The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine: Revised Edition Paperback – November 6, 2012 Author: M.D. James Le Fanu M.D. | Language: English | ISBN:
0465058957 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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About the Author
James Le Fanu, M.D., is a medical columnist for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph as well as a writer for the Times, the Spectator, and GQ.
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- Paperback: 608 pages
- Publisher: Basic Books; Revised edition (November 6, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0465058957
- ISBN-13: 978-0465058952
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #849,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Telegraph's medical columnist claims that medicine's golden age was from 1945 to 1980, due to the chance discovery of drugs, advances in clinical science and innovative technology. He believes that it is now exhausted, and laments that the vacuum is being filled by what he thinks are the dead ends of New Genetics, epidemiology and social medicine. It is untimely to write off genetics when the Human Genome Project offers such exciting possibilities.
He calls for more research into the causes of disease, and rightly rejects idealist explanations. Doctors used to think that peptic ulcers were due to `stress' or `personality', but in 1984, Barry Marshall, a young Australian doctor, identified a type of bacterium that triggered them. A seven-day course of antibiotics was the cure. The same organism caused two-thirds of stomach cancer cases. In 1986, Thomas Grayston discovered that the bacterium chlamydia caused heart disease. Perhaps as yet undiscovered bacteria cause arthritis, schizophrenia, leukaemia, MS, diabetes and ME.
He has a brilliant chapter on how the use of new drugs refuted Freudianism, as chlorpromazine effectively relieved schizophrenia's symptoms, lithium mania's, prozac depression's and valium anxiety's.
Le Fanu shows that the influential historian of medicine Thomas McKeown wrongly denied doctors the credit for tuberculosis's decline. Doctors' seclusion of TB patients in sanatoria dramatically reduced the infection's incidence.
He argues against social medicine, rejecting all social and economic explanations of illness. But lifestyle changes - losing weight, improving diet and exercising more - do prevent diabetes and promote health and well-being (British Medical Journal, 14 July 2001, page 63.)
He claims that medicine has run its course.
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