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The Trouble with Medicine

© Dr. David L. Phillips

Medicine is in trouble. Its costs are burgeoning; its effectiveness lessening. It has become downright dangerous to follow its advice. It seems to have lost its way and has no sense of direction. The expectations of its consumers are increasing and, while attempting to react to those hopes, its treatments are becoming more desperate. One only needs to look at the HRT debacle, the Vioxx scandal or the farce that is cholesterol medication to understand all this. I'm sure that future generations will look with dismay at the way medicine is practiced today. Our ancestors will look upon the medical practices of the last few decades as we do the blood-letting in prior centuries.

Purely and simply, medicine today has one aim: profit, enormous profit. And the goal seems to be to make it as fast as possible. I know this sounds harsh and indeed it is a sweeping generalization. But what I speak of here is a profession that has all but lost its social conscience and forgotten its purpose.

Modern medicine, practicing Newtonian reductionism as it does so single-mindedly, has almost reached a point of being worse than the diseases which it purports to treat. It is well publicized that the third leading cause of death today, right behind cancer and heart disease, is mistakes that happen in hospitals. If statistics were kept and could be analyzed concerning adverse drug and surgical reactions that occur outside hospitals as well as those harmful events stemming from doctor's offices and various clinics, medicine as a whole could very well be the number one cause of death today. Sad, but true.

Ultimately, the real problem with medicine today is that it's all about selling drugs. There seems no other way to describe it. The pharmaceutical industry is a mega-billion dollar business with a firmly entrenched hold over both doctors and hospitals. Drugs are the 'raison d'etre' of medicine and all it stands for. Without a prescription pad, and a local pharmacy, today's doctors are professionally impotent.

One huge problem with medicine is drug advertising. Recently, drug ads have come under fire, but so far only from those researchers, politicians, teachers and parents with an objective conscience. Drug advertising appears in all manner of print and visual media today, and its influence is both enormously lucrative and frighteningly devious. It has been indisputably observed that the most prescribed drugs are also those most advertised. People demand that their doctors give them the pills that will offer them the lifestyle they've seen on a TV ad. Obscene pharmaceutical profits fund medical journals, university chairs, and much research. Altruistic to be sure, however, this infusion of cash also results in compromise and influence. This influence is turning out to be quite unhealthy for you.

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