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What Hacker News says
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569979/
That's a book review of a readable book that makes the case quite compellingly.
> I recently read George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma and experienced an unexpected sense of insult on behalf of my profession. In this celebrated play, Shaw serially indicts various kinds of late 19th century doctor—the hypocrite, the self publicist, and (most dangerous of all) the blinkered zealot. While I admired the plot construction, I suspected that Shaw had created such character extremes for comic effect. However, having read David Wootton's Bad Medicine, I am now no longer insulted and, on behalf of my profession, feel somewhat grateful to Shaw for his restraint. For, as Wootton painstakingly argues in this short but undoubtedly explosive new book, the history of medicine has been nothing less than a failure and doctors have been the culprits.
- > Western medicine until after 1880 had rejected the benefits of cleanliness - with surgeons taught to operate covered in filth.
If anyone's interested in a good read on this I'd recommend
"Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates" by David Wootton
https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Medicine-Doctors-Doing-Hippocrate...
It's pretty eye-opening.
- There's also a book called Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates from Oxford University Press.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bad-medicine-9780199...
It's not by the same author, but adds a nice historical perspective. On a long scale, medicine is mostly about harming your patient with treatements that are worse than nothing.
- According to the fascinating book "Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Medicine-Doctors-Doing-Hippocrat...) Doctors were doing more harm than good right up until the 1950s and some even after that due to receiving training earlier.
Basically this changed with the germ model and penicillin (which was discovered by accident and then used by Fleming to create entirely ineffective but very profitable vaccines until one of his students, against his wishes, purified it and put it to actual use as an antibiotic).
There's some disturbing anecdotes in there, such as doctors not bothering to wash their hands while delivering babies, even after they knew it could lead to deaths, because their patients were too poor to pay for the time it would take.
Even today, it is evidence based medicine which is the new big thing. Actually testing out what works in a scientific manner with double-blind test and rigorous statistics rather than fumble through on gut feelings dressed up as science or experience.
I take comfort in the fact that while out profession is still at the quack stage, that there is something at it's core. At least we're not psychotherapists or homeopaths, though sometimes were too close for comfort.
