VERNON COLEMAN tm


   

 

men in dresses Betrayal of Trust - out of print (was £9.95 paperback and may be available from your library)

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PREFACE

The public trust doctors. But the public has been betrayed. Doctors trust drug companies. But that trust has been betrayed. And animals trust us all. And we have betrayed them.

In the past, protests about animal experiments have usually been either ethical or moral or have been based on the argument that they are scientifically invalid. In this book Iintend to take the argument one step further and to show that animal experiments are not merely unscientific and useless but are also a major factor in the incidence of iatrogenesis (doctor-induced disease) which is now the commonest cause of serious illness in the developed world. Animal experiments are killing people.

Those who perform or support animal experiments often argue that the work they do cannot be stopped until acceptable replacements have been developed (since it is they who will decide which replacements are 'acceptable', it is easy to see that this is simply a way of organising an indefinite delay). The fact is, however, that we would be better off with nothing rather than the present system. The existence and availability of alternatives is irrelevant because animal experiments are not just pointless and inaccurate; they are also misleading and a major danger to public health. They must be stopped. Animal experiments are far, far worse than useless and we would all (with the exception of the drug industry and its employees) be much better off without them.

Animal experiments are at the heart of a major deceit; a massive confidence trick which drug companies use to help them trick doctors into prescribing drugs which are neither safe nor effective. It is no accident that iatrogenesis is one of the commonest causes of ill health today-it is, indeed, a result of a deliberate policy

The greed of the pharmaceutical industry and the greed of an unquestioning and easily bought medical profession have allowed those who test new drugs to pass off animal experiments as a valuable aid. The truth is that even after doing animal experiments we still have to do tests on people but the animal experiments enable the drug companies to get away with fewer tests and in consequence the use of animal experiments is directly responsible for the size of the iatrogenesis problem. International, computerised monitoring of drug side effects (which 1 have been suggesting for decades) would cost very little to organise and would save thousands of lives but would badly damage drug industry profits.

Animal experimenters kill around a thousand animals-cats, dogs, monkeys, rats, mice, sheep, guinea pigs-every thirty seconds. Those animals all die in vain. As this book clearly shows, animal experimentation is a betrayal of many different types of trust.

Vernon Coleman Devon, December 1993

 

CHAPTER ONE

THE HARM DOCTORS DO

The incidence of doctor induced illness is now epidemic throughout the western world, and although the medical profession accepts that doctor induced illness is commonplace, many doctors still seem unwilling to accept that the problem is a serious one. In 1988, in my book The Health Scandal, I reported that Dr Gareth Beevers, a physician at the Dudley Road Hospital in Birmingham and a lecturer in medicine at Birmingham University, had estimated that 10- 15% of patients were in hospital with drug related problems. Two years later, in 1990, DR Patrick Pietroni, Senior Lecturer in General Practice at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, claimed that at any given time one in six patients were in hospital because of some side effect of their medication. No one disputed this figure. One medical commentator seemed quite proud of the fact that if only one in six patients in hospital are there because they have been injured by doctors, then it must also be true that five out of six patients in hospital haven't been injured by doctors.

Iatrogenic illness-doctor induced disease-is now a massive problem, though I suspect that the 'one in six' figure is an underestimate. It is impossible to quantify the overall size of the problem precisely-particularly in general practice-for the very simple reason that nine out of ten doctors fail to record or report drug side effects (even though the evidence shows that 40% of patients suffer side effects while taking drugs). The threat of legal action means that doctors are constantly wary of admitting any sort of liability.

But, using the official figures, I have made an attempt to produce a serious estimate of the number of patients who suffer from iatrogenesis in England (where the population is around 46,000,000).

According to the British Department of Health there were 255,000 hospital beds in England in 1990/91 (the figure has been falling steadily since 1980). Of these 255,000 beds, 46,000 were for geriatric patients and 78,000 were for psychiatric patients both groups tend to be long-stay patients-and this means that there were 131,000 beds for acute, short-stay, medical, surgical and obstetric patients whose length of hospital stay is (again, according to government figures) usually around six days. Applying the 'one in six' figure, it is clear that if all the 131,000 available beds were occupied all of the time, then 21,833 patients on acute wards would be there because they had been made ill by doctors.

Since there are approximately sixty periods of six days in a year it is clear that if all hospital beds were full all the time then there would be 1,309,980 patients a year in hospital because they had been made ill by a doctor.

However, on average only around three quarters of the beds available are full at any one time. So this figure needs to be reduced to 982,485.

To this, of course, we need to add the psychiatric and geriatric patients who are in hospital because they have been made ill by doctors. As I have already pointed out there were 124,000 hospital beds available for psychiatric and geriatric patients in 1990/91. If we assume that each patient stayed in his or her bed for a month (long-stay hospitalisation is discouraged these days) this would mean a total of 1,488,000 patients going through longstay hospitals. But, again, we can assume from government figures that only three quarters of the available beds were occupied at any one time and so this gives us a figure of 1,116,000 patients. If we then divide this by six we find that an additional 186,000 patients in geriatric and psychiatric hospitals were in hospital because they had been made ill by doctors.

Added together the figures suggest that in 1990/91 a total of 1,168,485 patients were in hospital in England because they had been made ill by doctors.

I found this figure so staggering (it suggests that doctor induced illness is now the greatest causes of illness in England) that I decided to tackle the figures another way.

The Department of Health figures show that in 1990/91 (the last year for which figures were available in the autumn of 1993) English hospitals treated 7,524,000 patients. If one in six of these patients were there because they had been made ill by doctors then the total number of patients needing to go into hospital in 1990/91 because of problems caused by a doctor would be 1,254,000.

So, either way, the figures produce similar results: suggesting that well over a million patients a year are admitted to English hospitals because they have been made ill by doctors. The conclusion has to be that iatrogenesis is undeniably a major cause of illness in modern society. Even if we (generously) accept the older 'one in eight' figure for the number of patients suffering from iatrogenic illnesses in hospitals, it is clear that the size of the problem is now enormous.

THERE IS NOTHING new in the fact that doctors kill people. Doctors have always made mistakes and there have always been patients who have died as a result of medical ignorance or incompetence.

But, since we now spend more on health care than ever before, and since the medical profession is apparently more scientific and better equipped than ever before, there is a savage irony in the fact that we have now reached the point where, on balance, well-meaning doctors in general practice and highly trained, well-equipped specialists working in hospitals do more harm than good. The epidemic of iatrogenic disease which has always scarred medical practice has been steadily getting worse and today most of us would, most of the time, be better off without a medical profession.

Most developed countries now spend around 8% of their gross national products on health care (the Americans spend considerably more-around 12-14%) but through a mixture of ignorance, incompetence, prejudice, dishonesty, laziness, paternalism and misplaced trust doctors are killing more people than they are saving and they are causing more illness and more discomfort than they are alleviating.

Most developed countries now spend around 1% of their annual income on prescription drugs and doctors have more knowledge and greater access to powerful treatments than ever before, but there has probably never been another time in history when doctors have done more harm than they do today.

It is true, of course, that doctors save thousands of lives by, for example, prescribing life saving drugs or by performing essential life saving surgery on accident victims.

But when the medical profession, together with the pharmaceutical industry, claim that it is the advances in medicine which are responsible for the fact that life expectancy figures have risen in the last one hundred years or so, they are wrong. It is, for example, commonly claimed that modern scientific medicine has led to improvements in life expectation in most developed countries from around 55 years at the start of the century to over 70 today.

The evidence does not support this claim.

The improvement in life expectancy which has occurred in the last hundred years is not related to developments in the medical profession or to the growth of the international drug industry; but the increase in iatrogenesis is related to both these factors.

Whichever facts you look at, they seem to support my contention that although doctors may do a limited amount of good, they do a great deal more harm.

IF DOCTORS REALLY did help people stay alive then you might expect to find that the countries which had most doctors would have the best life expectation figures. But that isn't the case at all.

In America there is one doctor for every 500 people and life expectancy for black males is around 65. In Jamaica there is one doctor for every 7,000 people and life expectancy for men is around 69. In North Korea there is one doctor for every 400 patients and life expectancy for males is 63 years. In South Korea there is one doctor for every 1,500 people and life expectancy is 64 years. America spends more per head on health care than any other nation in the world and yet its citizens have one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the western world. (It is, of course, possible to argue that there are many other differences, other than the number of doctors, between South Korea and North Korea; but it is reasonable to expect doctors to influence those factors. Moreover, if doctors as a group are going to claim responsibility for health care successes-which they do-then it is surely also fair that they should take overall responsibility for mortality and morbidity rates.)

The Americans spend around $2,000 per person per year on health care and yet out of every 1,000 live births twelve children will die before they reach their fifth birthday. In Japan, where the expenditure on health care is considerably less than half that in America, the number of children who will fail to reach their fifth birthday will be eight out of every one thousand born. The Americans spend around 12-14% of their gross national product on high technology medicine but, on average, they are sicker and die younger than individuals in most other developed countries.

Infant mortality rates in Asia are lower than those in Western Europe while estimated life expectancy at birth is higher in the Far East than it is in the over-doctored West.

Only when severely underdeveloped countries are compared to developed countries are there clear differences in infant mortality rates and life expectation figures and in these instances it is the differences in the infrastructure of the countries which explain the difference. My view may sound startling and controversial but it is a view shared by a growing number of independent experts around the world. These figures hardly support the image of doctors as an effective healing profession.

Even more startling, perhaps, is the evidence of what happens when doctors go on strike and leave patients to cope without professional medical help.

You might imagine that without doctors people would be dying like flies in autumn. Not a bit of it. When doctors in Israel went on strike for a month admissions to hospital dropped by 85% with only the most urgent cases being admitted, but despite this the death rate in Israel dropped by 50%-the largest drop since the previous doctors' strike twenty years earlier-to its lowest ever recorded level. Much the same thing has happened wherever doctors have gone on strike. In Bogota, Colombia, doctors went on strike for 52 days and there was a 35% fall in the mortality rate. In Los Angeles a doctors' strike resulted in an 18% reduction in the death rate. During the strike there were 60% fewer operations in 17 major hospitals. At the end of the strike the death rate went back up to normal.

Whatever statistics are consulted, whatever evidence is examined, the conclusion has to be the same. Doctors are a hazard rather than an asset to any community In Britain the death rate of working men over 50 was higher in the 1970s than it was in the 1930s. The British were never healthier than they were during the Second World War.

Figures published by the United States Bureau of Census show that 33% of people born in 1907 could expect to live to the age of 75 whereas 33% of the people born in 1977 could expect to live to the age of 80. Remove the improvements produced by better living conditions, cleaner water supplies, and the reduction in deaths during or just after childbirth and it becomes clear that doctors, drug companies and hospitals cannot possibly have had any useful effect on life expectancy Indeed, the figures show that there has been an increase in mortality rates among the middle aged and an increase in the incidence of disabling disorders such as diabetes and arthritis. The incidence of diabetes, for example, is now reported to be doubling every ten years and the incidence of serious heart disease among young men is increasing rapidly. Today death rates from heart disease among adults are 50 times higher than they were at the start of the century. In countries such as America where there has been a slight fall in the incidence of heart disease, it is clear that the improvement has been a result of better eating habits (by and large this simply means consuming less fatty food) rather than any improvement in medical care. The explosion of drugs and surgical treatments for heart disease has had no positive effect on death rates. On the contrary, there is a considerable amount of evidence to show that the increase in the use of such procedures as angiography, drug therapy and heart surgery has resulted in more deaths. People in the West are being doctored and drugged to death. Four out of five people in the world live in underdeveloped countries but four out of five drugs are taken by people in developed countries. Despite the expenditure of enormous amounts of money on screening programmes, deaths of young women from cancer continue to go up and every time one infectious disease is conquered another seems to take its place. Bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics and the number of disabled and incapable citizens in developed countries is increasing so rapidly that it is now clear that by the year 2020 the disabled and incapable will outnumber the healthy and able bodied.

In Britain, where free access to doctors and hospitals is available to everyone, life expectancy for 40 year olds is lower than almost anywhere else in the developed world. In America 6% of hospital patients get a drug resistant, hospital induced infection and an estimated 80,000 patients a year die in this way. This puts hospital infections high among the top ten causes of death in America.

When doctors and drug companies produce figures which show that there has been a (usually slight) increase in life expectation during the last one hundred years or so, they invariably overlook the massive contribution made by improved living conditions, cleaner drinking water, better sewage disposal facilities, more widespread education, better (and more abundant) food and better and safer methods of transport. All these factors have had a far more dramatic influence on mortality and morbidity rates than the provision of health care services.

Relief organisations working in underdeveloped parts of the world are well aware that they can make an impact on mortality rates far more speedily by providing tools, wells and shelter than by building hospitals or clinics or importing doctors and nurses. Sadly, the governments receiving help are often loath to accept this and are frequently much more enthusiastic about building state of the art hospitals complete with scanners, heart transplant teams and intensive care units than they are about building homes, installing irrigation systems or planting crops.

This obsession with high technology leads to problems in all areas of health care. For example, the control of malaria was going well for as long as stagnant pools of water were removed, but when it was discovered that the mosquitoes could be killed by spraying DDT and that the disease could be controlled by using drugs such as chloroquine, the authorities stopped bothering to remove stagnant pools. Today mosquitoes are resistant to DDT and the parasites which cause malaria are becoming resistant to the drugs: malaria now kills around 1.5 million people a year.

THOSE WHO ARGUE that doctors are responsible for any improvement in life expectancy which we may enjoy overlook the fact that from the dark ages, through the Renaissance and up to the first few decades of the twentieth century, infant mortality rates were absolutely terrible and it was these massive death rates among the young which brought down the average life expectation.

The Foundling Hospital in Dublin admitted 10,272 infants in the years from 1775 to 1796 and of these only 45 survived. In Britain deaths among babies under one year old have fallen by more than 85% in the last century. Even among older children the improvement has been dramatic. In 1890 one in four children in Britain died before their tenth birthday. Today 84 out of every 85 children survive to celebrate their tenth birthday. These improvements have virtually nothing to do with doctors or drug companies but are almost entirely a result of better living conditions. In 1904 one third of all British schoolchildren were undernourished. Poor diets meant that babies and small children were weak and succumbed easily to diseases. Older children from poor families were expected to survive on a diet of bread and dripping and many women who had to spend long hours working in terrible conditions were unable to breast feed their babies, many of which then died from drinking infected milk or water.

When the improvements in child mortality figures are taken out of the equation, it is clear that for adults living in developed countries life expectation has certainly not risen in the way that both doctors and drug companies usually suggest.

It isn't even possible to credit vaccination programmes with the improvement in life expectation since the figures show quite clearly that mortality rates for diseases as varied as tuberculosis, whooping cough and cholera had, as a result of better living conditions, all fallen to a fraction of their former levels long before any of the relevant vaccines were introduced.

IF DRUGS WERE only ever prescribed sensibly and when they were likely to interfere with a potentially life threatening disease, the risks associated with their use would be acceptable. But all the evidence shows that doctors do not understand the hazards associated with the drugs they use and frequently prescribe inappropriately and excessively. Many of the deaths associated with drug use are caused by drugs which did not need to be taken.

The best example of the modem tendency to over-prescribe probably lies in the way that antibiotics are used. One in six prescriptions is for an antibiotic and there are at least 100 preparations available for doctors to choose from. When antibiotics-drugs such as penicillin-were first introduced in the 1930s they gave doctors a chance to kill the bacteria causing infections.

The impact made by antibiotics has been exaggerated because most of the diseases which are caused by organisms, which are susceptible to antibiotics, were on the decline before the antibiotics were introduced.

Nevertheless, these drugs are undoubtedly of considerable value. The problem is that although doctors are aware of the advantages of these drugs (if they are in any doubt, the drug companies will frequently remind them) they seem unaware of the hazards associated with their unnecessary use and there is no doubt that most of the prescriptions which are written for antibiotics are unnecessary Many patients are suffering from viral infections which are not susceptible to antibiotics and others would get better by themselves without any drug being prescribed.

Various independent experts who have studied the use of antibiotics claim that between 50% and 90% of the prescriptions written for antibiotics are unnecessary. To a certain extent doctors over-prescribe because they like to do something when faced with a patient-and prescribing a drug is virtually the only thing most of them can do. And to some extent prescribing a drug is a defence against any possible future charge of negligence (on the basis that if the patient dies it is better to have done something than to have done nothing). But the main reason for the overprescribing of antibiotics is, without doubt, the fact that doctors are under the influence of the drug companies. The makers of the antibiotics want their drugs prescribed in vast quantities. It makes no difference to them whether or not the prescriptions are necessary.

The over-prescribing of antibiotics would not matter too much if these drugs were harmless and if there were no other hazards associated with their use. But antibiotics are certainly not harmless. Penicillin alone is said to kill over 1,000 people a year, and if nine out of ten prescriptions are unnecessary then it is not unreasonable to assume that nine out of ten deaths are unnecessary too. The unnecessary and excessive use of antibiotics causes allergy reactions, side effects and a huge variety of serious complications. There is also the very real hazard that by overusing antibiotics doctors are enabling bacteria to develop immunity to these potentially life saving drugs. There is now no doubt that many of our most useful drugs have been devalued by overuse and are no longer effective.

IT IS NOW widely accepted that at least 40% of all the people who are given prescription medicines to take will suffer uncomfortable, hazardous or potentially lethal side effects.

I say 'at least' because, for a variety of reasons, the vast majority of doctors never admit that their patients ever suffer any side effects. In Britain, for example, nine out of ten doctors have never reported any drug side effects to the authorities-authorities who admit that they receive information on no more than 10-15% of even the most serious adverse drug reactions occurring in patients. In other words they admit that they never hear about at least 85-90% of all dangerous drug reactions! Astonishingly, it is even accepted that some doctors will withhold reports of serious adverse reactions and keep their suspicions to themselves in the hope that they may later be able to win fame by publishing their findings in a journal or revealing their discovery to a newspaper or magazine.

Because the real figures about drug hazards are hidden, patients assume that drugs are safe to take, will act in a predictable, effective way and are of recognised quality and standard. None of these assumptions is correct and none of the thousands of the drugs which are available satisfies these criteria. Patients who take drugs are taking a risk; they are often taking part in a massive experiment, and by taking a medicine may become worse off than if they had done nothing. To make things worse no one knows exactly how big the risks are when a particular drug is taken. All drugs are potential poisons that may heal or may kill.

The medical profession, the drug industry and the regulatory bodies all accept that the hazards of using any drug will only be known when the drug has been given to large numbers of patients for a considerable period of time.

ASTONISHINGLY, DESPITE the hazards associated with their use, drugs are controlled less in their development, manufacture, promotion, sale and supply than virtually any other substance imaginable.

In an average sort of year in a developed country, at least 1 in 250 people will be admitted to hospital because of a drug overdose. One in 50 of them will die. Even more worrying is the fact that every day thousands of people are admitted to hospital not because of an overdose but because a drug taken at prescribed levels has caused serious and possibly life-threatening symptoms. Since doctors rarely admit to it when adverse effects occur, the chances are that the true figures are much higher than this.

One of the major reasons for the disastrously high incidence of problems associated with drug use is the fact that the initial clinical trials, performed before a drug is made available for all general practitioners to prescribe for their patients, rarely involve more than a few thousand patients at most. Some initial trials may involve no more than half a dozen patients.

However, it is now well known that severe problems often do not appear either until at least 50,000 patients have taken a drug or until patients have used a drug for many months or even years. Because of this a huge death toll can build up over the years. Drug control authorities admit that when a new drug is launched no one really knows what will happen or what side effects will be identified.

Doctors and drug companies are, it seems, using the public in a constant, ongoing, mass testing programme. And the frightening truth is that far more people are killed as a result of prescription drugs than are killed as a result of using illegal drugs such as heroin or cocaine.

The treatments for many common diseases such as arthritis, backache and allergies such as hay fever and eczema frequently provide inadequate relief and often cause adverse effects which are far worse than the original complaint.

THE MOST CONVINCING evidence for the failure of our current drug testing systems to protect patients properly lies in the number of drugs which have to be withdrawn after they have been tested on animals and issued with licences. Withdrawing drugs from the market is not something which either the manufacturers or the authorities approach lightly. Apart from the obvious commercial losses that follow when a drug is taken off the market, withdrawing a drug means a certain amount of embarrassment for everyone concerned. Drug companies, licensing authorities and scientists who have written glowing reports about the drugs which are removed all try to avoid this obvious humiliation.

The following list, which is taken from evidence supplied to me by various sources including the British government, details some of the principal drugs which were completely or partly taken off the market, or which were made available only with restrictions, because they weren't considered to be safe enough. The list relates to drugs which were dealt with between 1961 and 1993. Not all these drugs were marketed in every country. And, bizarrely, some drugs which have been withdrawn in some countries are still on sale in other countries. Some of these drugs were withdrawn from the market after being on sale for just a few months. Others were taken off the market after being available for over half a century. And some were banned for use by general practitioners but still retained for use in hospitals. There are even drugs which have been withdrawn but which are now being used again for other disorders. For example, thalidomide (which was originally introduced in 1956 as a sedative and hypnotic and which was withdrawn from the market in 1961 because of teratogenic effects) is now being used in the treatment of leprosy.

The main trade names for the withdrawn drugs are included in brackets.

As I HAVE already pointed out some drugs which have been withdrawn in one or more countries are still available, and still widely prescribed in other countries. And just as bizarrely, even when a drug is withdrawn from sale in one or more countries there is frequently little cooperation between the authorities around the world. It would seem logical to expect that when a drug is withdrawn in one country information would be passed to other countries so that similar action could immediately be taken elsewhere. My information shows that this does not happen. For example, the drug phenformin was officially withdrawn from the market in the USA and France in 1977, but was only officially withdrawn in the United Kingdom five years later in 1982.

THE NUMBER OF patients being injured by drugs would undoubtedly be considerably higher if it were not for the fact that many patients either never start taking tablets which have been prescribed for them, or else stop taking their tablets early. Stopping a drug because it produces unpleasant side effects is very common and many patients never start taking pills because they are frightened of what might happen to them. In most developed countries up to 70% of all the drugs prescribed are thrown away! The drug companies do not mind, of course. They have still sold the drug and made their profits. It is one of the great ironies of modern life that not taking the drugs you are prescribed can sometimes save your life.

IT IS NOT only by prescribing drugs or vaccines that doctors do harm. There is plenty of evidence to show that patients are at risk merely by going into hospital.

At least 1 in 20 of all hospital patients will pick up an infection in hospital-mostly urinary tract, chest or wound infections and mostly caused by doctors and nurses failing to wash their hands often enough.

Since Ignaz Philipp Semmelweiss first demonstrated (in the mid-nineteenth century) that deaths in the delivery room were caused by dirty hands, every child has been taught the importance of basic personal hygiene. Sadly, the message does not seem to have got through to the medical and nursing professions. One recent study showed that nurses washed their hands only once every three times after cleaning around a patient's catheter. Another study at a major hospital showed that hand washing by staff was well below recommended levels. A study of doctors' habits showed that two out of three anaesthetists failed to wash their hands before treating a new patient (even though anaesthetists frequently perform venepuncture surgery) while one in three surgeons did not wash their arms properly before an operation.

At least one third of all hospital infections are caused by dirty hands and the cost in simple financial terms is colossal (though not, of course, as horrendous or as unforgivable as the cost in human terms). And it is hardly surprising that people who stay at home to be treated-or who go home quickly after day-case or short-stay surgery-usually get better much quicker than people who need long-stay treatment.

DRUG-RELATED TRAGEDIES are often the ultimate responsibility of the drug industry rather than the medical profession, but there is ample evidence to show that incompetent or careless doctors do cause a horrifying amount of death or injury.

In America, the Public Citizen Health Research Group has shown that 'more than 100,000 people are killed or injured a year by negligent medical care'. The real figure is probably considerably higher than this and there can be little doubt that many of the injuries and deaths are caused by simple, straightforward incompetence rather than bad luck or unforeseen complications.

When doctors from the Harvard School of Public Health studied what happened to more than 30,000 patients admitted to acute care hospitals in New York, they found that nearly 4% of them suffered unintended injuries in the course of their treatment and that 14% of these patients died of their injuries. This survey concluded that nearly 200,000 people die each year in America as a result of medical accidents. This means that more than four times as many people die from injuries caused by doctors as die in road accidents.

Carotid endarterectomies - in which deposits are removed from the arteries in the neck-are currently fashionable in America where doctors earn $1.5 billion a year performing them. But when a study of carotid endarterectomies was recently completed it was found that 64% of these operations were either unjustified or of debatable value because the symptoms were not severe enough to justify the risks of the operation. For pacemaker implants the equivalent figure is 56%. Coronary bypass operations are immensely popular among heart surgeons (and extremely profitable) but a major study conducted in Europe showed that many patients who don't have surgery live longer than those who do. In 1990 American surgeons performed 350,000 coronary bypass operations and charged $14 billion for them. When one researcher studied 300 patients who had had bypass operations at several hospitals in California, he discovered that 14% of the patients would have thrived as well without surgery as with it, while another 30% were borderline. Around 50% of lower back disc operations and up to 70% of hysterectomies are probably unnecessary. In America death toll from unnecessary surgery alone has been estimated to be as high as 80,000 patients per year.

Two Irish doctors recently reported in the British Medical Journal that 20% of British patients who have slightly raised blood pressure are treated unnecessarily with drugs. Two pathologists who carried out 400 post mortem examinations found that in more than 50% of the patients the wrong diagnosis had been made. A British Royal College of Radiologists Working Party reported that at least a fifth of radiological examinations carried out in National Health Service hospitals were clinically unhelpful. In Britain the Institute of Economic Affairs claimed that inexperienced doctors in casualty units kill at least one thousand patients a year.

Today's doctors may laugh at the surgeons who chopped out lengths of bowel to treat constipation or who cut out pieces of brain to treat hysteria, but modern practices may to future generations seem no easier to understand. Around the world there are still hundreds of doctors chopping out lengths of bowel, putting staples in stomachs or wiring up jaws to treat patients who eat too much. There are still hundreds of doctors giving patients electric shocks because they are depressed or chopping out bits and pieces of brain to treat problems as varied as schizophrenia, anxiety and drug addiction. Most alarming of all, perhaps, is the fact that as hospitals are filled with increasingly sophisticated equipment (which doctors and technicians often do not entirely understand) so the opportunities for error are constantly being upgraded. For example, there have been several reports showing that patients receiving radiation treatment have been given the wrong dosage.

It was recently estimated in one medical publication that three quarters of Britain’s surgeons were still using hernia repair techniques which were regarded internationally as obsolete. Surveys of junior hospital doctors regularly show an alarming ignorance about drugs, prescription writing and the performance of simple, practical procedures.

The overuse of medical facilities-particularly surgery-is a common cause of unnecessary injury and death. When a patient is likely to die if an operation is not performed, the risks associated with the operation may be acceptable. But when procedures are performed unnecessarily the risks become unacceptable.

According to Fortune magazine, American hospitals now try to attract doctors who will bring in patients likely to run up substantial bills. Centres offering investigative facilities often offer lucrative partnerships to doctors who are prepared to promise to make lots of referrals. Research in British hospitals has shown that pregnant women who are in private beds in NHS hospitals are twice as likely to have their babies by Caesarian section as women in NHS beds. Could this be due to the fact that surgeons looking after private patients can charge a hefty extra fee for delivering a baby by Caesarian section?

TODAY, WE HAVE sophisticated diagnostic aids, monitoring systems, drugs, microscopic surgery, lasers and a thousand and one other miracles and yet we are, by and large, over-cautious, hypochondriacal, drug abusing, overweight, neurotic, constipated, nervous, neurasthenic, hysterical and unhealthy. We are a tribute to and a product of our times.

When, to this appalling roll call of doctor induced disease, you add the steadily increasing dissatisfaction with extended waiting lists, arrogant doctors, indifference and a lack of civility or caring it is hardly surprising that millions of people are today abandoning the traditional suppliers of medical help and seeking help from alternative practitioners.

In 1984 a survey of British family doctors revealed that 16% of GPs spent less than 12 hours a week with their patients, including the time spent on home visits, while only 10% spent more than 28 hours with their patients. Another survey showed that the average British doctor spends slightly less than 23 hours a week talking and listening to patients.

When GPs can't make a diagnosis or need help with providing their patients with treatment, they usually refer them to hospital. But the evidence shows that hospital specialists are no more reliable than GPs and many patients referred to hospital are likely to see a doctor with less experience.

The National Audit Office in Britain said in 1990 that it suspected hospital consultants of neglecting health service duties for private commitments in many of the hospitals it had visited. In general surgery fewer than half of all new patients and only one third of all patients attending a hospital clinic are seen by a consultant. In medical clinics just over a quarter of patients are seen by doctors who have worked for less than six months in their present speciality after registration. Much of the work performed in hospitals is done by tired, incompletely trained doctors.

The rise in the number of people seeking help from alternative and complementary medical practitioners-often untrained and offering unproven forms of treatment-is a sign that a growing number of people are dissatisfied with the service provided by the orthodox medical profession and are prepared to try almost anything rather than to entrust themselves to allopathic medicine.

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.

As drug companies become increasingly aware that curing serious disease is beyond their capability (and, indeed, their desire-for why should drug companies, which make their money out of people being sick, want to make people well?), they spend more and more effort on finding drugs to improve life or performance in some vague way.

There can be little doubt that a former Director General of the World Health Organization got it absolutely right when he startled the medical establishment by stating that 'the major and most expensive part of medical knowledge as applied today appears to be more for the satisfaction of the health professions than for the benefit of the consumers of health care'. The evidence certainly supports that astonishing and apparently heretical view. Profits, not patients, are now the driving force which rule the medical profession's motives, ambitions and actions. Doctors don't seem to care any more. The passion has gone out of medicine.

In my view the biggest single reason why the medical profession is killing so many people is its alliance with the pharmaceutical industry.

The myth that we live long and healthy lives thanks to the drug industry and the medical profession has increased our expectations. We no longer expect to fall ill. We expect a magic solution when we fall ill. We don't want to be bothered making any effort to stay healthy because we have been taught to have faith that if we fall ill then the medical men will be able to cure us.

The drug industry likes to pretend that it has made us healthier, but it is the drug industry that is in particularly good health!

Twenty years ago the world drugs market was worth a miserly $12 billion. By the end of the 1980s it was worth $140 billion. By 1990 it was worth well over $170 billion and the industry estimates that it will be soon be worth well over $300 billion a year. And today the drug industry has almost total control over the medical profession.

Over 40% of the information doctors receive about the drugs they prescribe comes directly from drug company representatives and drug company leaflets. Well over 50% of the rest of the information they receive comes from medical journals and meetings which are sponsored by drug companies. In the mid 1970s, in my book The Medicine Men, I warned that the medical profession was being controlled by the drug industry and had no real right to call itself a profession. Today, there is no longer any doubt. Today, the drug industry owns the medical establishment and much of the medical profession.

It is widely accepted that the majority of illnesses do not need drug treatment. Most patients who visit a doctor neither want nor expect drug treatment. But at least eight out of ten patients who visit a general practitioner will be given a prescription (though growing numbers of patients do not take the drugs that are prescribed for them).

Sadly, the myth about our improving health is just that-a myth. We do not live longer or healthier lives than our predecessors. On the contrary, although we consume greater and greater quantities of medicine than ever before, more of us are ill today than at any time in history. On any day you care to choose in just about any developed country you care to mention, over half the population will be taking a drug of some kind. A recent survey of 9,000 Britons concluded that one in three people are suffering from a long standing illness or disability~ Other surveys have shown that in any one fourteen-day period 95% of the population consider themselves to be unwell for at least a few of those days. At no time in history has illness been so commonplace. We spend more than ever on health care but no one could argue that there is any less suffering in our society

The number of people attempting suicide is increasing every year and as more and more powerful drugs are produced and handed out the number who succeed is also increasing-despite the expenditure of vast amounts of money on equipment and drugs designed to bring people back to life again. Patients do not treat doctors in the same critical way that they treat other providers of a service because they have been taught to trust the medical profession. But that trust now appears to be misplaced.

What on earth can be the explanation for all this?

Is it simply that doctors are in the pay of the drug industry? Or are doctors more dishonest, more stupid and more incompetent than ever before?

In the chapters that follow I will provide some alarming answers to these straightforward questions.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

DOCTORS: INCOMPETENT,IGNORANT AND FRAUDULENT

In order to understand exactly why doctors are doing so much harm, it is first of all necessary to demolish a very basic medical myth: that medicine is a science.

The truth is that it is not. That may seem a startling claim. But it is not difficult to prove.

Doctors, medical researchers and drug companies do, of course, like to persuade all present and potential consumers of health care that medicine is a science which has advanced beyond the mystical incantations and witch doctor remedies of the past.

But modern medicine is not a science and modern clinicians and medical researchers are not scientists.

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.

It isn’t difficult to find examples showing the ineffectiveness of modern medical science.

Cancer is the killer that frightens people most. The very word is so emotive that most doctors try not to use it when talking to patients. Instead of talking of cancer they talk of 'tumours' and 'growths'. But large charities trying to raise money aren't so shy; they know that this fear can easily be translated into cash. Around the world some of the biggest, best established and most successful charities are those collecting money for 'cancer'. Between them they attract hundreds of millions of pounds worth of donations and legacies every year.

Many of those who give money to one of the high profile cancer charities do so in the same spirit that they would buy insurance; by making a donation to a cancer charity they are, they hope, helping to ensure that if they or one of their loved ones ever contract cancer then their donation will have helped to pay for a cure. People whose relatives have died of cancer make donations partly in memory of their loss and partly in the hope that by giving money they will help to ensure that the same thing doesn't happen again.

The huge army of cancer researchers and administrators who are kept in business by the money they raise through this potent stimulus-fear-are certainly not shy about using the word ‘cancer'. They know that many people who see the word 'cancer' on the side of a collecting tin will find it impossible to resist making a donation. Many people subconsciously feel that by making a donation to a cancer charity they are buying themselves some instant protection. It is, after all, much easier to slip a few coins into a stranger's tin than it is to stop smoking or avoid eating cancer inducing fatty foods. The big cancer charities employ thousands of scientists, and their publicity specialists make sure that every new piece of research is passed on to newspapers and television. All around the world patients (especially children) who are alleged to have been cured by new anti-cancer remedies are ruthlessly paraded in front of potential supporters. Journalists are rarely as sceptical as they should be and the man and woman in the street can hardly be blamed for believing that researchers are managing to conquer cancer.

In order to ensure that money continues to pour in, the big cancer charities must, of course, persuade potential contributors and supporters that they are making progress in the fight against cancer. The man or woman who puts a coin into a collecting tin for a cancer charity is almost certainly convinced that the researchers he or she is supporting have already made great progress and have helped to tame this much feared killer.

But are the thousands of highly paid, much lauded cancer researchers really making noticeable progress in the fight against cancer? I don't think so. And my scepticism is shared by a growing number of other medical observers. There has been some success in the treatment of cancers of the blood (diseases such as leukaemia) but the mortality figures show that as many people (if not more) are dying from commoner forms of cancer now as were a generation ago. One in three people already have, or will develop, cancer. Figures from around the world show that the picture is much the same everywhere. More than ten per cent of America's entire health care bill is spent on cancer research and treatment. But in America, during the last fifteen years or so the incidence of cancer has steadily risen as has the number of people dying of cancer. Writing in the European Medical Journal DR Jack Tropp - Director of the International Health Information Institute in Los Angeles, a Member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Cancer Victors and Friends (the oldest holistic cancer information centre in the United States) and author of Cancer.. A Healing Crisis - has pointed out that 'despite the billions of dollars spent each year for cancer research and treatment, using the traditional methods of choice: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, in the overall picture nothing has changed in the mortality rates in the last thirty-five years.' Independent scientists who have assessed the value of the war against cancer agree that we are losing the war, and that there is no evidence to suggest that decades of expensive research have made much, if any, effect on the most fundamental measure of success-death.

I don’t think there is much doubt that (if their aim was to save human lives) the regiments of enthusiastic volunteers who spend their free hours working in fund raising shops or raising money by organising stunts and events could have spent their time and energy in other far more effective ways. To describe cancer research as of doubtful financial validity is to be generous to a fault. To be blunt, the charities those fund raisers have so enthusiastically supported have failed miserably to conquer cancer.

In areas where cancer has become more amenable to treatment, or now takes fewer lives, it is changes in lifestyle that are responsible. Chimney sweeps' boys who used to scramble up chimneys to loosen the soot were prone to develop cancer of the scrotum because of all the soot. After the Chimney Sweeper's Act of 1788 this particular practice was gradually outlawed (though it was still common enough at the end of the nineteenth century). Now that young boys are no longer pushed up chimneys the incidence of this particular type of cancer has fallen. In the last few decades the incidence of stomach cancer has fallen but this has been a result of a change in dietary habits rather than the result of laboratory experiments.

Despite all the sponsored jogging and other fund raising, the incidence of some cancers-cancer of the skin and cancer of the colon, for example-is going up, not down. All the effort, all the money, all the misguided hope and faith that have been poured into cancer research hasn't worked.

Consider breast cancer - one of the most constantly publicised and most greatly feared forms of cancer. Because of its very nature it is a type of cancer which arouses much emotion. Newspapers, magazines and medical journals have for decades been full of articles describing new forms of treatment. At the beginning of 1993 the medical journal The Lancet, in an editorial, commented that: 'If one were to believe all the media hype, the triumphalism of the profession in published research, and the almost weekly miracle breakthroughs trumpeted by the cancer charities, one might be surprised that women are dying at all from this cancer.'

But women are still dying from breast cancer. Indeed, the overall death rate from breast cancer hasn't changed and isn't changing. Despite all the talk and all the promises the number of women dying from breast cancer hasn't altered. The disease is still as great a killer as it was decades ago. Approximately 25,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed every year in Britain and 180,000 a year are diagnosed in the United States of America.

(Incidentally, when an animal researcher attempts to test the safety of a potential breast cancer treatment on a laboratory mouse the chances are that the mouse will be male. The reasons are simple: male mice are easier to catch and cheaper to buy.)

Raising money for cancer research is now big business. But it is a business that has, if you assess its effectiveness critically, been a dismal failure. And the cancer industry has faded because it has concentrated its efforts on the wrong targets. Millions of pounds have, for example, been spent on giving cancer to animals and thousands of highly paid researchers have spent much of the money raised by enthusiastic volunteers on watching cancers spread throughout millions of animals. The cancers which affect animals are, of course, quite different to the cancers which affect human beings.

We know what causes most forms of cancer.

Cancer is created by chemical pollutants, by unhealthy food and by tobacco. Poisoned water supplies, dangerous prescription drugs and the over use of X rays have also contributed to the incidence of cancer. With immune systems constantly battered by polluted air, adulterated, chemically impregnated food and a constant onslaught from the drugs we buy for ourselves or allow our doctors to prescribe for us, it is not surprising that increasing numbers of people succumb to one of the many different types of cancer.

But tackling these causes does not seem to be a priority. Governments subsidise tobacco farmers and bend over backwards and sideways to accommodate the wishes of the pharmaceutical industry.

Most ironic of all is the fact that the evidence now suggests that many of the treatments used for patients with cancer (and regarded by those who support the 'cancer industry' as evidence of the effectiveness of their war) may themselves cause cancer and that instead of offering hope to parents, the medical profession itself may now be the major cause of childhood cancer! In October 1993 the British Medical Journal published a research paper which, it concluded, showed that 'modern chemotherapy for childhood cancers may be an independent aetiological factor for second tumours'. The authors of the paper, a team of medical scientists from the Nordic Society of Paediatric Haematology and the Oncology Association of the Nordic Cancer Registries, representing the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, pointed out that: 'The risk for a second malignant neoplasm after cancer in childhood or adolescence seems to be high relative to that in the general population and also in comparison to the relative risk for second tumours observed after a first tumour diagnosed late in life.' Another report, published in the same issue of the British Medical Journal, noted that: 'Most childhood leukaemia is now thought to be due to mutations initiated by environmental agents.' The British Medical Journal noted that the only confirmed culprit is X rays, though the drug chloramphenicol is a probable culprit.

The ultimate explanation for the failure of the cancer industry to conquer cancer is probably the simplest and yet the most cynical. The cancer industry has, like the pharmaceutical industry, become large and powerful and dependent for its existence upon the terrors it is supposed to be trying to banish from our world. The pharmaceutical industry has no interest in curing illness. Cures for heart disease or arthritis would lose it billions of pounds. The industry prefers to sell long-term treatments which never cure but which do provide it with enormous profits. The cancer industry is now in the same position. If cancer were conquered by teaching people how to adapt their lifestyles so that they avoided the provocative factors which are known to cause it then a massive, international, multi-billion dollar industry would be out of business. Thousands of highly paid researchers, animal breeders and handlers and administrators would have to seek useful work in the real world.

The future of the cancer industry depends upon the continuing threat from cancer. If cancer were conquered or controlled, thousands of well paid people would be out of work.

THE OTHER MAJOR concern of recent years has been AIDS. From the way that journalists and politicians have dealt with the AIDS story you might imagine that the virus causing this disease was a completely mystery; that it had arrived from nowhere and that doctors and scientists were now struggling, shoulder to shoulder, to find a cure. That isn't quite true. AIDS, like so many other modern diseases, was created by man. And to medical researchers AIDS has been more of a financial bonanza than a deadly target to be eliminated.

No one is sure exactly where the virus causing AIDS came from (if, indeed, AIDS is caused by this single virus-there is, at the time of writing, considerable controversy over this, though the scientific community, which has an enormous vested interest in the now traditional HIV-AIDS theory, is reluctant even to accept that AIDS may have some other cause). There are, however, several theories about the origin of AIDS and these theories all have one thing in common: they all suggest that the disease originated as a result of laboratory experiments.

Under normal, healthy, natural circumstances there are barriers which prevent the spread of viruses from one species to another. Human beings are not normally vulnerable to viruses which afflict dogs or cats, for example. But scientific researchers, deliberately transferring viruses between species, have overcome this natural safety mechanism and opened up a Pandora's box of horror that can be never be sealed again. Back in 1989, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, DR J Seattle pointed out that: 'Viral species tend to be restricted to the host animal species which they infect', but warned that: 'It would appear that the AIDS epidemic may be just one of the latest of several mammalian cross species viral transfers triggered by the techniques of virology developed in the twentieth century, which subsequently spread out of control in the new host species'.

Just when, and how, the HIV virus which causes AIDS was first installed in human beings is a mystery

One British researcher has claimed that AIDS was introduced into the human blood pool in 1922 when at least 34 people were injected with blood from chimpanzees to see if the animals' malarial parasites would have any effect on humans. Another 33 people received blood from this initial group and it is claimed that it was these individuals who were the first AIDS carriers.

A second possibility, reported at length in Rolling Stone magazine by writer Tom Curtis, is that the AIDS virus was injected into human patients along with the poliomyelitis vaccine. The medium that scientists used to produce the vaccine-the kidneys of monkeys caught in the wild-was found sometimes to be contaminated by monkey viruses which were then passed on to unsuspecting, innocent and usually healthy human patients. Between the mid 1950s and the early 1960s many tens of millions of people around the world were injected with a polio vaccine that contained a monkey virus. (The virus was later claimed to make human cells prone to cancer. We'll probably never know now whether mothers who dutifully took along their children to be vaccinated against polio were unwittingly having their children injected with cancer inducing viruses.)

What we do know is that vaccines were administered to many people in Africa in the late 1950s. If, as has been alleged, one of the vaccines used was contaminated with an unknown monkey virus, then it is, I suspect, possible that the AIDS virus may have come from that mass inoculation programme.

Sadly, I doubt if we are ever likely to know for sure whether or not the AIDS virus did originally come from a vaccination programme. Leaders of the medical establishment seem reluctant even to discuss the possibility and orthodox medical journals have dedicated little space to the study of this question. One wonders if their reluctance to investigate could be inspired by an awareness that if a link is discovered the cost to their beloved pharmaceutical industry could be unbearable; both from expensive lawsuits and through the fact that if a link is proven it might permanently frighten members of the public into refusing to accept vaccinations.

Those are by no means the only theories about how the HIV virus first came to affect human beings. But all the theories I've been able to find involve laboratory animals and research scientists.

WHICHEVER ANIMAL RESEARCH laboratory the AIDS virus came from there is little doubt that once AIDS had arrived on the scene the world's pharmaceutical companies were quick to leap upon the idea of making a profit out of the disease.

It was the pharmaceutical industry, largely through its more or less total control of the medical establishment, which helped to manufacture and maintain the AIDS myth. The myth-the inaccurate assertion that AIDS was the greatest threat to humankind since the Black Death plague-began by accident, was built up for crude commercial reasons and was eventually exaggerated by pressure groups who had their own very special reasons for turning a nasty disease into a global threat. AIDS brought together several groups of people who had nothing at all in common and united them in a unique way

In the beginning it was just a good news story: another potentially lethal disease for which there seemed to be no obvious cure available. A few well known victims-particularly film stars-gave the disease a rare glamour that enabled the feature writers to put a little spin on what was basically a rather low key story. The drug companies quickly recognised that AIDS offered unprecedented opportunities to make money; within a short space of time they were making millions of dollars out of selling AIDS tests and new drugs.

At the peak of the AIDS scare-in the mid 1980s-shares of companies offering AIDS related products were rocketing skywards. In April 1987 Fortune, the American business magazine, ran a special feature entitled 'Aids stocks worth the gamble' in which it reported that shares in several individual companies had gone up by as much as three hundred and sixty per cent in twelve months. In the first three months of 1987 a portfolio of shares offering AIDS solutions rose by a staggering forty-one per cent.

The medical establishment stoutly supported the plague theory. In the 1980s a spokesman for the British Medical Association warned that by 1991 every family in Britain would be touched by AIDS and attacked me viciously when 1 quoted evidence supporting a less 'scary' point of view. Other medical establishment groups jumped on the 'AIDS is going to kill us all' bandwagon and the official line was defended with unprecedented ferocity. (1 have fought many campaigns against the establishment but the AIDS campaign seemed to arouse particularly self-righteous, sanctimonious venom and I was mocked and vilified by many 'AIDS is the modern plague' theorists.) The World Health Organization forecast that 100 million people might be infected by the year 1990 and the Royal College of Nursing forecast that one in fifty people in Britain would have the disease by the early 1990s.

Then, with the drug industry behind the promotion of AIDS, at least four separate groups of people realised that there were advantages to be gained out of turning the story into a major international threat.

The first to realise the significance of AIDS were probably the religious activists who had for years hated the 'free sex' attitudes at had survived the sixties. They quickly realised that in AIDS they had a heaven-sent opportunity to frighten people into abandoning their promiscuous ways. In the early days much of the most terrifying AIDS propaganda came from religious pressure groups who wanted to spread their own sanctimonious message and were perfectly prepared to exaggerate the facts a little in order to scare the electorate into their arms.

Second, there were many other business groups who recognised the profit making opportunities associated with AIDS. Insurance companies used the threat of AIDS as an excuse to push their premiums up at a far faster rate than they would have ever dared do without AIDS. Hospital and clinic managers started making money out of offering AIDS tests and AIDS counselling.

Even companies which were not directly involved greeted the AIDS scare with delight. The tobacco industry, for example, must have been extremely grateful to see pundits on television warning of a coming plague which, they predicted (using figures that were plucked out of the night), might eventually kill as many as a hundred thousand Britons a year. The tobacco companies knew that cigarettes were already killing one hundred thousand Britons a year.

Naturally, politicians were not slow to take advantage of the disease. They realised that AIDS was a heaven-sent opportunity to scare the living daylights out of their electorates. Politicians love scaring people-it gives them a good excuse for introducing tough legislation that would otherwise never get passed. And conservative administrations-particularly those in power know very well that people always vote for right wing politicians (and for the status quo) when they feel threatened. Once they saw just how rapidly the AIDS scare campaign was growing the politicians leapt onto the bandwagon and did what they could to exaggerate the threat. Some of the advertising campaigns launched to warn the public about the threat of AIDS would have been laughed at if people hadn't already been frightened out of their wits.

There was one final group who had a vital part to play in helping to create the AIDS myth. Right from the beginning it seemed clear AIDS was primarily a threat to homosexuals and this worried the gay pressure groups enormously. They quickly realised that if AIDS remained a predominantly 'gay' disease there would be a real risk that politicians, doctors, researchers and the public would quickly tire of the disease and funds would not be made available to continue the research work that had been started. They realised that in order to keep public interest in the disease high they had to change the public perception of the disease; AIDS had to become a predominantly heterosexual disease. So, all around the world gay pressure groups worked hard at changing public perceptions. Since there are many homosexuals working in television and radio, in publishing, in journalism and in the world of entertainment, the campaign was difficult to build up and within a very short time the message had been distorted so successfully that many people really began to believe what was being broadcast.

DESPITE THE INTERNATIONAL media blitz provided by a willing army of drug company controlled medical journalists it had been clear from the earliest days that AIDS was not going to be a major threat to society in general.

Way back in 1987 the medical magazine Pulse reported that the ~only sexual practice' likely to lead to AIDS virus infection was receptive anal intercourse. The magazine was quoting data from the San Francisco Men's Health Study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study of more than one thousand heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual men reported that-and I quote-'receptive anal genital contact is the major mode of transmission of HIV infection'. The report went on to say that 'there was no evidence of epidemic spread due to any other sexual mode of transmission'.

This report made sense. After all, the evidence showed that AIDS was primarily a blood borne disease and whereas ordinary vaginal sex does not usually lead to damaged tissues (and therefore bleeding), anal sex does.

In 1988 the British Medical Journal published a paper entitled 'Heterosexual transmission of HIV by haemophiliacs'. It was written by three doctors from the University Hospital in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, who had for three years followed thirteen haemophiliacs and their partners. Their conclusion was-and I quote: 'In the absence of other risk factors transmission of HIV from men to women by vaginal intercourse is infrequent'.

In a paper entitled 'Human immunodeficiency virus infection, hepatitis B virus infection and sexual behaviour of women attending a genito-urinary medicine clinic, authors from the West London Hospital, Charing Cross Hospital and Central Public Health Laboratory in London studied 1,115 women who attended a genito-urinary clinic in west London. The authors reported that more than half of 424 women who said that they had non regular sexual partners never used a condom. They also said that the two women who were seropositive for HIV who completed a questionnaire on their sexual behaviour reported that they had had anal sex. The authors of this paper concluded that-and I quote: 'Heterosexual women in London are at a low risk of becoming infected with HIV.’

In another scientific paper, also published in the British Medical Journal, researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science and St Mary's Hospital studied prostitutes. They came to the conclusion that-and I quote from their paper -'the most important risk factor for prostitutes in the West is sharing needles and syringes for drugs'. In 1992 researchers found that fewer than 30 of 1,000 prostitutes in Glasgow were infected with the AIDS virus-all of them were injecting drug users. The researchers in Glasgow pointed out that the virus was more likely to be spread by prostitutes through the use of dirty injecting equipment than by unprotected sexual intercourse.

One of the most important papers published on the subject of AIDS was probably the one produced by the European Study Group in 1989. This was published in the British Medical Journal under the heading 'Risk factors for male to female transmission of HIV. The coordinating centre for this report was the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on AIDS in Paris and there were participating centres in Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain. The authors of this report concluded - and I quote - 'The only sexual practice that clearly increases the risk of male to female transmission was anal intercourse'. The authors went on to say that-and again I quote-'no other sexual practices have been associated with the risk of transmission'.

As it became clear that AIDS was not going to become the feared plague, there were many attempts to justify the original forecasts. In some areas it was suggested that patients suffering from cancer should be listed as AIDS victims. In others areas it was suggested that patients suffering from tuberculosis should be included in the AIDS statistics.

Eventually, in an editorial in the British Medical Journal in the early 1990s the International AIDS Coordinator at the National Cancer Institute in the United States of America, announced that 'the HIV epidemic in North America and Europe probably peaked ... in the mid 1980s' while the Institute of Actuaries in Britain eventually admitted there was 'no evidence to support the hypothesis of a 'heterosexual explosion' of AIDS or HIV infection in this country'. But by then it was too late, for the AIDS myth had created a new industry of researchers, advisers and self-styled experts and newspapers were regularly carrying stories of areas where the number of AIDS counsellors exceeded the number of AIDS sufferers. By 1992 in many areas there were found to be two or three times as many AIDS counsellors as victims. Many of the under-employed AIDS experts seemed to keep themselves busy doing their very best to maintain the AIDS myth-the myth which paid their quite unjustified salaries.

DESPITE THE EVIDENCE AIDS was constantly promoted as a 'plague'. By devoting an extraordinary amount of time to the problem of AIDS and by refusing to put forward any point of view which did not support the idea of AIDS as a major plague television caused more fear and more hysteria than anything else I can remember. It is worth remembering that by September 1987 - probably the peak year for AIDS, when it was difficult to turn on a television set without finding a programme outlining the horrors of AIDS-the official government estimate in Britain was that eight heterosexuals had contracted AIDS through sex since 1981. Just to put things in perspective it is worth pointing out that in just two years four times as many people had died while horse riding. Instead of spending millions trying to encourage heterosexuals to wear condoms the government would, perhaps, have been better occupied spending its money trying to encourage horse riders to wear hard hats.

The effectiveness of the industry lobby to promote AIDS as a fearful (and therefore profitable) disease came home to me on numerous occasions in the 1980s when I was vilified for telling the truth about the disease. Guests at a dinner where I was speaking as the guest of honour walked out when 1 dared to suggest that AIDS was not a major threat to heterosexuals. Editors who published my articles about AIDS received indignant telephone calls from self-styled experts insisting that I should not be allowed any sort of public platform for my views. I was repeatedly threatened and attacked for daring to quote the research papers which proved that AIDS was not the new plague.

By the second half of the decade it had become professionally dangerous to dare to suggest that AIDS was not a killer plague. Few people in television or in publishing would even listen to a rational scientific argument.

In early 1987 1 had a telephone call from a researcher for a TV company who told me that he was planning a documentary about AIDS.

'What do you think about AIDS?' he asked me.

I told him that I thought that AIDS was a serious problem, but it was just one of many serious medical problems and that the threat it posed had been exaggerated by some doctors, a lot of politicians and most journalists. The researcher was silent for a moment or two. I could tell by the silence that he was disappointed. It wasn't quite what he hoped to hear.

'We're planning a major documentary,' he said. 'We want to cover all the angles. Haven't you got anything new to say about AIDS?'

'I don't think AIDS is a plague that threatens humankind,' I insisted. 'I think it is a dangerous, infectious disease that currently affects a small number of people and that may, in the next few years, affect thousands more.' I then pointed out that I believed that the evidence about AIDS had been distorted and the facts exaggerated.

'We really want you to come on to the programme and talk about some of the problems likely to be produced by the disease,' persisted the researcher.

'I'm happy to come on to the programme and say that I think that the dangers posed by the disease have been exaggerated,' 1 said.

The researcher sighed. 'Quite a few doctors have said that to me. But it really isn't the sort of angle we're looking for.'

I didn't expect to hear from the researcher again and I didn't. His company produced a networked television programme about AIDS that appeared on our screens a short time after that conversation and most of those who viewed it will have gone to bed thinking that AIDS was the greatest threat to humankind since the Black Death.

During the last few years I've lost count of the number of times I have had that same conversation with TV researchers and producers. During the late 1980s I received an average of three or four requests a week to appear on television. But during that same period (when countless programmes about AIDS were being made) 1 received no invitations to speak about AIDS on television.

Time and time again the facts about AIDS have been carefully selected to satisfy the public image of the disease (and to provide a good story) rather than to relate the truth.

When it became quite plain that the talk of plagues had been wildly exaggerated, an attempt was made to maintain the myth by claiming that the disease was about to devastate Africa.

Once again the claim was fraudulent.

THE CRUELLEST OF cruel ironies must surely be that AIDS, which was almost certainly created as a result of experiments on animals, has led to the creation of a massive sub-industry devoted to using laboratory animals to try to find a cure for the disease. The research industry which has been created has consumed vast amounts of money, has inspired accusations of professional double dealing and jealousy and has never got anywhere near to finding a cure.

Throughout the 1980s research institutes around the world who needed extra funds simply had to add AIDS onto their project titles and then sit back to wait for the cash to roll in. The AIDS industry has become vast. In 1991 the total amount of money spent on AIDS research around the world was $1,500,000,000. In 1992 it was estimated that the expenditure on AIDS research would reach $1,625,000,000. Most of that money was allocated for animal experiments. (This sum doesn't include the vast amount collected by voluntary workers, large numbers of whom seem constantly eager to help raise money for AIDS. I wonder if they would be as keen to raise money for unfashionable but nevertheless lethal disorders such as cancer of the colon).

The AIDS story, which had begun in an animal experimenter's laboratory, has gone full circle. In the end the industry which had created the disease has made the greatest profit from it. Hardly a 'triumph' for medical science.

THERE WERE TIMES before and during the Renaissance when doctors were scientists and medicine was a science.

In the thirteenth century there was Roger Bacon, the Franciscan monk who is credited with the invention of the telescope, the microscope, the diving bell, gunpowder, locomotives, flying machines and spectacles and who is said to have moaned that 'medical men don't know the drugs they use, nor their prices'. In the sixteenth century there were Galileo, the Italian scientist who also studied medicine and who got into terrible trouble with the Church for supporting Copernicus' view that the planets revolved around the sun, and Andreas Vesalius, the Belgian physician whose descriptions of human anatomy made a vital contribution to the renaissance in medicine. There was Franciscus Sylvius, also known as Francois de Bois and Franz de le Boe, a German physician, physiologist, anatomist and chemist who believed that disorders were caused by chemical actions and could therefore be diagnosed and treated logically; Santorio Santorio, an Italian physician, physicist and physiologist who devised the first watch, thermometer and weighing machine and was the first person to introduce scientific instruments to medical practice; and Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician who was eventually executed by the Calvinists and whose major contribution to medical thinking was his discovery of the circulation of the blood to and from the lungs.

And there was Paracelsus, christened Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who travelled throughout Europe battling against what he saw as primitive, unproven and out of date medical theories. Paracelsus, who was born in 1493 and who died in 1541, rejected the old idea that illness is a result of a failure of balance within the body (oddly enough this old fashioned idea, rejected by scientists for 500 years is now fashionable again among some practitioners of alternative medicine). Paracelsus claimed that illnesses needed to be treated within specific organs, using specific chemical compounds to treat the organ and the disease. He believed in experimenting on patients who needed treatment and he burnt all the old textbooks which he regarded as unscientific. Paracelsus wanted the alchemists to stop their constant search for ways to turn lead into gold and to spend their days trying to make medicines.

Since he was threatening the status quo Paracelsus was banned and condemned and attacked and driven out of his home. Many attempts were made to silence him. Paracelsus, who was oddly enough born in Basle, the home of many of today's leading drug companies, was in many ways the founder of the pharmaceutical industry. But these days the industry does not recognise its mentor, possibly because those industry chiefs who have heard of him are only too aware that if Paracelsus was alive today he would be appalled by the industry he helped to create.

All these men lived and worked in the sixteenth century. Many of them risked their lives to do their work and they were proud, fearless and desperate for knowledge. These were true scientists: they tried to prove or to disprove their theories and were prepared to be proved wrong, and they were prepared to experiment and to put their ideas to the test.

But modern doctors and medical researchers are more like Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher who used experiments not to find the truth but merely to illustrate his theories.

The foundation of modern, twentieth-century medical thinking is the Cartesian principle that although the mind and the body are linked they are essentially separate entities. Descartes did not believe in experimental science or the objective assessment of ideas. He was a philosopher who dabbled in science but his ideas were to dominate many aspects of medical thinking and teaching for some time. He believed in intuition and he believed that man could be regarded as a simple mechanical creation. It is for this reason that many doctors treat the lesion or the organ that they believe to be failing to function properly rather than the patient, his fears, and his symptoms. Doctors organise laboratory

tests and then believe that by treating abnormalities they are acting scientifically.

When a patient complains of pain the doctor does tests to find the cause of the pain but doesn't bother to treat the pain because that would interfere with the results of the tests. Meanwhile, the patient suffers so much from the pain that he becomes even more severely ill. With that sort of background it is hardly surprising that the reputation of modern allopathic medicine as a healing branch of science is crumbling rapidly. Too many modern doctors neither cure nor care.

The modern clinician and the modern medical researcher base their opinions and their conclusions almost exclusively on subjective observations and wishful expectations-observations and expectations which are likely to be based on inaccurate historical perspectives and experimental experiences with members of another species.

Superstition and suspicion are the principal foundations of twentieth-century medical science. Error is built upon error and unproven theories are used as building blocks for new ideas. Assumptions, prejudices and hearsay compete with subjective observations and personal interpretations of symptoms and signs for the doctor's attention and allegiance. To be truly scientific the doctor would have to subordinate his personal opinions to impartial knowledge gained by analysis and experimentation, but if he did this the doctor would lose the mystique and authority which is traditionally a part of the medicine man's armoury. By becoming a scientist he would become a technician and lose his god-like powers.

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 two thousand years ago.

In true science an idea is born and then tested before conclusions are drawn. Without testing there can be no science and an idea can never be more than an opinion or a hypothesis. The true scientist will do everything he can to disprove his hypothesis, excluding probability, chance, coincidence and the placebo effect, and ignoring pride, vanity and all commercial pressures in his search for the truth. Sadly, such devotion is rare indeed within the world of medicine. All too frequently doctors use case reports as testimonials. They will admit that all patients are different and then they will draw conclusions about the treatment of thousands of patients from single case reports published in a medical journal. Statistics are essential for determining probabilities, for making predictions and for choosing the best possible remedy but doctors frequently use their own interpretations of statistics. A doctor will say: 'I have seen 300 patients with this disease over the last five years and this treatment or that remedy is best'. He will forget that there are many possible remedies which he has probably never considered and he will ignore the fact that some of his patients may have died and many of them may have got no better. When case histories are viewed subjectively the mind of the viewer can and often will lie and distort in order to protect the viewer's pride and vanity.

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 seventeenth 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'.

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?

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.

The other type of research is done by doctors or scientists wishing to advance their careers. All young doctors and medical scientists who wish to progress within the medical establishment must publish as many scientific papers as possible.

The real, unstated reason for many medical theses and papers is that they give appointments committees something to measure. But is this a criterion which commends itself to the general public who pay for our services? Would you prefer your treatment to be supervised by a physician who had published fifteen papers rather than fourteen? A general practitioner claims that she was told by a fellow doctor: 'Find something to measure, and then keep on measuring it until you can put six points on a graph. Then start submitting abstracts, because you'll soon be applying for senior registrar jobs and you'll need at least ten publications to get on the short list.' The GP claims that the registrar who told her this also said: 'Look, I'll help you out a bit. I'll put your name on everything I publish from this lab if you put my name on everything you publish.'

Those scientists who still do original and unsponsored research might claim that their work is of potential value but the evidence contradicts that view.

The first genetically engineered crop to be released into the wild was a tobacco plant which was resistant to herbicides and therefore able to be more heavily sprayed against weeds. In both Britain and America freak giant calves and lambs were born on experimental farms after attempts to produce herds of identical animals went disastrously wrong. Instead of weighing 80 lbs several of the calves developed to 150 Ibs or more and had to be delivered by Caesarian section. In other experiments scientists have 'created' a creature that was half sheep and half goat, have kept monkeys heads alive without their bodies and have made a female monkey pregnant with human sperm.

Even more worrying is the fact that there is now a considerable amount of evidence to show that many modern so-called scientists are prepared to 'alter' their results if their experiments do not turn out as planned. (This cavalier attitude towards scientific experiments may well have been acquired from the world's drug companies-which have a well-deserved reputation for amending or suppressing unsatisfactory results).

It is now reliably estimated that at least 12% of scientific research is fraudulent.

THE FAILURE OF the modern medical 'scientist' to conduct his research in the traditional logical and analytical scientific way is perhaps best illustrated by the dependence of so many researchers (both those subsidised by the drug industry and those working for their own personal or professional satisfaction) on animal experiments-despite the fact that animal experiments are now known to be of no practical value.

Time and time again medical experts who have looked critically at animal experiments have concluded that such experiments are far worse than useless.

A leading toxicologist has shown that a standard cancer test used on rats gives results which can be applied accurately to human beings just 38% of the time. Put another way that means that 62% of the time the results animal experiments obtain are wrong. Tossing a coin would at least give a 50% chance of success-and that would, therefore, be a considerable improvement on the majority of medical experiments performed these days.

THE SAD TRUTH is that the modern clinician does not put his treatments to the test and does not want to put his treatments to the test. Indeed, if it is suggested that he expose his treatment methods to a true, scientific analysis he will throw up his hands in horror, arguing that it would be unethical to test his treatments for that might deprive his patients of help. He will argue that his treatments do not need to be tested because he knows that they work. Today's medical training is based upon pronouncement and opinion rather than on investigation and scientific experience. In medical schools students are bombarded, with information but denied the time or the opportunity to question the ex cathedra statements which are made from an archaic medical culture. The drugs and tools which are used may be devised with the aid of scientific techniques but the way in which they are used is certainly not scientific.

If medicine was a science, then when a patient visited a doctor complaining of a symptom he would be given the best, proven treatment, a treatment that was quite specific for the disease. Treatments for specific symptoms would be predictable and diagnostic skills would, because they would be based on scientific techniques, be reliable within certain acknowledged limits. But that is not what happens at all. In some areas of medicine specialists operate in a way that would be considered a variety of pseudoscience if the practitioners did not happen to have qualifications recognised by the medical establishment. Consider, for example, the practices of psychiatry, psychosurgery and psychoanalysis, widely accepted medical specialities where doctors clearly still make decisions about treatments according to their personal beliefs, instincts and hunches rather than according to any scientific principles.

Psychiatrists cannot even agree on which collections of symptoms constitute mental disorders. It was only in 1980 in the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. In 1985 at a meeting of 7,000 psychiatrists in Phoenix, USA, three out of four main speakers said that schizophrenia did not exist. Kleptomania, pyromania, gambling and transvestism are not recognised mental disorders but there is a condition called hypoactive sexual desire disorder (defined as persistently or recurrently deficient or absent sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity-the judgement of deficiency or absence is made by the clinician). Where is the logic in any of this? Psychiatrists can offer no scientific evidence to support their decisions to accept some categories of mental illness while rejecting others.

We are led to believe that psychiatry is a modern-day science but in reality it is still a black art, based on rumour, suspicion and gossip rather than anything remotely resembling science.

Two-thirds of the people who commit suicide will have visited their GP within a month of killing themselves and half of these will have consulted their GP within a week of their death. Surely there must be something wrong with mental care when most of the people who kill themselves do so shortly after seeking professional help?

The cruellest irony is undoubtedly the fact that many of those who kill themselves do so with pills their doctors have prescribed.

Both general practitioners and psychiatrists have wildly and irresponsibly prescribed tranquillisers and sleeping tablets for millions of patients and have produced an army of addicts around the world. The way in which untold millions of people worldwide became hooked on the benzodiazepine tranquillisers is an excellent example of the way that the medical profession and the regulatory authorities allow themselves to be dictated to by the powerful international drug companies. Time and time again warnings were ignored or suppressed as the drug companies, which were making vast profits from these drugs, managed to persuade doctors that the hazards associated with the products had been exaggerated.

The first benzodiazepine was launched on the American market in early 1960 and the problems associated with the drugs first started to appear shortly afterwards. In 1961 a paper was published in the journal Psychophannacologia which described how patients who had been taking a benzodiazepine suffered from withdrawal symptoms when the drug was stopped. By 1967 there were enough worries about the drugs in America for a recommendation to be made that the drugs be scheduled under drug abuse laws. At a symposium I helped organise for the British Clinical Journal in 1973 the hazards associated with the benzodiazepines were described with quiet precision. By the mid 1970s the problems associated with the benzodiazepines were being widely discussed in public but doctors were still prescribing the drugs in massive quantities and the companies making them were as enthusiastic as ever. The drugs were given to students going to college for the first time and for people who found their work or home life worrying or demanding. Ironically, thousands of doctors started taking the drugs too to help them cope with the rush of patients wanting new prescriptions. The benzodiazepines became an essential part of life for millions of people, a universal panacea.

The benzodiazepines should have been controlled in the early 1970s at the latest. There was plenty of evidence available then to persuade the authorities to warn doctors of th