Doctor Skeptic: Book & web reviews

Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo, Ian Harris (2016)

Between the Lines, Marya Zilberberg (2012)

Effectiveness and Efficiency, Archibald Cochrane (1972)

How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life, Robert and Edward Skidelsky (2012)

The Medicalization of Society, Peter Conrad (2007)

Stabbed in the Back, Nortin Hadler (2009)

Overtreated: why too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer, Shannon Brownlee (2009)

Bad Pharma: how drug companies are misleading doctors and harming patients, Ben Goldacre (2012)

Overdiagnosed: making people sick in the pursuit of health, H Gilbert Welch (2011)

Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health, Ivan Illich (1975)

Rethinking Aging: Growing Old and Living Well in an Overtreated Society, Nortin Hadler (2011)

Meaning, Medicine and the Placebo Effect, Daniel Moerman (2002)

The Wisdom of the Body, Walter Cannon (1939)

Skeptical Medicine (website)

The Great Cholesterol Myth, Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra (2012)

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (2011)

The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis? Thomas McKeown (1979)

The Doctor's Guide to Critical Appraisal, Narinder and Gurpal Gossall (2012)

Testing Treatments, I Evans, H Thornton, I Chalmers and P Glasziou (2011)

Why be skeptical about medicine?

Doctors and skeptics are often critical of alternative medicine and other non-medical healing practices because they are not well supported by scientific evidence. This is appropriate.
What is inappropriate is the acceptance of medical practices (established and new) without a requirement for the same level of scientific support.
The evidence supporting many medical practices is less than many people suppose, and similarly, the harms from medicine are often under-appreciated.
We need to ask the same question of medicine that we would ask the alternative practitioner: what is the evidence? But we need skills to be able to critically appraise that evidence, because unlike (say) homeopathy, medical evidence is based on science. This is part of the problem because for many, being scientifically based is reason enough for a treatment to be accepted as true; assuming that a medical treatment works is our default position. This, and the other biases that creep into medical science on so many levels, at least partly due to our keenness to see it work, are the reasons for looking at medicine with a skeptical eye.

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Book & web reviews