Don't trust your doctor!

 To protect yourself from the pusher-priest you again have to make the heretic's radical leap of unfaith. Don't trust your doctor. Assume that if he prescribes a drug, it's dangerous. There is no safe drug. Eli Lilly himself once said that a drug without toxic effects is no drug at all. Every drug has to be approached with suspicion. 

 That goes double if you're pregnant. In fact, if you're pregnant you and your baby are better off if you stay away from all drugs completely. A drug that has minor side effects or even no side effects on you may do irreparable harm to a developing fetus. Hundreds of drugs are marketed long before their effects on the fetus are known. Unless you want to donate your baby's welfare to science and be one of [79] the first to find out a drug's effects, don't take any drug unless your life is at stake. 

 That includes aspirin. Though it's been around for eighty of more years doctors still don't know how aspirin works. Because it's been a "friend of the family" for so long, people don't realize that aspirin is not without side effects and dangers of its own. Besides the most common side effect, stomach bleeding, aspirin can cause a hemorrhage under the scalp of a newborn if a mother takes it within seventy-two hours of delivery. I've often wondered why doctors always say to take "two tablets" of five grains each despite the availability of a single, ten-grain aspirin tablet. Could there be some sort of religious significance in receiving ten of something in two tablets? 

 Before you take the first dose of any medication your doctor prescribes, you should make it your business to find out more about the drug than the doctor himself knows. Again, learning more about your situation than the doctor won't be all that difficult. Doctors get most of their information about drugs from advertisements and from detail men and their pamphlet handouts. 

All you have to do is spend some time with a good book or two in order to get the information you need before deciding whether to take a drug or not. 

 The best book to start with is the Physicians' Desk Reference, the PDR. The PDR is the beginning of knowledge about drugs. Although it's easily available now, up until about two [80] years ago the publisher refused to distribute it to other than members of the medical profession. I wasn't aware of this when I gave the PDR many plugs in my column and newsletter. Finally, I got a letter from the publisher telling me to please stop referring people to their book since they distributed it only to professionals. They felt that the public wouldn't understand the PDR and would be confused by it. Well, I published that letter in my column and I commented that it was the first time in history a publisher didn't want to sell his books. Shortly thereafter, without any kind of fanfare, the PDR not only started showing up in bookstores, but it was promoted in bookstores! Now, if you go into the bookstores, you'll see piles of PDR's. I guess the publisher finally got the idea. 

 Of course, you don't have to buy the book. Almost every public library now has it. You shouldn't worry about understanding it. Anybody with an eighth grade education and a dictionary can read any medical book. Even doctors will testify that patients always seem to be able to pick out and understand the parts that they must know. 

 The PDR is good because all the information is provided by the drug companies in an effort to protect themselves. Not only does the FDA require them to put in all the information they have, but they also want to ward off any liability claims against them. In effect, they are saying to the doctor: we are telling you everything we know about this drug. What it may be [81] useful for. 

What it may do to the person who takes it. The wonderful thing that seems to be happening is that the PDR is becoming more and more discreet. For example, the latest issues divide drug side effects into major categories according to how frequently they can occur. Now at least you've got horse race odds when you take your medicine. 

 The PDR can be considered the "bible" of the Church of Modern Medicine, especially since for a long time it was forbidden literature except to the priesthood. But there are other sources for the kind of drug information you need. The American Medical Association publishes a Drug Evaluations book which in some cases gives even more information than the PDR. For one thing, the AMA book has a list of cross-referenced symptoms in the back. You look up your symptom or your side effect and it will tell you which drugs are indicated or suspected.

from: Confessions of a Medical Heretic Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D