What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Lynne McTaggart
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 side-effects might be worth taking if you have a life-threatening illness, but not if your medical problem is a hangnail.
Medical science is, in the main, a triumph of statistics over common sense. When bumping up against unpalatable truths in the study, medical scientists, who again always assume a medical treatment to be beneficial, are inclined to put the best face on the whole exercise, or cut and paste, refine and edit, to fit the premise or explain away an undesirable result.
Some years ago, a large study from the Netherlands Cancer Institute showed that all women taking the Pill, no matter what their age, had an increased risk of breast cancer. Most worryingly, 97 per cent of women under aged 36 who contracted breast cancer had taken the Pill, for any length of time.14 For more than 30 years, doctors have been touting the Pill as the safest drug ever developed. The Dutch study, now the fifth and possibly most damning to show a link between the Pill and cancer, was a colossal embarrassment to an entire industry devoted to contraception at all costs.
However, once they trumpeted the negative findings in the beginning of their article, the Dutch researchers began back-pedalling, by qualifying the overall implications of their findings. They emphasized that the increased risk mainly occurred among certain subgroups. Because the numbers supposedly showed no increased risk of breast cancer after long-term use among women in their latter thirties, their study was, in effect, good news: ‘Our findings accord with the mass of evidence that [oral contraceptive use] by women in the middle of their fertile years [25–39 years] has no adverse effect on breast cancer risk’ (my italics).
Doctors can often minimize the risks of drugs by magnifying the risk of not using them. Most studies have been able to justify that the Pill is safe by turning pregnancy into a dangerous disease. This risk-benefit equation only works if you believe it is better to risk breast cancer, cervical cancer, a stroke or thrombosis – all known risks associated with the Pill – than to have an unwanted baby or to use a condom instead.
A spokeswoman from the British Family Planning Association, which has probably handed out its fair share of Pills to teenagers, dismissed any breast cancer risk out of hand, arguing that this theoretical risk had to be weighed against the ‘evidence that the Pill protects against endometrial and ovarian cancer’.15 This is a typical example of medical reasoning. This drug is beneficial because it may ‘protect’ you against one kind of fatal cancer (a highly questionable conclusion, in any event), even though it may give you another potentially fatal cancer.
And