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Amazon.co.uk Review
Medicine looked subsequently for new frontiers but went up blind alleys, "The New Genetics" and "The Social Theory" of disease. Neither of these new "paradigms" have produced the same level of innovation and are responsible in part for bringing medicine into disrepute.
Despite enormous levels of funding, understanding the "code of life" has not produced any major therapeutic pay-offs, because genetically caused diseases--with only a few exceptions--are rare; genetic engineering and screening proved largely fruitless and genetic therapy made little impact. Theories that social behaviour causes disease, however, has not just been shown to be invalid but has also caused an epidemic itself of health hysteria amongst the well and resulted in blaming the sick for contracting their disease. He regards social theories such as the false idea that high- fat diets cause heart attacks as intellectual scandals that should be apologised for.
Perhaps his most controversial suggestion is that all university epidemiological departments should be closed down in order to prevent any further misinformation from being produced. But Fanu offers criticism of as well as praise for clinical practitioners, and scientists too. He suggests that doctors need to start listening to patients again and interpreting histories instead of ordering barrages of tests if they want medicine to regain respect. And clinical science needs to start trying to discover the biological transmissible agents of the diseases of middle-life if it is to awaken to a new dawn of innovation in the future. --Dorothy Porter --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Has the great knack of making even the most complex technical developments exciting and intelligible (OBSERVER )
A major achievement (THE TABLET )
Epic and entertaining. (THE LANCET ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
The discovery of penicillin is, predictably, both the first of the twelve definitive moments of the modern therapeutic revolution and the most important. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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He claims that medicine's golden age from 1945 to 1980 was due to the chance discovery of drugs, advances in clinical science and innovative technology. He believes that medical progress is now exhausted, and laments that the vacuum is being filled by what he thinks are the dead ends of New Genetics, epidemiology and social medicine.
However, it is perhaps bad timing to write off genetics when the Human Genome Project offers such exciting possibilities, and when epidemiology and social medicine have proven the social determinants of so many diseases. He rejects all social and economic explanations of illness. But lifestyle changes - losing weight, improving diet and exercising more - do, for instance, prevent diabetes and promote health and well being (British Medical Journal, 14 July 2001, page 63.)
But he usefully calls for more research into the causes of disease, and rightly rejects idealist explanations. He recounts how doctors used to blame peptic ulcers on 'stress' or 'personality factors', but in 1984, Barry Marshall, a young Australian doctor, identified the bacterium that triggered them. A seven-day course of antibiotics could cure them. The same organism caused two-thirds of stomach cancer cases. In 1986, Thomas Grayston discovered that the bacterium chlamydia caused heart disease. Le Fanu speculates that bacteria as yet undiscovered may cause arthritis, schizophrenia, leukaemia, MS, diabetes and ME.
Le Fanu shows that doctors' seclusion of tuberculosis patients in sanatoria dramatically reduced the infection's incidence, proving that the influential historian of medicine, Thomas McKeown, was wrong to deny doctors the credit for its decline.
He has a brilliant chapter on how the use of new drugs refuted Freudianism and psychoanalysis, as chlorpromazine effectively relieved schizophrenia's symptoms, lithium mania's, prozac depression's and Valium anxiety's.
This is a provocative and infuriating book, full of ideas and prejudices. All who work on improving people's health will naturally make their own judgements about the continuing value of their work.
The first half is the uplifting bit, the history of modern medicine's stunning advances... Read more
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