Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O

by Christopher Wanjek

Book Overview

"Christopher Wanjek uses a take-no-prisoners approach in debunkingthe outrageous nonsense being heaped on a gullible public in thename of science and medicine. Wanjek writes with clarity, humor, and humanity, and simultaneously informs and entertains."
-Dr. Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine; monthlycolumnist,
Scientific American; author of Why People Believe WeirdThings

Prehistoric humans believed cedar ashes and incantations...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 047143499X
• ISBN13: 9780471434993
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

interesting, readable, funny

Some reviewers were a little skeptical about the author, but a quick search on google will show that he is indeed qualified to write about medicine. But about the book: I found this book to be written in a very readable and easy to understand way. Many times I chuckled outloud at the authors sarcasm. While most people know why homeopathic medicine is bunk, he goes onto explain why it is bunk. He also has an interesting chapter on diets and on milk. This book is full of interesting information, and i highly reccomend it to everyone who is interested in real medicine.

Readable survey of pseudoscientific ideas and practices

Actually some of the medicine debunked here is merely not effective beyond the placebo. Homeopathy is a case in point. Wanjek includes it because he believes that people relying on such medicines tend to deprive themselves of real medicine. This may indeed be the case sometimes, but more often people turn to alternative medicine when conventional medicine fails. Clearly if one has an affliction that can be cured by conventional medicine and instead flies to the Philippines for some fake surgery, this is not good. On the other hand if the medical profession has stopped treating somebody's cancer, it is understandable that one might try anything. Still even this is sad since such desperation rewards quacks and charlatans.But this book is about much more than bad medicine. Wanjek actually takes on a wide range of phoniness from bad TV health reporting to urban witch doctors, from why we go gray to why the Rambo-like violence in movies is unrealistic and dangerously misleading In fact, Wanjek's book is the widest ranging book of its kind that I have read and I've read a few; furthermore as far as I can tell he is right on the money.Some things I learned with interest: what the appendix actually does, and where the silly idea that we only use ten percent of our brain comes from, and why "Vitamin O" (oxygen) is just so much bunk. Also: how health studies are conducted well and not so well and how they can be fudged, and why it is highly unlikely that Julius Caesar was born of a Caesarean section since his mother lived on and in those days nobody, but nobody ever survived such an operation.There is also of course a lot that I already knew including the fact that the black plague is still with us, and that cold weather does not cause colds, and that antibiotics are useless against viruses (such as flu or cold viruses), and that radiation used in radiating food does not contaminate the food anymore than baking the food in a conventional oven does.Wanjek even changed my mind on a couple of things, and for these old eyes to see new light is a rarity. I used to give Chinese medical practice and India's ancient ayurvedic treatments the benefit of the doubt believing that all those many centuries of experience counted for something. However, Wanjek makes the very excellent point that such medical traditions existed not because they were effective but because there was nothing else. He adds that conventional medicine is largely replacing these practices in their very countries of origin. Wanjek adds in implication that the entire history of medical practice up to (and to some very real extent) including modern times has been one long exercise in malpractice and painful ignorance. What horrors are we practicing on our patients today, one might ask, horrors to compare with bloodletting and Mayan brain surgery? Try chemotherapy for cancer, Wanjek suggests.The only fault I could find with the book is that in his discussion of why we are getting so fa

Much More Than the Reviews Say

I have been fascinated reading the reviews of this book, which seem to focus almost entirely on one small chapter on alternative medicine. No one seems to refute the funny "Hollywood" chapter, where we learn that getting knocked out with a bottle over the head can lead to a lifetime of neurological problems. No one says a word about the informative chapters on aging, the nature of disease, nutrition, the body, and how science is conducted. Do I sense a bit of defensiveness from the alternative medicine crowd?I do not think the author suggests that that which is unproven by science is therefore wrong, as so many of these reviews claim. (This must be a standard defense with that crowd.) The author seems fascinated by acupuncture and sees promise in it. He explains that herbal medicine is not alternative; the science of pharmacology is based on creating medicine from plants. He explains that yoga and tai chi are useful because they are forms of exercise, just like running and stretching. These aren't alternative; they're common sense. What the author, Christopher Wanjek, dismisses is psychic healing, which is always proven to be fraudulent. He dismisses astrology. He laments the fact that children die because their parents rely on the power of prayer instead of medicine or because they don't "believe" in vaccination. He lashes out at "ancient" mind-body cures that, for example, claim to eliminate childbirth complications when it should be obvious that childbirth ultimately killed so many women in the ancient world. He seems annoyed by all the people who refuse useful treatment for "natural" cures (like the apricot pit cancer cure scam) when there's no such concept as "natural" anyway -- a chemical is a chemical, be it from "natural" hemlock or salt water. And he takes pains to explain how this recent push that "natural equals good" fools people into thinking that life long ago was somehow healthier... and thus you too can deliver babies at home because that's what our great-grandparents did. Six of my grandmother's 10 siblings did before age 10 in turn-of-the-century rural Italy. The same is true for most of the older folks I know. No amount of traditional cures could save them.Believe what you want, but let's not create a health system based on distance healing, magic touch therapy, incantations, herbs that only work when Mars is aligned properly, cures that dismiss the germ theory of disease, and well-intentioned healing arts that have since been proven illogical and useless now that we have the tools (microscopes, imaging) to see how the body works. I can only hope my home country of Italy doesn't follow America's lead (with distance healers and psychics advising the White House!)Not only did I enjoy the 30-page chapter on alternative medicine (called The Return of the Witchdoctor), I enjoyed the other 230 pages of Bad Medicine as well.

Superb job of clearing out the misconceptions

This book is a wide-ranging explanation of most people's health concerns written in most people's terms. It is especially good at reinforcing time and again that proper diet, nutrition, and exercise throughout life are the surest and cheapest keys to good health. Along the way Mr. Wanjek dispatches no end of windmills, from the myth of racial exceptionalism to where, exactly, does the tongue taste sweetness and saltiness. The tiny little appendix (the one inside us, not the somewhat more commodious one at the end of the book) really does have a use after all and shouldn't be willy-nilly snipped out whilst the belly is open for other reasons. Kidneys, liver, skin, hair, the resident populations of microbes-all these get a fair hearing and an even better explanation. As a periodic refresher on why it is a great idea to take care of oneself, this book is about as good as they come.Mr. Wanjek gives thoughtful explanations when to take health claims at their word and when to look deeper. Chapter 24, entitled "Organic Food," starts off with a appetite-vaporizing set of facts about the secretive industry that calls itself "Organic". Milk sold under that rubric is in fact produced by cows penned up in the same ghastly poop-palace conditions as the more traditional variety. They are simply fed organic food (whatever that might be) instead of the truly dangerous stuff the industrial-food lads have dreamed up. If we take off the rose-colored glasses with the word "organic" silk-screened on the surface, we find many similarities in the minds of "Organic" corporate nutrition designers and the minds of the tetracycline-and-ground-brains designers. Corporate, after all, is corporate. So organic cows are penned up like their less well-fed sisters in row-stalls, mouth in a trough and teats in a machine that sucks them dry three times a day. They just get a nicer label for their fate. Soya milk, anyone?You'll probably not want to keep this in mind next time at the McChicken place, but "free range" chickens range freely over a pecked-to-death enclosure with thousands of others, their beaks sometimes removed so they won't go on a murderous frenzy at the spark of something scary.There are many similar examples of gut-spasming truth-telling, but Mr. Wanjek sticks to facts and graciously stays out of rubbing our noses in it. He also lays low some foot-soldiers of popular mythology that health-products industry generals use to scare the wits out of everybody. Remember the bottled Perrier scare a decade ago? To quote Mr. Wanjek, "Perrier mineral water comes from a variety of sources beyond France, such as Texas and New Jersey. Somewhere, somehow, in 1990, unacceptable levels of benzene, a known cancer-causing chemical, made their way into the stylish green bottles. The benzene level was far from deadly or even cancerous. You would have had to drink a couple hundred bottles a day to get to a level that would significantly increase your lifetime risk of getting cancer; and

Some Really Sick Stuff

What a great concept, and the author really pulls it off. I especially enjoyed the entertaining and informative chapter on "memory loss and aging." Or, at least, I think I recall liking it. Also, the chapter about the dangers of obesity was reminiscent of another excellent tome, "Fast Food Nation." In fact, overall, I'd rank "Bad Medicine" right up there with that book. Christopher Wanjek is a great find -- I look forward to reading more of his books in the future.