: Heart surgery
Bypass surgery improves a heart patient five-year survival rate only marginally. After five years, the survival rate actually worsens.
Balloon angioplasty has similarly not been proven to be more effective. Some 30 percent of patients have their arteries close again within six months.
Dangers of medicine: Cancer treatment
Chemotherapy and radiation treatment for cancer have also not been scientifically proven to be effective – except for a few types of cancer, like childhood leukemia.
A few scientific studies actually show that chemotherapy and radiation speed up the death of cancer patients. Yet they remain standard treatment.
With Aids, medical “science” deliberately chose to be unscientific. The drug AZT was approved before it was scientifically proven to be effective and before the full side effects were known. Doctors felt than Aids patients cannot wait for scientific proof. Well, a major study completed this year (1993) has proven that AZT doesn’t work.
(Note: It is now known that AZT – even at high doses – does not destroy the HIV infection, but only delays the progression of the disease and the replication of virus. Moreover, HIV has the ability to develop resistance to AZT. A study showed that cells treated with AZT eventually produced viruses as much as the untreated cells. So now the practice is to give AZT in combination with other drugs.)
Dangers of medicine: Side effects
If a drug or treatment doesn’t work, that is bad enough. Often, however, they cause great harm as well.
In Medical Care can be Dangerous to your Health, Eugene D Robin, MD, coins the word “iatroepidemic” to denote an epidemic caused by unscientific medical treatment. His examples include:
Dangers of medicine: Unnecessary surgery
Another study found that the heart patients were twice as likely to have open heart surgery if their address was in Des Moines than if they lived 100 miles away in Iowa City!
In What Your Doctor Didn’t Lean in Medical School, Stuart M Berger, MD, gives the official medical estimates for unnecessary surgery:
| Eye surgery | 36 percent |
| Heart pacemakers | 50 percent |
| Hernia | 28 percent |
| Gallbladder | 31 percent |
| Hysterectomy | 33 percent |
| Prostate | 29 percent |
| Hemorrhoids | 43 percent |
| Knee surgery | 32 percent |
These are conservative estimates made by doctors. Those more critical of the dangers of medicine believe at least 90 percent of all operations are unnecessary.
In Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Robert S Mendelsohn, MD, reports: “One study closely reviewed people who were recommended for surgery. Not only did they find that most of them needed no surgery, but fully half of them needed no medical treatment at all!”
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Unnecessary drug prescription, especially for antibiotics, is even more widespread. Every day, doctors give out antibiotics to patients suffering colds and flu.
Doctors know that antibiotics don’t cure colds and flu, as these are caused by viruses and antibiotics are ineffective against viruses.
Again, doctors are being kiasu. (Kiasu is a Singaporean slang meaning "afraid to lose" or, in this case, overly cautious).
They prescribe antibiotics just I case the cold or flu leads to a bacterial infection. But that seldom happens.
When I was young. I had very bad pimples and the skin specialist gave me course after course of antibiotics. I was taking antibiotics everyday for nearly a year. Do antibiotics cure pimples? No.
Close to 100 percent of antibiotic prescription are unnecessary. Dr Mendelsohn reckons a person needs antibiotics at most “three or four times during his or her entire life.”
Dangers of medicine: Painkillers
Painkillers, too, are freely dispensed. Usually, patients are asked to take them “if necessary.”
But my wife was once told differently. She had consulted a doctor about a slight pain in her abdomen. The doctor did not find anything wrong, and prescribed painkillers. She told him she didn’t need painkillers, since the pain was very slight. But the doctor insisted she took them. My wife said she would throw the pills away. Still, the doctor insisted.
My own experience sounds like a joke. It really happened. When I was in hospital some years back, one night the nurse woke me up and asked me to take my sleeping pills.
Why did I need sleeping pills when I was already fast sleep?
The nurse explained: “Hospital rules.”
Dangers of medicine: Unnecessary medical tests
My friend C P Sreemadhavan once injured his finger. He went to the doctor and the doctor ordered an x-ray – to see if the bone was broken.
What would be the treatment if the bone was broken? Sree asked. The doctor said he would immobilize the finger by tying it to the next finger.
And what would he do if the bone was not broken? The same thing. He would immobilize the finger by tying it to the next finger.
Why have an x-ray if, whatever the results showed, the treatment was going to be he same?
It happened to Sree. It happens everyday to countless patients. Blood is drawn from them, tissue samples are taken from their bodies, they get zapped by x-rays and injected with radioactive substances…
The number of medical test has skyrocketed. So has the cost, as test equipment gets more sophisticated. Has this improved the outcome of medical treatment?
Maybe not. In Medical Care Can Be dangerous to your Health, Eugene D Robin, MD, notes: “The results may actually be getting worse. Using post-mortem examination as the gold standard for diagnosis, it was found that in 1960, in about 8 percent of patients who died, doctors had missed problems for which treatment might have resulted in survival; in 1980, this rose to about 10 percent."
If medical test are not so helpful, why are doctors ordering more and more of them?
Again, it’s for kiasu reasons. If something goes wrong, doctors can show that they have done the entire range of necessary tests – plus a few extras – to get as much information as possible.
Tests are done to protect doctors, not necessary to save patients.
But is there any harm in undergoing too may medical test?
You bet. Dr Robin explains how a medical test can kill more patients than save, and still be proclaimed a “great success”. We will find out more about this in the next article about the dangers of medicine.
Meanwhile, here’s something to think about…
In 1976, when doctors in Los Angeles went on a five-week strike, the weekly death rate in hospitals dropped below normal. Once the strike ended, the death rate rose and stayed above normal for several weeks.