Product Description

LE/RISE AND FALL OF MODERN MEDICINE

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #438484 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-03
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.80" h x 1.46" w x 5.08" l, .98 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 501 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"Much current medical advice is quackery," cautions Le Fanu in this remarkably engrossing scholarly study of medical progressAand the recent lack thereofAin the 20th century. Le Fanu (a medical columnist for London's Daily and Sunday Telegraph) contemplates what he sees as the unhappy situation of contemporary health care. The decades from the 1940s to the 1980s saw some of the most critically important advances Western medicine has seen, from penicillin to the heart pump that made open-heart surgery possible. Yet doctors are disillusioned, and patients are turning in droves to alternative forms of medicine. How has this dilemma come about? Le Fanu first details the astonishing breakthroughs of the earlier part of the 20th century (he describes, for instance, the progress made by the first patient ever administered penicillin). But, more controversially, he argues that since the 1980s medical progress has been crippled by two developments, which he terms "Social Theory" and "New Genetics," respectively: according to the author, misguided epidemiologists promote a lifestyle changes (low-cholesterol diet, etc.) as a means of preventing heart disease; and geneticists have misled us into thinking that their research breakthroughs can eliminate genetic diseases. Both cases have been overstated, Le Fanu contends, drawing on a wealth of scientific data to attempt to show that dietary changes have done little to prevent heart disease and that genetic experiments, despite "millions of hours of research," have had "scarcely detectable" practical results. He concludes with a plea to return to the traditional in the practice of medicineAthe relationship between doctor and patientAand to a renewal of faith in the diagnostic skill and judgment of one's personal physician. B&w photos. Agent, Caroline Dawnay. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
English physician and Daily Telegraph columnist Le Fanu writes a thoughtful history of the only 20th-century revolution that turned out brilliantly.During the century before 1940, people grew healthier and lived longer through improved hygiene, housing, and nutrition. Once they got sick, however, doctors weren't that much help: except for a few treatments (such as thyroid hormone, insulin, and vitamins) a patient got better pretty much on his own--or he didn't. WWII marked the beginning of a torrent of miraculous advances. To label these miracles is no hype. Dreadfully sick people received penicillin, cortisone, or lithium--and suddenly they weren't sick. Every single child who contracted leukemia in 1950 died; today almost all live. Victims of congenital heart disease or kidney failure lived as pitiful invalids if they lived at all; now they live normally. This was a wonderful period full of heroes, and Le Fanu describes it superbly in the first half of his story. Then he grows sober, thoughtful, and pessimistic. Medicine's golden age peaked in the 1960s, he writes. Important discoveries trailed off after 1970, introduction of genuinely new drugs dropped sharply, and two disturbing trends appeared. He calls one the Social Theory. Misled by triumphs of the golden age (proof that smoking causes cancer and treating hypertension prevents strokes), doctors embraced a utopian theory of prevention with enthusiasm unaccompanied by proof. Readers will be jolted by the author's claim that diet, lifestyle, and pollution contribute only marginally to ill health. Obsessive efforts to fine-tune our diet and environment (medical correctness) have, in Le Fanu's view, produced little beside anxiety. The author also takes a dim view of the New Genetics: science's fascination with DNA, genetic engineering, and genetic therapy. He points out that 20 years of expensive research, media obsession, and wildly optimistic claims have produced only minor benefits to patients. Le Fanu's doubts about prevention and genetic engineering place him in the minority among laymen as well as doctors, but he makes a convincing case in this readable and informative account. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
Stand by for a brilliant read ... will send your heart palpitating and your blood pressure rising from the start' DAILY MAIL 'Has the great knack of making even the most complex technical developments exciting and intelligible' OBSERVER 'A major achievement' THE TABLET 'Epic and entertaining.' THE LANCET 'Dr Le Fanu writes with clarity and authority... you'll nowhere find a better crafted and more expert account of how modern medicine helps ensure that the great jaority of us live to a ripe old age...erudite and absorbing.' Professor Roy Porter, OBSERVER 'The struggles, disappointments and fatal errors of these early pioneers are described with zest, authority and a special brand of wry humour...it is an endlessly fascinating read.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Well written, a fascinating and informative book, which should be read by anyone with an interest in contemporary medicine.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'A masterly history of these revolutionary years.' THE TIMES 'The ambition of this, the first historical account of this period, is admirably justified throughout. Le Fanu communicates complex material in a clear and straightforward fashion while taking care, wearing his journalistic cap atop his white coat, never to let the abundant scientific facts stand in the way of what is a rattlingly good story.' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY 'A fascinating overview.' DAILY EXPRESS 'This well-written, extremely readable, and thought-provoking book deserves to be widely read, especially by those in the establishment who would say he is wrong.' BRITISH JOURNAL OF GENERAL PRACTICE 'This book is well worth reading just for the brilliant pen portraits of Le Fanu's 12 definitive moments of medical advance...the author has a way of encapsulation that is full of insights and unusual detail.' SPECTATOR 'The tales are well told, and should be read by all juniors to give them some feeling of the excitement felt by their grandparents as major diseases that had seemed totally untreatable come under control.' JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIEETY OF MEDICINE 'Take this book on holiday--it's a gripping story full of drama and suspense, heroes and villains and, despite charting dark periods when evil triumphed over virtue, has an optimistic message at the end. James Le Fanu has an enviable talent for making medical history fascinating and has produced a story about medicine's rise and fall since the Second World War that will surprise, intrigue and shock you. He claims that in a period of intense innovation between 1940 and 1970 medicine conquered all the major chronic diseases affecting the very young and the very old. With only the much rarer conditions that effect very small numbers of the population in middle life left to address, the revolution dramatically slowed down and innovation almost came to a halt. Medicine looked subsequently for new frontiers but went up blind alleys, "The New Genetics" and "The Social Theory" of disease. Neither of these new "paradigms" have produced the same level of innovation and are responsible in part for bringing medicine into disrepute. Despite enormous levels of funding, understanding the "code of life" has not produced any major therapeutic pay-offs, because genetically caused diseases--with only a few exceptions--are rare; genetic engineering and screening proved largely fruitless and genetic therapy made little impact. Theories that social behaviour causes disease, however, has not just been shown to be invalid but has also caused an epidemic itself of health hysteria amongst the well and resulted in blaming the sick for contracting their disease. He regards social theories such as the false idea that high- fat diets cause heart attacks as intellectual scandals that should be apologised for. Perhaps his most controversial suggestion is that all university epidemiological departments should be closed down in order to prevent any further misinformation from being produced. But Fanu offers criticism of as well as praise for clinical practitioners, and scientists too. He suggests that doctors need to start listening to patients again and interpreting histories instead of ordering barrages of tests if they want medicine to regain respect. And clinical science needs to start trying to discover the biological transmissible agents of the diseases of middle-life if it is to awaken to a new dawn of innovation in the future.' - Dorothy Porter, Amazon.co.uk