A comment on the previous post in this series — thanks, Vesna! — led me to a horrifying story about what happened to someone whose doctor prescribed statins (an expensive and nearly worthless class of drugs) because his cholesterol numbers were bad. (My friend and collaborator Norman Temple has written about the true value of statins.) The doctor did not warn him of the dangers, which were great. When his troubles began, he should have simply stopped the drug. What actually happened was that his doctor prescribed another dangerous drug. And his troubles got worse. Shades of Jane Brody!
I know a similar story. The elderly mother of a friend of mine was taken to the emergency room of a hospital because she had some sort of attack. It was the third such attack in a year. Her children were concerned. She was not of sound mind. Heroic measures to help her? Or a peaceful death? They chose a peaceful death. She was moved to a hospice. By mistake, her six prescriptions failed to be transferred. A clerical error. So she wasn’t able to take her usual drugs. She soon got better! Within a week or two she returned home. The drugs her doctor had prescribed had been killing her. Nobody had noticed.
First do no harm is a scary motto because it shows that those who take it seriously — supposedly the entire medical profession — aren’t thinking clearly, as I’ve heard Robin Hanson point out. It’s like English teachers having a motto with a word spelled wrong. And the consequences of doctors not thinking clearly — not doing something as obvious as stopping dangerous drugs when the patient gets worse — can be terrible. My suggested replacement motto: Learn something from everyone who comes to you for help.
This is closely related to self-experimentation, of course, which is all about figuring out for oneself what effect something has. I got a lot more interested in self-experimentation when it showed me that an acne drug I’d been prescribed was worthless.
My wife’s grandmother was driven to the brink of suicide by what felt like powerful electric shocks at her left cheekbone, and by the high doses of tegretol her doctor prescribed for it that left her too dizzy to walk. After many months I finally persuaded her to visit a specialist in another city, who in a simple outpatient procedure inserted a spacer between two crossed nerves, completely eliminating the problem.
Her husband went from a vigorous, active life to a passive little old man in only a few months from radiation treatments to his prostate. It made him dizzy and he fell from a loading dock, and his broken hip was not detected for six months.
When my own father had his pelvis crushed, recently, under a backhoe, the hospital staff decided on their own say-so to stop giving him his bipolar meds, cold turkey, and great risk to him.
My sister-in-law presented, some years back, with extreme abdominal pain, and was sent home without being tested for ectopic pregnancy, and nearly died.
I could go on.
We learned only recently that in treatment of myriad drowning victims in recent decades, their brains deprived of oxygen were undamaged until attending physicians applied oxygen, provoking massive cell death.
Medical malpractice has been blamed for 75,000 deaths/year in the U.S., but I suspect that number is a lower bound.
Good thing we have “tort reform” to protect the medical profession from lawsuits!
Giving pure oxygen is also what blinded tons of premature infants until recently. It was simply assumed, without testing, that more oxygen was better, and it was many years before it occurred to someone that the oxygen might be CAUSING the blindness.
Similarly, people assume that eating fat makes you fat. It just makes SENSE, doesn’t it? Incredibly, the testing HAS been done and most people still don’t believe it.
Where’s part 2?
Part 2 = previous post in this series
I think that between ‘Self Experimentation’ and ‘self-reported exerience’ lies a continuum of rigour but that both are valuable. As well as exposing side-effects the pharmas would rather gloss over, I believe these case studies, driven by the aggregation medium of the internet, are starting to reveal the extent to which diet can obviate the need for some drugs, but that the evidence is being undervalued by the research cummunity – I argue this in more detail here:
Are we Underrating the Anecdotal
– would love to get your views.
Methuselah
Pay Now Live Later