Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It

[HuckleB]

A Review: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=5038

"For most of human history, doctors have killed their patients more often than they have saved them. An excellent new book, Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It, by Druin Burch, MD, describes medicine’s bleak past, how better ways of thinking led to modern successes, and how failure to adopt those better ways of thinking continues to impede medical progress.

"The moral is not that doctors once did foolish things. The moral is that even the best of people let themselves down when they rely on untested theories and that these failures kill people and stain history. Bleeding and mercury have gone out of fashion, untested certainties and overconfidence have not."

Burch’s conversation with his rowing coach epitomizes the problem:

“I want you to keep your heart rate at 85% of max for the next hour and a half.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the best way to improve your fitness.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve done it before and it worked. Because that’s what the people who win the Olympics do. I know, I’ve trained some of them.”
“But has anyone actually done an experiment?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”

This book is Burch’s answer to his coach’s question. Medicine’s “beautiful idea” is that we should test all hypotheses and beliefs using the kind of tests that are reliable for determining the truth. Instead of going by tradition, authority, theory, common sense, or personal experience, we now have effective tools to find out for sure whether a treatment really works.

..."


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I'll be reading this very soon. The review itself isn't bad.

:hi:

[Warpy]

1. Since someone got the bright idea of recording what was happening

to their patients and comparing it to outcomes in poor people who couldn't afford the kind ministrations of the royal physicians, medicine has started to improve.

Just getting physicians to wash their hands between patients improved things the most. Grave robbing for dissection also provided great leaps forward in medical and surgical care.

Those Dark Ages royal physicians did manage to provide us with very accurate and detailed descriptions of disease processes. They just had no idea what to do about them, discouraged by church and prevailing wisdom from following new lines of thought leading to new practices.

If technological civilization hangs together for another 100 years, I'm sure much of what we do today will be seen as barbaric, especially things like transplants and chemotherapy.

The evidence will have shown us better ways to go about things.

[Crystal Clarity]

2. This could apply to more then medicine

One of Burch’s quotable words of wisdom:

There is a bitter joke in modern medicine: the violence with which someone makes an argument is inversely proportional to the amount of evidence they have backing it up.

I'm going to keep this one in mind for the next time I'm reading some of those scary threads in GD. It explains alot. ;-)

[HuckleB]

3. Hey, if you're into horror, it's all good.

But if it's keeping you up at night, well, avoidance isn't bad either.

:toast: