Medicine Is Not A Science

  Orthodox medical practitioners like to give the impression that they have conquered sickness with science but there are, at a conservative estimate, something in the region of 18,000 known diseases for which there are still no effective treatments – let alone cures. Even when treatments do exist their efficacy is often in question. A recent report concluded that 85% of medical and surgical treatments have never been properly tested.

Modern clinicians may use scientific techniques but in the way that they treat their patients they are still quacks and charlatans, loyal to existing and unproven ideas which are profitable and resistant to new techniques and technologies which may be proven and effective.

The fact that a doctor may use a scientific instrument in his work does not make him a scientist – any more than a typist who uses a word processor is a computer scientist. The scientific technology available to doctors may be magnificent but the problem is that the application of the scientific technology is crude, untested and unscientific.

Modern physicians and surgeons do not see the human mind and the human body as a single entity (which is why the medical profession has been slow to embrace the principles of holistic medicine and doubly incompetent in its attempts to deal with stress-related disorders) and they rely more on hopes and assumptions than on evidence and objective clinical experience. The modern clinician is as narrow-minded, and as influenced by his personal experiences and interpretations as was his predecessor 2,000 years ago. Most patients probably assume that when a doctor proposes to use an established treatment to conquer a disease he will be using a treatment which has been tested, examined and proven. But this is not the case. The British Medical Journal in October 1991 carried an editorial reporting that there are ‘perhaps 30,000 biomedical journals in the world, and they have grown steadily by 7% a year since the 17th century.’ The editorial also reported that: ‘only about 15% of medical interventions are supported by solid scientific evidence’ and ‘only 1% of the articles in medical journals are scientifically sound’.

Nothing has improved since then.

What sort of science is that? How can doctors possibly regard themselves as practising a science when six out of seven treatment regimes are unsupported by scientific evidence and when 99% of the articles upon which clinical decisions are based are scientifically unsound? How can doctors regard themselves as scientists when it is known that a kind, compassionate doctor can have a healing rate 50% better than his crueller colleagues – simply because patients respond better to his remedies? How can doctors regard medicine as a science when it has been proven many times that at least a third of patients will get better if given a placebo? How can doctors regard medicine as a science when it is known that a large proportion of patients expecting to have heart surgery will get better if they are merely given a scar on their chests and told that they have had an operation?

Medicine is no science. It’s an art. Mysticism.

But these days it is polluted by business. And money.

The savage truth is that most medical research is organised, paid for, commissioned or subsidised by the drug industry. This type of research is designed, quite simply, to find evidence showing a new product is of commercial value. The companies which commission such research are not terribly bothered about evidence; what they are looking for are conclusions which will enable them to sell their product. Drug company sponsored research is done more to get good reviews than to find out the truth.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that one in five researchers in the life sciences had delayed publication of their results, or had not published them at all, because of their relations with business firms. Whenever I have accused scientists of being prejudiced and ‘bought’ because of their allegiance to their corporate paymasters the answer has invariably been the same: ‘Everyone does it. There isn’t a scientist in the world who hasn’t taken corporate money.’ This is probably true – and is one explanation for the fact that many allegedly independent Government bodies are almost always packed with men and women who work for (or have taken fees from) the large corporations their Government body is supposed to be policing.

It is also a fact that most of the doctors and scientists writing articles, papers and reviews for medical and scientific journals have received money, grants and freebies from drug, chemical or food companies. (It is also worth remembering that many allegedly and apparently independent journals accept corporate advertising and some accept payment in return for running articles.)  The absence of scientific evidence supporting medical practices is apparent in all areas of medicine.

With a very few exceptions there are no certainties in medicine.

The treatment a patient gets will depend more on chance and the doctor’s personal prejudices than on science. The unexpected seems to happen so often that it really ought to be expected and the likelihood of a doctor accurately predicting the outcome of a disease is often no more than 50:50.

Even in these days of apparently high technology medicine there are almost endless variations in the treatments preferred by differing doctors. Doctors offer different prescriptions for exactly the same symptoms; they keep patients in hospital for vastly different lengths of time, and they perform different operations on patients with apparently identical problems.

There is, indeed, ample evidence now available to show that the type of treatment a patient gets when he visits a doctor will depend not so much on the symptoms he describes but on the doctor he consults – and where that doctor practises. And yet most doctors in practice seem to be convinced that their treatment methods are beyond question. Many GPs and hospital doctors announce their decisions as though they are carved on stone.

Today’s research is largely controlled by and for the pharmaceutical industry. Doctors are unquestioning. Most don’t read original papers (and couldn’t read between the lines or assess papers accurately even if they did). The majority obtain 99% of their information from two biased and thoroughly unreliable sources: drug companies and the Government. No one bothers to look for evidence that chemotherapy, radiotherapy and vaccination actually work. Since there isn’t any this is fortunate and convenient.

Young doctors are told that what they are taught are facts. And they are taught (and then believe) that medicine is a science.

Outside the anatomy room and, possibly, the physiology laboratory, there are no facts in medicine. The gaps in our knowledge about the body (when well and when sick) are far greater than the extent of our knowing. Medicine is not a science. It is an art and a craft. With a smidgen of science stuck on the side. Economics, psychiatry and psychology are all pseudosciences with no more relation to real science than astrology or iridology. Medicine is somewhere in between real science and economics. But it isn’t a science.

Doctors like to be thought of as scientists because it contributes to their aura of infallibility. Drug companies like to think that doctors are scientists because it encourages patients to have faith in the remedies they produce. And research doctors like to pretend that they are scientists because it makes it easier for them to obtain grants and to tell convincing stories to the media. Modern medical scientists decide on a commercially acceptable solution and then select the facts which support the solution they have selected. That’s not science: it’s propaganda.

Do Doctors And Nurses Kill More People Than Cancer?

  Vernon Coleman