Physician, heal thyself - Jerome Burne's response to the attack on alternative m

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Physician, heal thyself - Jerome Burne's excellent response

to the attack on alternative medicine

Wed, 24 May 2006 21:56:40 +0100

 

Emma Holister emma

May 24, 2006 6:44 AM

Physician, heal thyself - Jerome Burne's response to the

attack on alternative medicine

 

 

With all the mails going round today on this fight I don't know if

everyone has seen this excellent response by Jerome Burne.

I've attached another couple of related cartoons (apologies to those

who may have seen them already).

 

Emma xxx

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-2194306,00.html

 

Physician, heal thyself

By Jerome Burne

PROFESSOR Michael Baum, who laid into alternative medicine yesterday,

is right to be concerned about wasting scarce NHS funds on " unproven

or disproved " treatments. But he has the wrong target in his sights.

If he wants to root out hype dressed up as science, he would do far

better to focus on conventional drugs.

 

Far too many prescription drugs are marginally effective and carry

risks out of proportion to the conditions they are designed to treat.

Drug side- effects kill around 10,000 people a year in the UK — three

times the number killed on the roads — and cost the NHS more than £4

billion. Patients are being perfectly rational in seeking alternatives

and it is simply outdated medical arrogance to condemn them for it.

 

*

 

Only last week it emerged that one of the antidepressant SSRI drugs

increased the risk of young adults committing suicide — a possibility

that the companies had always strenuously denied even though in 2003

doctors had been advised not to give these drugs to anyone under 18

because of a suicide link. The evidence for that official ruling dated

to 1996 but had never been published. During the intervening years

British doctors were prescribing more SSRIs to children than any other

country in Europe and yet there was no proper evidence base for this

at all. Treating those children by changing their diet or with

acupuncture seems sane by comparison.

 

The scandal surrounding the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx — withdrawn

from the market in 2004 because it doubled the risk of developing

heart disease — is another example of a heavily hyped drug prescribed

to millions for whom it was not appropriate. Evidence that there was a

danger was once again downplayed or ignored; one expert estimate puts

the number of Americans killed or harmed by a drug they took to ease

aching joints at 140,000.

 

Professor Baum demonstrates no understanding of why people are

searching for alternatives to his remedies. In any other business,

blaming your customers for deserting you would be regarded as

self-defeating. If he's serious about safety and cutting costs, he

could start by demanding that drug disasters are followed by an

official inquiry and that testing of promising non-drug therapies is

properly funded.

 

Jerome Burne is author of the forthcoming book Food is Better Medicine

than Drugs

 

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