Right thinking doctors must get together
Things are changing slowly. On 22nd February, The Times of India had a report of the frustrations of 78 doctors in and around Pune. This is a good sign and an encouragement for people like me who have been fighting for this for four decades now. It was a coincidence that, on the same day, there was a report from London about how drug companies are fooling the medical world about the wrong drugs, to make money. The drug in question is the infamous statin. A few days ago, there was a report on the wrong nutrition advice given by the American science for more than 40 years. In 1968, I had warned the public about the dangers of fat-free diets and avoiding the best fat in the world—coconut oil. Now, they say coconut oil is a panacea for most human ills! All this makes me happy as I have been able to witness the truth coming out, slowly but steadily. I have written books, thousands of articles, in general interest magazines and scientific journals, and delivering hundreds of talks, since the 1960s, on the right approach to healthcare.
The problem is much more complicated than simply of a clear conscience. It was nearly 90 years ago that some rich people in America saw the potential of producing chemical compounds from naphtha to control human illnesses—a very dangerous idea, based on the wrong premise that the human body is like a machine built by putting organs together. They worked their way through the then US government to get the medical colleges there audited for the authenticity of this idea. This greedy conglomerate was funding about 47 of the nearly 250-odd medical schools then. They had their staff on the governing boards of those colleges. They had one of their own retired staff, Abraham Flexner (a retired school headmaster) as a one-man commission. He declared only those 47 to be authentic and scientific medical institutions and the rest as bogus! Thus was born the era of chemical drugs which rule the roost even to this day.
A recent study by Douglas C Wallace showed that all chemical reductionist molecules are rejected by the body and are sent to the liver for destruction while herbal drugs are recognised as self and used! Indian Ayurveda and many other systems have been in existence for times immemorial but were defamed by the infamous 1910 Flexner report.
The same is the story with other interventions. One glaring example will suffice. Coronary angioplasty is an effort which is not only a waste but could even lead to death of the patient! Except in rare cases of intractable chest pain and extreme reduction in heart’s function, there is no necessity for even coronary bypass surgery. Over-investigation and over-diagnosis are other ways of disease mongering. All in all, the hapless patient is in for expensive journey through our system.
The whole of Western medicine is flawed as the human body works, as a whole, in consonance with its environment; not as a machine. When we use chemicals as drugs, we make it still more difficult for the body to recover from any disease. This needs to be incorporated into the medical education field to control runaway economic disaster. Today, private medicine has become a corporate monstrosity. But we, doctors, are either unaware of this or do not want to know it, since the change might break our rice bowl!
Right thinking doctors must come together to debate all these areas and come to a consensus on how to tackle these complicated issues. We must remember that a doctor is basically trained to look after the health of the public. We do very little by way of preserving human health. We have become sickness managers.
“The FDA protects the big drug companies, and is subsequently rewarded, and using the government’s police powers, they attack those who threaten the big drug companies. People think that the FDA is protecting them. It isn’t. What the FDA is doing, and what the public thinks it is doing are as different as night and day.”— Dr Herbert Ley, former commissioner of the US FDA
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Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS.)
