The Myth of Evidence Based Science
I’m giving a talk next week to the European Parliament MPs (like Congressmen and Women). I’ve been invited to lay into the Big Pharma society model and explain how it is enslaving whole countries economically—like in the USA, the healthcare bill is 14% of the gross national product (GNP); in Britain it’s 7% and so on.
Pharmaceutical companies have a clear agenda (I almost wrote “hidden” agenda, but it’s so blatantly obvious!) for trapping and controlling governments into having to allocate huge sums for the medical care of its citizens which goes into their coffers.
It is based on two very vicious traps:
- No-one shall get well, if we can stop it. We want them to remain UN-cured and permanently in medical care.
- As many citizens as possible will be made ill, by preventing access to natural and effective health products.
Governments fall for it, so consistently, it’s OBVIOUS that politicians are getting payoffs and back-handers.
This is going to be a very hard-hitting talk. I’ll make the video available to you later.
In the meantime, I thought I would use some of the shocking data I found that’s readily available to any honest journalist (sounds like an oxymoron!). Trouble is, the media are very heavily censored in the USA. People are not allowed the truth.
Let me share a few incriminating facts with you about the myth of what is (laughably) called “evidence-based medicine” or EBM. It’s a new tool, a silly boast, whatever you want to call it, that orthodox doctors use to attack and berate holistically inclined practitioners.
According to this myth, mainstream doctors are guided by pure scientific wisdom; their story is a proven case; science backs up everything they say and do; they work from real evidence. Whereas holistic practitioners, so the myth goes, have no science behind their crackpot theories; or they use “junk science” at best.
So what’s the truth?
They are condemned from their own published journals!
According to the journal BMJ Clinical Evidence,* which describes itself as “the international source of the best available evidence for effective health care,” the myth is very sorry indeed.
The journal’s distinguished team of advisors set out in 2007 to answer a simple question: “What proportion of commonly used treatments are supported by good evidence…?”
Around 2500 treatments were reviewed. The results are either hilarious or sickening, depending on your view!
Results:
- Only 13 percent of current treatments have been found definitely beneficial (less than one seventh of medicine is what it’s cracked up to be!)
- 23 percent are rated as likely to be beneficial
- 8 percent can be classified as a trade off between benefits and harms
- 6 percent as clearly unlikely to be beneficial; 4 percent are likely to be ineffective or harmful
- A whopping 46 percent of all current medical treatments are honestly rated as being of unknown effectiveness
So 62% of medicine, as practiced today, you wouldn’t even want!
What you get from your doctor is really like the outcome of a lottery: it could be worthless, kill you, or do the job. Nobody knows… spin the dice. Hey! That’s my a** on the line. That’s not what you want if you seek medical assistance, is it?
Hypocrisy and Double-Standards
Given that very few of conventional medicine’s standard treatments have been demonstrated to have any clear benefit and conversely, that a substantial proportion have been shown to be potentially harmful, it is somewhat ironic to see the term ‘evidence-based medicine’ used as a war cry by those who are virulently opposed to complementary and alternative medicines.
But not all orthodox medical doctors are fascist fools (I keep making this point).
Erich Loewy, MD, a bioethicist and professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis (I wish I’d met with him when I lived in Davis) writes:
- “To me, as a bioethicist and…a physician who has observed the evolution of EBM, I am impressed with the danger to physicians, patients, the educative process, and, ultimately, to the behavior it encourages. Mindless reliance on EBM does exactly what we do not want our students to do: convert what is a suffering human being, with a unique personal life-history, into a specimen of pathophysiology or a heart murmur”. (Loewy, 2007)
Dr. Loewy points out that ‘evidence-based medicine’, as practiced in large institutions, can have the highly undesirable effect of stifling thought and constraining good diagnostic and clinical judgment.
Doctors who ‘think outside the box’ and who feel that a particular patient is uniquely suited for a treatment option that is currently not listed as standard ‘evidence-based medicine’, risk being disciplined by their institution. “EBM is basically anti-intellectual,”1 Loewy writes.
Furthermore, says Loewy, ‘evidence-based medicine’ protocols must, like drugs or food, have an expiration date after which they have to be reexamined in far more than a perfunctory way to make sure they are still legitimate.1
Evidence-based medicine, for all its advantages in caring for the “usual case of “X,” tends to suppress our curiosity and imagination or at least tends to channel our curiosity and shape our imagination within narrow limits and, therefore, gets in the way of the sort of speculation necessary for scientific progress.2
Refusing to publish a paper, by the way, may be a highly effective form of censorship. We badly need a “Journal of Negative Results” devoted to experiments that proved a reasonable hypothesis to be untrue, he says.
I think that’s a great idea.
- “A herniorrhaphy patient can go home in 1 or 2 days” — is that really true? It is probably true if the patient lives in a middle-class suburb with a spouse and adequate sanitation. But is it true for a 55-year-old man who lives in a rat-infested “project” building on the fifth floor and without a functioning elevator?”
3
We are a strange society, says Loewy: On the one hand we have made autonomy into the supreme virtue; on the other we have created instruments which force others (physicians) to act in ways they find suboptimal.
One writer, compared the dilemma of doctors who don’t want to knuckle under the EBM hyposcrisy to the moral dilemma of Germans under the Nazis, who may not have wanted to harm the Jews. But they were forced to conform.
A “system”—a political, economic, or cultural system—insinuates itself between myself and the other. If the other is excluded, it is the system that is doing the excluding, a system in which I participate because I must survive and against which I do not rebel because it cannot be changed…I start to view horror and my implication in it as normalcy.4
Let Me Finish With A Telling Joke
The British Medical Journal has run a few scientific jokes over the years. This one is a beauty. They published a tongue-in-cheek article looking into what scientific papers, if any, had been published to provide evidence that parachutes were effective for those who were “gravitationally challenged”!
The findings were: “The authors were unable to identify any randomized controlled trials of parachute intervention for gravitational challenge. They concluded that the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by randomized controlled trials.”
The authors of this report suggest that everyone might benefit if the most radical proponents of evidence-based medicine organized and participated in a double blind randomized, placebo-controlled crossover trial of the parachute.”5
I’d like to support such a trial!
References
* An offshoot of the BMJ: the British Medical Journal.
1. [Erich Loewy MD, Medscape General Medicine. 2007;9(3):30]
2. [Loewy EH. Curiosity, imagination, compassion, science and ethics: do curiosity and imagination serve a central function? Health Care Anal. 1998;6:286-294]
3. [Erich Loewy MD, Medscape General Medicine. 2007;9(3):30]
4. [Barnett V. Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust. Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers; 1999:169.]
5. [Ref: Smith GCS, Pell JP. Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomized controlled trials. BMJ. 2003;327:1459-1461
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