What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Lynne McTaggart
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Название: What Doctors Don’t Tell You
Автор: Lynne McTaggart
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Медицина
isbn: 9780007374168
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The greatest reason that medical research is tainted is that the majority of it is funded by the very companies who stand to gain by certain results. These drug companies not only pay the salaries of researchers, but they can often decide where – indeed, whether – they get published. It’s wise to keep in mind that this industry, in a sense, has a vested interest in ill health: if drug companies found cures, rather than lifelong ‘maintenance’ therapies, they’d soon be out of business.
The constant exposure of medicine to the pharmaceutical industry, and the reliance of future medical research on these companies, has bred a climate in which much of mainstream medicine refuses to consider any other treatment options besides drugs and surgery, even when copious scientific evidence exists to support those options. Many conventional doctors are especially vituperative in their dismissal of important work by innovators, while uncritically embracing many surgical or drug-based solutions that are little more than modern-day snake oil. This has bred a climate into which healers are polarized into ‘alternative’ and ‘orthodox’ camps, rather than into one common group approving of anything that has a solid basis in science or clinical practice. Dr Peter Duesberg, a leading University of California professor in molecular biology, was one of many publicly vilified for suggesting, with a well-reasoned argument backed up by a 75-page published paper, that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
To give you some idea how medicine handles heretics, witness how it still reacts to scientific evidence supporting alternative medicine. A study conducted scientifically, with all the usual gold-standard double-blind, placebo-controlled checks and balances that medicine prides itself on, showed that homoeopathy for asthma actually works. Scientists now had some proof: homoeopathy works. In fact it was the third study carried out by the same man since 1985 to show exactly the same result.
Nevertheless, in his published report the leader of the trial distanced himself from his results, pointing out in his conclusion that tests such as these just might end up producing false-positive, or wrong, results.19 Despite the scientific design of the trial, an editorial in The Lancet flatly refused to accept the results: ‘What could be more absurd than the notion that a substance is therapeutically active in dilutions so great that the patient is unlikely to receive a single molecule of it?…Yes, the dilution principle of homeopathy is absurd; so the reason for any therapeutic effect presumably lies elsewhere.’20 In other words, the scientific method works only when it applies to things we have faith in, but not, it seems, with anything we don’t understand or agree with.
The problem with this dogmatic adherence to preconception and dismissal of dissension or doubt, as far as you and I are concerned, is that it covers up the fact that much of standard medical practice may not work very well. It makes dangerous drugs look safe and effective. It makes it seem like people who don’t need drugs should take them. It justifies a lot of useless surgery that may very well kill you, and certainly isn’t going to make you better. It explains away many promising treatments that don’t require dangerous drugs or surgery. Despite the very best of intentions, it sometimes causes untold pain and suffering, rather than contributing to your health. In fact, you are in grave danger from the moment you walk into your doctor’s surgery, particularly at the point when he tells you he’d like to take a few tests.
Your modern-day doctor has at his disposal an array of high-tech gadgetry that allows him to monitor and measure virtually every nook and cranny of your body. He and his fellow doctors are now completely reliant upon these tests to diagnose disease. As patients, we trust tests so implicitly to provide us with a definitive view of our state of health, even to predict when we’re going to get ill at some distant point in the future, that most of our children begin having tests as soon as they’ve been conceived.
At last count, there were more than 1,400 of these, ranging from the simple blood-pressure cuff to the most sophisticated computerized nuclear magnetic imaging devices. Back in the relatively dark ages of 1987, some 19 billion tests were performed on Americans that year alone, which works out to be 80 tests for each man, woman and child.1
Despite the kind of gadgetry that would put NASA to shame, the problem is that the technology doesn’t really work very well. Most tests are grossly unreliable, giving wrong readings a good deal of the time. A false-positive test sets in motion the juggernaut of aggressive treatments at your doctor’s disposal, with all their attendant risks. But the tests themselves can be as risky as some of the most dangerous drugs and surgery, risks that are magnified because so many of these tests are patently unnecessary. In many cases (more so in the United States), doctors protect themselves against potential lawsuits by ordering every test they can. In fact, in the US, many orders for tests are motivated by a doctor’s own self-interest, since so many physicians either own or have substantial shareholdings in the facilities to which they refer their own patients.
Another problem is that, these days, technology has replaced the fine art of diagnostics – of examining a patient’s clinical history and having a good look at his eyes and the state of his tongue. The problem often comes down to trainee doctors, who often order tests under the mistaken notion that their consultant superiors desire such ‘just-in-case’ medicine. But in many cases senior doctors do flog their juniors if they fail to request particular tests, engendering the view that more is better and that massive test-taking is what constitutes good doctoring.2
Tests also make the fundamental error of assuming not only that all people are alike, but that people (and their measurements) always stay the same.
The other problem is that, unless your doctor has a particular feeling for taking apart computers in his spare time, he can get a bit muddled by this gee-whizz technology. One study found that virtually all doctors and nurses don’t know how to work a pulse oximeter, a monitoring system which is vital for monitoring patients recovering from anaesthesia and recording potential life-threatening situations.3 Consequently, they make serious errors in evaluating readings. The medics reported not being ‘particularly worried’ when patients had levels indicating that they were seriously deprived of oxygen and needed immediate attention if they were to live.4
BLOOD-PRESSURE READINGS
Your problems can start even when your doctor brandishes his blood-pressure cuff to record your blood pressure. Professor William White, chief of Hypertension and Vascular Diseases at the University of Connecticut, refers to this gizmo, known in medicalese as the ‘sphygmomanometer’, as ‘medicine’s crudest investigation’. Blood pressure, he says, can vary tremendously – as much as 30 mm Hg over the course of any day.5 In fact, the time it’s most likely to rise is in your doctor’s surgery, when you’re waiting to have the test – a phenomenon known as ‘white-coat hypertension’. A recent study comparing blood-pressure readings taken at home, at work and at the doctor’s surgery found that the most inaccurate were those performed in the doctor’s surgery.6 Such an artificially high test reading at the doctor’s СКАЧАТЬ