Deadly Medicine: Why Tens of Thousands of Heart Patients Died in America's Worst Drug Disaster Review

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(More customer reviews)Ralph Moss wrote an excellent review of this book in the Spring 1997 edition of the Cancer Chronicles. I am writing only to put his review into context. There have been many books written describing the shortcomings of medicine, particularly those questioning claims of the efficacy of medical intervention. These include Robert Mendelsohn's Confessions of A Medical Heretic; Richard Taylor's Medicine out of Control; Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis; the New Medical Foundation's Dissent in Medicine; Samuel Epstein's The Politics of Cancer; Ralph Moss' Cancer Industry and Questioning Chemotherapy; Ulrich Abel's Chemotherapy of advanced epithelial cancer - a critical survey; What Doctors Don't Tell You's Cancer Handbook, What's Really Working; and Neville Hodgkinson's AIDS, the failure of scientific medicine. (I have also published two papers questioning the efficacy of surgical treatment of cancer in Medical Hypotheses.) These together support and explain the claim in the editorial in the British Medical Journal of October 1991 (Vol 303: 198-99) "Where is the wisdom...? The poverty of medical evidence" that "Only about 15% of medical interventions are supported by solid evidence... This is partly because only 1% of the articles in medical journals are scientifically sound". Thomas Moore's earlier (1989) book Heart Failure describes the poor record of treating heart problems with bypass surgery, balloon angioplasty and drugs to lower serum cholesterol. Moore's more recent book homes in on particular drugs such as those used to treat arrhythmia. With deaths from heart disease accounting for more than 40% of all deaths these two books on the inefficacy of treatments for heart problems fill an important gap. As a scientist I found the section explaining how "surrogate endpoints" are used instead of actual therapeutic benefits to test efficacy particularly useful. It explains why so many claims for the efficacy of chemotherapy are invalid. It is a pity that the book is now out of print.

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