Heroes Not Zombies

If we take a whole of life view, instead of a short term next few days view, things can look very different. David Healy tells the fascinating story of the patterns of Syphilis across on his blog.

There’s an advanced stage of syphilis known as “tertiary” syphilis, or GPI (“General Paralysis of the Insane”). It presents with psychiatric and neurological symptoms – dementia and paralyses.

Interestingly, this form of syphilis was not described in the Americas where the disease was found. But it became a significant problem back in Europe. Why was that? Even more curious was the fact that prostitutes in Europe rarely seemed to develop this advanced stage of the disease despite having a high incidence of syphilis itself. Yet their clients, the men who paid them, did tend to develop GPI. Only one group of prostitutes in Europe developed GPI – those in Vienna.

There’s a hidden element in this story, isn’t there?

It turns out that the hidden element was Mercury.

Mercury was the standard treatment for syphilis in Europe (“a night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury”). It wasn’t used in the “New World”. It wasn’t used by prostitutes, but it was by their wealthier clients. Only the prostitutes in Vienna were forced to take Mercury prophylactically by the authorities.

What a great cure, huh? I wonder how many other short term, apparently obvious “cures” or treatments lead to worse disease further down the line? How about this research into inflammatory diseases (which are increasing rapidly)

Increasing evidence suggests that the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us. As nature’s blanket, the potentially pathogenic and benign microorganisms associated with the dirt that once covered every aspect of our preindustrial day guaranteed a time-honored co-evolutionary process that established “normal” background levels and kept our bodies from overreacting to foreign bodies. This research suggests that reintroducing some of the organisms from the mud and water of our natural world would help avoid an overreaction of an otherwise healthy immune response that results in such chronic diseases as Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis and a host of allergic disorders.

I remember a few years back there was a Public Health campaign directed at young people who were offered illegal drugs – “Just say no” – was the campaign slogan. Turns out the bigger problem is prescription drugs….

According to the UN report referred to in this sensationalist heading women are more likely to be “abusing” prescription drugs than illegal ones. And the problem is getting worse and worse….

The rate of increase in prescribing is colossal. It simply isn’t sustainable.

The excellent David Healy, author of “Pharmageddon”, points out that in the 1960s it was unusual for a doctor to prescribe more than two drugs to the same patient. Now, 50 years on, ten to fifteen drugs for a patient is not uncommon. That’s truly astonishing.
David Healy has an interesting take on this today. He points out that there was a shift in focus and law in the 19th Century which resulted in doctors, rather than patients, becoming the prime “consumers” of drugs.

Doctors who for centuries had being trying to push quacks and hucksters out of the medical marketplace were being offered the means to conclusively do so. You would only be able to get the drugs that really worked from your doctor. But the bargain was Faustian. Few if any doctors seemed to spot that patients would no longer be the consumers of drugs. If by consumers we mean those who are the targets of pharmaceutical company marketing, then doctors were the new consumers. These new consumers moreover would consume by putting drugs into their patients’ mouths and so would consume without side effects. This was a win-win of which Mephistopheles would have been proud.

As he rightly says

Left to their own devices few of a doctor’s patients would ever take 10-15 over the counter drugs at the same time for indefinite periods no matter what the supposed benefits.

He quotes Pinel as saying about the Art of Medicine –

“It is an art of no little importance to administer medicines properly: but it is an art of much greater and more difficult acquisition to know when to suspend or altogether to omit them”.

That’s what I was taught, but it seems this principle has lost ground rapidly. Nowadays doctors don’t only prescribe to suppress almost every symptom a patient presents, they prescribe for the healthy to stop them becoming sick!

This is not sustainable. It has to stop.

…..doctors are going to have to come up with something extraordinary. They may even need to become a revolutionary class, partisans, who create a space that markets do not readily understand – a space where No is the operative word.

I don’t want to be completely negative here. Understand I’m not arguing for doctors to refuse to help patients. I’m arguing for doctors to rediscover the Art of Medicine, to become patients’ partners in health, helping them to flourish in their lives, during health, and during sickness. I’m arguing for a reality check, instead of reflex prescribing of substances that only dope, and dull, and mask.

Let’s learn how to be discerning and only prescribe as a contribution to the work of assisting a person’s natural self-healing.

The Life Force – the only known way to health.