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Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates


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#1 stocks

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Posted 06 October 2010 - 09:46 PM

Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates

David Wootton argues, from the fifth century BC until the 1930s, doctors actually did more harm than good.

"For 2,400 years patients have believed that doctors were doing them good; for 2,300 years they were wrong." The unsparingly pessimistic view of the overwhelming failures of doctors is that of David Wootton, a professor of history who has written "Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates"

For a couple of thousand years, medicine was based on Hippocrates and his successors, especially Galen, whose theories dealt with balancing bodily fluids, and to help nature along, doctors would induce vomiting or diarrhea, apply hot irons to the body, or drain off some blood. There was no physiological benefit in such treatments, which could do nothing but make things worse. Yet such treatments were the staple of medical practice until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Why did physicians and scientists, and even patients, believe in the theories of Hippocrates and Galen, which were wrong from start to finish? According to Hippocrates, for example, the arteries carry air. No one made a connection between the pulse, which could be felt in the wrist, and the beating of the heart.

The first microscope was invented in 1575, and a hundred years later, Antony van Leeuwenhoek built hundreds of them. But no one thought of using them to continue studying the tiny particles that Leeuwenhoek saw under his microscope and illustrated.

The truth is, I never paid attention to the fact that there was such a large time gap between the invention of the microscope and its clinical use, or the fact that patients suffered such intolerable pain during operations performed without anesthesia when the substances that allowed pain relief were already known. Only when the use of ether was demonstrated in 1846, and amazingly, not by surgeons who saw the suffering they caused, but by a quack dentist who thought it was a good way to get rich, did doctors begin to administer ether to dull pain during surgical procedures.


http://www.amazon.co...s/dp/0192803557

http://www.haaretz.c...gnosis-1.216267
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#2 stocks

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Posted 24 October 2010 - 08:23 AM

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.


That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.

His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views

Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest.

Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right).

http://www.theatlant...l-science/8269/
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#3 Echo

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Posted 24 October 2010 - 02:07 PM

Stocks, what is the root cause of your years long habit of posting this trash on this site. You may have had close contact with a bad apple and every profession has bad apples, but why do you have to be so one sided. You post flies in the face of so many things that it is ludicrous. Like The ever growing life expectancy... The control of pandemic and epidemic type infections like smallpox that wiped out 20% of populations, sweeping through the continents and killing 300-500,000 people, more than all the world wars put together, and 1/3 of the surviving left blind... Heart attack mortality going steadily down with the advent of emergency angioplasy and STEMI protocols... Heart failure mortality going steadily down with many improvements in medicine... Reduced sudden cardiac death through appropriate screening and inplantable defibrillators... Decrease in the ravages of hypertension with the advent of good medicines to control it... Improved survival of certain types of cancers through surgical removal, chemotherapy and radiation... Survival of end stage kidney failure with dialysis Survival of various types of organ failure including heart, lung, kidney, and liver to name a few with transplants... Anyway, I doubt I, or anyone, will ever get through to you, as you have you blinders on, reading and posting every conspiracy theory medical bash you can get your hands on. Just accept the fact that there are bad apples in every profession, medicine is not immue to it, and leave it at that. Realize that every single patient that a doctor encounters is a father, or mother, or brother, or sister, child of someone, etc and the vast majority of doctors use their years of training skills and knowledge to HELP people in a caring and compassionate way, hopefully as they would treat their own loved ones, rather then see dollar signs in the eyes of their patients. The final proof that this is the norm is that nearly every single doctor out there treats their own parents or children or siblings, indeed themselves, with the same cutting edge medical care that they use on everyone else, whether it is heart disease, cancer, infectious disease, etc. Enough said. Give it a break, Stocks!!! :angry: Doc

#4 Rogerdodger

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Posted 24 October 2010 - 02:36 PM

I have several docs as clients. They mostly seem to be humans, and nice ones at that, unlike lawyers. :P

#5 stocks

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Posted 24 October 2010 - 05:39 PM

posting every conspiracy theory medical bash you can get your hands on.

Ridiculous.
All defensive emotion.

My posts have links, make a list of the authors and assess the credibility
All distinguished professionals.

I will continue to inform people about the sad state of the medical profession with links to
credible sources and hard reasoning.
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#6 Echo

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Posted 24 October 2010 - 07:20 PM

Not defensive emotion. Pure logic and facts. When doctors get sick, we go to colleagues we know and trust that practice cutting edge medicine as practiced on all other patients as well. We get the same medicines and treatments given to all others. WE DON'T LOOK UP THE DISTINGUISHED PROFESSIONALS QUOTED IN YOUR LINKS FOR ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE TREATMENTS! Doc

#7 stocks

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Posted 30 October 2010 - 08:44 AM

What does this remind you of?

Hint: It starts with global and ends with warming.


THOUGH SCIENTISTS AND science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it. Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.” What’s more, the peer-review process often pressures researchers to shy away from striking out in genuinely new directions, and instead to build on the findings of their colleagues (that is, their potential reviewers) in ways that only seem like breakthroughs—as with the exciting-sounding gene linkages (autism genes identified!) and nutritional findings (olive oil lowers blood pressure!) that are really just dubious and conflicting variations on a theme.

Most journal editors don’t even claim to protect against the problems that plague these studies. University and government research overseers rarely step in to directly enforce research quality, and when they do, the science community goes ballistic over the outside interference. The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.

Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades



http://www.theatlant...ience/8269/2/at
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#8 stocks

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Posted 15 November 2010 - 02:37 PM

Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates

David Wootton argues, from the fifth century BC until the 1930s, doctors actually did more harm than good.

"For 2,400 years patients have believed that doctors were doing them good; for 2,300 years they were wrong." The unsparingly pessimistic view of the overwhelming failures of doctors is that of David Wootton, a professor of history who has written "Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates"

at the age of 67, President George Washington died in 1799.

It is said that Washington spent five hours out in freezing rain, then returned home and dined with guests in his wet clothes because he did not want to keep them waiting. The next day he complained of a sore throat and was hoarse, but otherwise appeared well. The following night he awakened Martha to tell her that he felt a severe pain in his throat, and was having trouble breathing

The next day his personal physician, Dr. James Craik, was summoned. Craik diagnosed the condition as life threatening, and hastily assembled a team of doctors for aggressive treatment. They bled him of five pints of blood, burned his neck, and gave him calomel, a mercury compound used as a purgative but which probably did little more than induce mercury poisoning. Finally, after several days of this torture, Washington displayed the judgment that made him a great president and told them to stop. According to Ellis: “Eventually Washington ordered his doctors to cease their barbarisms and let him go in peace.

In any case, it is entirely possible that his physician's may have contributed to his death... blood-letting of 3.75 liters... Gosh... a human adult has about 5 liters of blood. As far as I'm concerned... that's medical malpractice and one could argue first degree murder. Add mercury poisoning as well.



http://fauquierent.b...ent-george.html
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#9 stocks

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Posted 31 December 2010 - 04:21 PM

Greatest Medical Discoveries And Breakthroughs

5) X-ray

The discovery of the X-ray is one of the greatest diagnostic discoveries of all time. It allows us to see inside the human body, without having to perform dangerous surgeries. As well as seeing anomalies in the human body, x-rays have helped hugely in dentistry, allowing a dentist to spot cavities before they turn in to painful abscesses.

With the use of the x-ray in medicine, scientists have been able to find the cause of many diseases, and how to treat them.

4) Anesthetics

Anesthetics are easily one of the most important medical advances in surgical operations. By preventing pain during surgery, surgeons were given the ability to work in completely new ways with the human body, with a lower chance from complications such as shock.

With anesthetics, pain no longer became such a huge factor in operations. Not only did this reduce the risk of shock, but it also allowed for more complex and intricate surgical procedures.

3) Germ Theory

Germ theory allowed our scientist to find the major causes behind disease, and created a whole new understanding on why cleanliness was important, as opposed to the old practice of surrounding oneself with bad smells to ward off bad influences.

The discovery of germ theory helped bring about the knowledge of the importance of sanitation, and is one of the biggest factors in extending human life by prevention of disease.

Germ theory was actually discovered by a haberdasher named Anton Leeuwenhoek, who was also a janitor in his spare time. In the end, the discovery was made his examination of a raindrop under a microscope, in which he could see a myriad of tiny animals swimming around.

2) Penicillin

Germ theory might have been the discovery of bacteria, but the discovery of penicillin was the moment that the medical profession finally had a way to fight back against infections that would have once cost people their lives.

Penicillin became the starting point for a whole string of antibiotics, both broad and narrow spectrum. This new way of treatment meant that amputations were significantly reduced, gum infections could be treated, and infections of the blood were no longer fatal.

1) Vaccination
Edward Jenner faced great adversity when he announced his discovery of vaccination. However, the discovery of vaccination has helped to greatly reduce some of the world’s deadliest epidemics and diseases, from cholera, influenza and measles, to the bubonic plague.

Thanks to vaccination, we no longer have to deal with some of the world’s deadliest and most infectious diseases, which have plagued humankind for millennia.


Top 5 medical
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#10 stocks

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Posted 08 January 2011 - 12:02 PM

For a couple of thousand years, medicine was based on Hippocrates and his successors, especially Galen, whose theories dealt with balancing bodily fluids, and to help nature along, doctors would induce vomiting or diarrhea, apply hot irons to the body, or drain off some blood. There was no physiological benefit in such treatments, which could do nothing but make things worse. Yet such treatments were the staple of medical practice until the middle of the nineteenth century.


Antique bloodletting devices


Through the Middle Ages and into the 18th and 19th century there were many strides in medical knowledge with regards to disease states, and anatomy. However, there was not much that could be done in terms of treatment. There were no antibiotics and surgery was in its infancy (in large part due to the lack of quality anesthesia). One of the only therapeutic modalities was to get out the old lancet and let some blood. It can safely be said that this almost never benefited the patient. Perhaps the biggest benefit was to the physician and family, who felt that at least they were doing something, and if the patient died anyway, it was meant to be.

I will look at some of the artifacts that help to demonstrate how phlebotomy was carried out, both on humans and animals. Some of these items are still readily available on the antique market. Others are harder to find but do turn up from time to time. Most of these items are from the 18th and 19th centuries.

THE LANCET

The earliest bloodletters probably used sharpened pieces of wood and stone to "breath a vein." There are many steel lancets with flat ebony or ivory handles that exist today.

THE SCARIFICATOR


Why bleed with one spring-loaded blade when you could have 4, 12, or even 20?! As long ago as the 17th century there were multi-bladed bleeders called scarificators


Bloodletting
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.