Can Hippocrates’ medicine still be taken seriously today? Maybe in some places, yes, but you have to be stupid to let yourself be treated by a doctor who is guided only by his writings.
The doctor Ignaz Semmelweis was considered crazy by his colleagues in the 19th century because he proposed a simple hand disinfection procedure as a solution to reduce the mortality rate of newborn babies. In the end, he was found right, but after years and years and after being driven crazy.
Mercury was a “fashionable” treatment for decades in the psichological wards. Today, it is unanimously accepted that what actually drove their patients crazy was the treatment, and that the treatment itself killed tem.
During the interwar period, some idiots had invented all kinds of “treatments” based on radium. Needless to say, the only tangible effect was the alarming increase in the number of cancers of all kinds, until the aberration was banned (in the 1940s).
Shouldn't we have already talked about Thalidomide. It solved the nausea of pregnant women, oh my, it took them by the hand! But babies also came out of their bodies without arms and legs. It took five years (1957-1962) for it to be withdrawn from the market.
Diethylstilbestrol was prescribed to pregnant women for over 30 years, starting in 1940, until doctors finally understood (in 1971), that girls born to mothers who had taken this substance during pregnancy developed vaginal cancer at a young age, at the age of 20.
Portuguese doctor Antonio Moniz won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949 for inventing the lobotomy procedure. Were you nervous, were you looking at someone in the eye? Pac pac, your brain would be cut and you would calm down. Absolutely! Yes, the Nobel Prize was given for something like that. And not in 1700, but in 1949, that is, relatively recently.
We have enough academics who were children at that time. One of JFK's sisters was miserable for life because her idiot father "believed in science" and had her brain cut. Observing certain female political figures today such as Kaja Kallas, Annalena Baerbock or Ursula Von Der Leyen, you realize that Mr. Kennedy Sr. was an idiot: he should have made his daughter a politician, not lobotomize her.
But have you heard of Vioxx? Well, if you are not a doctor, you certainly have not heard of it. Vioxx was a drug developed by the giant Merck that took bone pain (arthritis) by the hand. Phew! Pac pac, no more pain. Unfortunately, in 2004 - so during our lifetimes - it had to be withdrawn from the market, and Merck was fined about 7-8 billion USD (anyway, well BELOW the profit brought by this miracle drug) because it did not increase the risk of myocardial infarction and/or stroke "only" about 4 times... The number of deaths is unknown, the number of patients with a history of infarction/stroke after taking Vioxx is over 60,000.
On the medical front, the largest single fine in history, 2.3 billion USD, was paid by Pfizer in 2009 for falsely promoting the drug Bextra, which had effects similar to Merck's Vioxx.
Yes, the same Pfizer with the magic serum thing...
And there are many more such cases that show that medicine, like any science, is in constant evolution, it is not a "theology", a divine word revealed once and for all: today you may happen to be dealing with who knows what miracle drug, tomorrow you find out that it has been withdrawn from the market or restricted.
Just think of the banal antibiotics, which today can no longer be bought by anyone, anytime, at the pharmacy, because it has been observed that over time, taken by mouth, they stimulate the resistance of pathogens.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento