Doctor Skeptic: Lessons from history

1. The stress of modern life

2. Evidence-based blood letting

3. Railway spine

4. Repetitive strain injury

5. Bone marrow transplant for breast cancer

6. The Vioxx saga

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.

Pages

Lessons from history