Medicines and Snake Oil
While the debt of mankind to the progress of medical knowledge is substantial, there is much to justify a critical attitude to the present organization of medicine. The system of private practice which makes the medical man largely dependent on fees collected for the exercise of knowledge which no one man could possibly carry in his head at once is not adapted to the fullest use of the new knowledge. One result is that the medical man becomes the tool of commercial firms which encourage the belief that their products confer benefits far in excess of any claims which the research worker puts forward. The commercialization of medical preparations by private competing firms perpetuates the alchemical elixir. So soon as a new drug or treatment is discovered there is a strong temptation to welcome it as a panacea. Modern practice still encourages many silly illusions of this type.
Lancelot Hogben, in his book Science for the Citizen – in 1938.
Nothing’s really changed in the last seventy-odd years, sad to say, even with the change to a National Health Service, which has brought many other benefits. But the effect of commercial pharmaceutical manufacture on the prescribing of medicines remains.
The Pharmaceutical Journal (14th July 2017) had an apposite article: The cholesterol and calorie hypotheses are both dead – it is time to focus on the real culprit: insulin resistance. (From the Wayback Machine – the link to the article on the Journal’s own site doesn’t work for me any longer. Has the article been removed? Did the statin manufacturers force that – or even the sugar producers? I don’t know, and I don’t know who’s in the right if they did. But you can at least still read the article, with interesting comments on this last successful download by the Wayback Machine.)