Voodoo. In Clare? Everywhere?

national | consumer issues | opinion/analysis Friday June 18, 2004 19:14 by Sean Crudden - IMPERO impero at iol dot ie Jenkinstown, Dundalk, Co Louth. 042 93 71310

Exploitation or Science?

Is the medical profession a semi-secret society which is besotted by rules and legalisms which is ripping the community off for big salaries and at the same time doing more to compromise our health than to improve it?

Some people hold out greater hope for alternative than for conventional medicine. Others (like The Irish Times in today’s editorial) would plump for regulation and restriction of the right to practice.

To me it seems that the current high profile cases of Dr Paschal Carmody and Mr William Porter are merely examples where the medical "guild" have picked on two unconventional practitioners making scapegoats of them gratuitously bolsterering up the impression that conventional medicine as it is practiced in 2004 AD is safe.

Are the results of conventional treatment of cancer anything to boast about? How many iatrogenic disorders have arisen in the treatment of the mentally ill in the past half century?

It seems to me that a coldly scientific ongoing assessment of outcomes in medicine in general would be as sobering for the medical profession and its ancillaries as it would be for the rest of us.

Thankfully most general practitioners and many specialists take with a pinch of salt the latest fashion in medicine or the latest "wonder" drug and follow a careful and common sense approach. There are inducements for them to go a different way, as even a vague recollection of the recent Prime-Time program on RTE 1 graphically illustrates for us, in the case of anti-depressant prescription.