When Healing Becomes a Crime: The Amazing Story of the Hoxsey Cancer Clinics and the Return of Alternative Therapies Review

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(More customer reviews)Warning, when you read this book you might be scared away from "conventional medicine"! If you are suffering of cancer or have a relative that is terminally ill and has been given up by doctors, I recommend this book as a "second opinion".
This book tells the story of how an alternative treatment was sabotaged by the medical community and by organizations that are supposed to protect our health (such as the Food and Drug Administration). As a European, I have been quite skeptical about this agency for some time, and this book doesn't help at all! The picture this book gives you is that the main reason a drug gets accepted or not might be linked to serious lobbying inside the conventional medical community and to the financial gains that are linked to it. This isn't hard to believe if you see how the tobacco lobby succeeded for years to cover up the problems smoking causes.
Yet, there is hope as far "conventional medicine" is concerned. Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) teaches doctors that they should stay current with recent research on drugs and learn how to interpret studies before administering drugs to their patients. I studied this subject in preparation of my Ph.D. I believe that EBM practices do drastically enhance our chances as patients to get the right treatment, especially if you read that 50% of doctors risk giving you a wrong or outdated treatment. No wonder many doctors admit that many patients get better DESPITE their doctor's treatment.
The problem with EBM is that apparently some often used treatments such as many current forms of chemotherapy lack the statistical data to back them up, and that doctors seem to treat patients with those cures because they don't have anything better. When I was doing my own research concerning whiplash, I was faced with a similar dilemma: conventional treatment in which patients have to wear a cervical collar may actually worsen the condition of patients. Yet 50% of MD's still prescribe it today. On the other hand, if you would recommend a patient to throw away this collar, you might be pursued form "medical malpractice".
On the other hand, I have known for years that the problem of many alternative cures (whether they are herbal remedies or psychological assistance) lies in the fact that they have not been proven scientifically. But, not being proven doesn't mean that the cure isn't valid, it only lets you know there is no way to tell. Therefore I keep trying to convince "alternative therapists" to do the necessary "homework" with regards to proving their protocols. The drama is that it doesn't pay to do the scientific research for those cures, whereas there are billions to be gained from doing research for registered drugs.
Given that the death rate of cancer today isn't much better than in the 1950s, it's no wonder that today over 60% of cancer patients supplement their conventional treatment with one or more forms of alternative treatment. Reading this book should at least help you to be a bit more skeptical to what your doctor is telling you, and to be more willing to inquire for yourself what therapy will help to cure you.
Related books: "The Cancer industry" and "Questioning Chemotherapy" by Ralph Moss...

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A powerful and substantiated expose of the medical politics that prevents promising alternative cancer therapies from being implemented in the United States.

' Focuses on Harry Hoxsey, the subject of the author's award-winning documentary, who claimed to cure cancer using herbal remedies.

' Presents scientific evidence supporting Hoxsey's cancer-fighting claims.

' Published to coincide with the anticipated 2000 public release of the government-sponsored report finding "noteworthy cases of survival" among Hoxsey patients.

Harry Hoxsey claimed to cure cancer using herbal remedies, and thousands of patients swore that he healed them. His Texas clinic became the world's largest privately owned cancer center with branches in seventeen states, and the value of its therapeutic treatments was upheld by two federal courts. Even his arch-nemesis, the AMA, admitted his treatment was effective against some forms of cancer. But the medical establishment refused an investigation, branding Hoxsey the worst cancer quack of the century and forcing his clinic to Tijuana, Mexico, where it continues to claim very high success rates. Modern laboratory tests have confirmed the anticancer properties of Hoxsey's herbs, and a federal govenment-sponsored report is now calling for a major reconsideration of the Hoxsey therapy.

When Healing Becomes a Crime exposes the overall failure of the War on Cancer, while revealing how yesterday's "unorthodox" treatments are emerging as tomorrow's medicine. It probes other promising unconventional cancer treatments that have also been condemned without investigation, delving deeply into the corrosive medical politics and powerful economic forces behind this suppression. As alternative medicine finally regains its rightful place in mainstream practice, this compelling book will not only forever change the way you see medicine, but could also save your life.

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Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates Review

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(More customer reviews)We are proud of humanity's progress in medicine. We like our doctors; they are consistently among the professions that the public trusts the most. There are countless books on histories of medicine, citing a proud tradition from Hippocrates on down to the latest in gene therapy. Doctors gradually but eagerly advanced to take in new techniques and new science to get us where we are today. Except this did not happen. "For 2,400 years patients have believed that doctors were doing them good; for 2,300 years they were wrong." The unsparingly pessimistic view of the overwhelming failures of doctors is that of David Wootton, a professor of history who has written _Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates_ (Oxford University Press). The world has adopted the scientific method as the way of getting information and using it, but before the dawn of germ theory, there was only a firm hold on medical traditions, and the traditions were wrong. Even worse, in many cases medical treatment became more dangerous over time, as in the case of nineteenth century hospitals causing the deaths of mothers in childbirth far more effectively than independent midwives could do. This is a grim story, and if we are past the centuries of medicine-as-tradition, there are still reasons to think that doctors may be addicted to doing the things they do because that's what they have always done.
For a couple of thousand years, medicine was based on Hippocrates and his successors, especially Galen, whose theories dealt with balancing bodily fluids, and to help nature along, doctors would induce vomiting or diarrhea, apply hot irons to the body, or drain off some blood. There was no physiological benefit in such treatments, which could do nothing but make things worse. Yet such treatments were the staple of medical practice until the middle of the nineteenth century. One reason is that people generally tend to be healthy, and when they are sick they generally tend to get well; bodies are designed to do this and do it fairly well, even without help (or hindrance) from medical treatment. Another reason is the placebo effect, which only got to be understood in the nineteenth century. A final and overwhelming reason for doctors' failure to move out of the tradition of treating humors was that having satisfied themselves that such treatment worked, and having formed a pattern of using it and taking fees for using it, they were much more interested, over many centuries, to preserve and transmit the tradition rather than to question or try to improve it. This was despite new understanding of, say, blood circulation, or the worlds of beasties revealed by the microscope.
Wootton's history is one of lost chances; medical science, he shows over and over, could have taken advantage of concepts known in biological science centuries beforehand, but did not do so. Doctors were, like any other group of people, set in their ways. They thought they had as good therapies as could be gotten, and so psychological and cultural factors kept medicine from advancing. It was not that there were gaps in equipment or pure science or intellectual resources, but bad arguments repeatedly drove out good and kept the status quo. It happened for centuries, and might happen in other ways in the future; a bit of skepticism on the parts of both doctors and patients could prove healthful.

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Just how much good has medicine done over the years? And how much damage does it continue to do?The history of medicine begins with Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. Yet until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.In this fascinating new look at the history of medicine, David Wootton argues that for more than 2300 years doctors have relied on their patients' misplaced faith in their ability to cure. Over and over again major discoveries which could save lives were met with professional resistance. And this is not just a phenomenon of the distant past. The first patient effectively treated with penicillin was in the 1880s; the second not until the 1940s. There was overwhelming evidence that smoking caused lung cancer in the 1950s; but it took thirty years for doctors to accept the claim that smoking was addictive. As Wootton graphically illustrates, throughout history and right up to the present, bad medical practice has often been deeply entrenched and stubbornly resistant to evidence.This is a bold and challenging book--and the first general history of medicine to acknowledge the frequency with which doctors do harm.

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