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The Persecution of Heretics

How dissenting doctors are being silenced.

23rd September 2014
| Professor of psychiatry at Bangor University. He is a psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist and author. His research focuses on the contribution of antidepressants to suicide and the history of pharmacology.
888 words
Read time: approx. 4 mins

Behind medicine's apparent Biblical authority lies an inquisitional apparatus aimed at silencing dissent. It is run by corporate PR and scientific planning agencies, backed by academic expertise, and its aim is to ensure that prescribing doctors keep on prescribing. The heretic ends up in the broad light of day, but the persecutor hides in the shadows.

I should know. In a lecture for IAI, I outlined some of the many things that can be done to intimidate doctors – especially those who suggest that a brand-name drug might have significant adverse events. At the time the talk was being given I was being referred again to the General Medical Council (GMC). Further details of this will be announced soon. Readers will be invited to work out who is attempting to commit the murder, with what, and why.

In this case is it the local health board, clinical colleagues, the relevant Royal College, the GMC itself, one of the major pharmaceutical companies, or even the Government?

 

A brief history of medicine

For millennia we have struggled with death and disease. In the 1950s there was a huge increase in the number of truly effective medicines, and this has played a part in improving life-spans and quality of life, in particular among children. These new drugs supported the creation of the National Health Service: effective treatments make populations healthier and more effective at work, so the provision of services offering such treatments makes a country better able to compete with others.

David Healy
23rd September 2014

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Susan Thrasher 25 September 2014

Doctors are really the meat in the sandwich: pharmaceutical companies use them to promote and sell their products, and a willing public turn to them for assistance and advice. I've explored this idea in my new book "Reframing Mental Illness" (available at Amazon) and touch on the role of doctors as trusted-authorities-with-limited-time and drug-promoter in my recent blog "Mental Health Drugs are Big Business" at http://susan-thrasher.blogspot.co.nz/2014/09/mental-health-drugs-are-big-business.html

John Tucker 25 September 2014

I don't know if I believe that there is an organized pattern of persecution, at least not of rank and file practioners. Certainly there is information in the public domain that companies have set out to discredit their most high profile critics, but this sort of thing is commonplace in the rough and tumble world of scientific debate, and certainly not unknown behavior between academics of differing viewpoints. Its not attractive, nor ethical, but the assertion that general practioners seeing patients in the community are afraid to address patient's concerns about side effects seems a little over the top.

Randomized trials, in spite of their shortcomings, allow us to examine the effects of varying only a single variable, if only on an averaged basis. We can look at the data in the Prozac package insert and see that while 28% of OCD patients on Prozac suffered insominia, so did 22% of those on placebo. In the absence of a control group we would conclude that Prozac caused insomnia in a very high percentage of those taking it. The control group allows us to see that insomnia is a feature of the disease state.

Similar considerations apply to attributing more serious putative side effects, such as disabling withdrawals syndromes, acts of extreme violence, and the like, based on case reports. Using this reasoning, we would conclude that one should avoid the hospital under all circumstances, because death is much more common among those who are hospitalized than among the population as a whole. But one really needs to look at why they are in the hospital in the first place.