The FBI arrested 5 members of a New York crime family for their part in a 1978 airplane heist.
Down near the end of the story it mentioned the theft of $1.2 million in gold salts from a FedEx driver. I had no idea what gold salts are – so…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_salts
Gold salts (and they’re not technically salts) were once all the rage for treating rheumatoid arthritis but sound pretty close to medical quackery. The salts cause skin discoloration and kidney damage and all sorts of bad things.
Here is a double blind study done in the 1970s involving 27 (!) patients over two (!) years that seems to show the disease slowed in several (!) of the treated patients.
http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=688227
An important part of the double blind study is the persons involved in the test don’t know which individuals are in the control group and which are getting the medication. If I want to justify the expense of the study and seek more funding for a longer term study, the incentives are on the side to shade the data. It’s pretty simple to say a person has a strength of 4 instead of a 3 if that’s what you want the outcome to be.
One of the reasons I distrust Medical Science is the lack of transparency in medical research. Peer reviewed science is not written for nor intended to be read by the masses. This article is behind a subscription firewall. Part of that is revenue related, but a lot of the motivation is to keep away skeptics.
While it is out of date, the book “Confessions of a Medical Heretic” by Robert Mendelsohn MD forms a lot of my opinions about how medicine has gone off track. Coming from a medical family, this can be a problem.
The basic theme is that doctors have set themselves up as a religion with themselves as the priests – the keepers of the secret knowledge too dangerous to let the masses understand – analogous to the days when Catholic priests read the Bible for you and kept services in Latin.
This dynamic creates the expectation that doctors are infallible, when in many cases, they have no idea – give the patient a placebo (or worse) and hope the body cures itself or the patient loses interest and goes away or dies quietly from unknown causes. The reality is genetics is what plays a large role in most diseases.
The medical system has two main solutions to any problem – medications or surgery. People have the expectations that doctors will “do something” and if they don’t the medical system failed you. Add in government paying the bills and the system consumes 18% of the county’s GDP.
Medications and surgery – that’s a choice? What about preventive medicine? Oh, that’s right – we don’t incentivize that. People put Doctors on a pedestal, I know I do – it is the recognition of completion of extremely difficult studies and practical internships. As Art says, Doctors are not only fallible, they are often forced to be that way by the system. Figures never lie and liars never figure when it comes to medical studies and don’t forget the money.
I would like to skip the Gold Salts and go for the original Coke that actually had cocaine in it 🙂 If I am going to die of a disease, why not be smiling?
The book also makes the point (and Dr Dean Edell did as well) that medical school generally require no training in nutrition. Over dinner with my two doctor relatives, I brought up the topic of pellegra and how the disease had been epidemic in the South 100 years ago, and wondered if any patients still show up with the problem.
Pellegra is caused by vitamin B3 deficiency – the federal government mandated that all wheat flour be fortified with Niacin. Niacin is mainly found in meat – my nephew is raising his children as vegetarian – part of bringing up the subject was to see if they realize the danger of raising children without eating meat if the parents are not substituting legumes for meat to get essential nutrients. When I started down the path of how people think they may be fooling themselves by buying “organic” “natural” products that contain unfortified flour, they could be harming their health. The adrenalin surge was palpable as if I just said to a Christian that Jesus might have been gay.
Oh, well…
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129137062