Bad Medicine : Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O (Wiley Bad Science Series)

Rating:
Summary: This man thinks we are all stupid
Review: 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 fat and in his eagerness to nail the Atkins diet to the wall he failed to mention so-called "carbohydrate intolerance." (Maybe he doesn't like the phrase.) I want to therefore remind him that in the prehistory there were not only no fatted calves or choice cuts of beef but no amber waves of grain either. Humans have little tolerance for living with a lot of easily gotten carbs anymore than they have genes for resisting fat-laden foods. Before the rise of agriculture, gathering wheat and other grain plants was such a labor-intensive process that not even Momma Cass could get fat from eating grass seeds.

Bottom line: the most comprehensive book on pseudoscience that I have read in recent years and one of the most readable.

Rating:
Summary: Readable survey of pseudoscientific ideas and practices
Review: 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 fat and in his eagerness to nail the Atkins diet to the wall he failed to mention so-called "carbohydrate intolerance." (Maybe he doesn't like the phrase.) I want to therefore remind him that in the prehistory there were not only no fatted calves or choice cuts of beef but no amber waves of grain either. Humans have little tolerance for living with a lot of easily gotten carbs anymore than they have genes for resisting fat-laden foods. Before the rise of agriculture, gathering wheat and other grain plants was such a labor-intensive process that not even Momma Cass could get fat from eating grass seeds.

Bottom line: the most comprehensive book on pseudoscience that I have read in recent years and one of the most readable.

Rating:
Summary: Great, if you want medical advice from a joke writer
Review: After reading the fine book "Bad Astronomy," I found "Bad Medicine" a disappointment. The tortured puns in the astronomy book made me wince, but it was written by an astronomer and was authoritative and educational. By contrast, this uninformative book on medicine was written not by a physician or Ph.D. researcher but by Christopher Wanjek, a writer whose bio offers no academic credentials but highlights that he is a Saturday Night Live joke writer. Ironically, he takes people to task for believing pseudoscience from questionable sources. Yet we're given no cause to think Wanjek is a credible source himself, and while he does quote authorities from time to time, he does not routinely back up his claims with expert testimony.

This is not to say that the content of the book is wholly incorrect. On the contrary, much of it is sensible. But I learned almost nothing. It is not exactly big news that a lot of herbal remedies have yet to be subjected to rigorous testing, or that homeopathy is based on an idiotic premise. Does the author really think the people who are likely to read this book don't know that? The majority of his exposes are obvious to everyone but National Enquirer devotees.

Even the chapters that didn't cover the excruciatingly obvious were lacking. For example, I found his chapter on milk not being the healthy drink it is cracked up to be somewhat thought-provoking. However, his glib advice is "drink calcium-fortified orange juice." OJ is loaded with sugar, so it seems unlikely to be a healthy alternative when consumed in large quantity. And, since I don't reside in the U.S., I can't get the calcium fortification anyway. Besides, his concerns over hormones in milk are hard to take seriously, when in other chapters he takes people to task for being concerned about trace amounts of dioxin and other toxins.

Finally, I found at least one outright error, along with other statements that struck me as wrong, although as a non-scientist I can't be sure. Wanjek states that the Atkins diet does not allow you to eat asparagus. Whatever you think of Atkins, that's just plain WRONG. Atkins actually encourages people to eat lots of green vegetables, asparagus specifically included. Another example: several years ago, I was treated by an ophthalmologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School. Unlike Wanjek, I'm not willing to make blanket statements about areas that lie outside my expertise, so perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me my eye doctor told me things that directly contradict what Wanjek says in chapter 3.

If there were some indication that each chapter had been reviewed by the appropriate specialist, perhaps I wouldn't doubt Wanjek so much. But I saw no indication that the book has been fact-checked by real live physicians.

In closing, it is only fair to say that Wanjek is a terrific writer. As disgusted as I was by the lack of intellectual rigor in this book, I would have stopped reading if he didn't have such an engaging style. The history of medical practice that he opens with makes great reading, and his chapters that point out how falsely Hollywood portrays the consequences of regular exposure to gunfire and repeated knocks on the head are very entertaining. I can see why he's had success as a comic writer - he is laugh-out-loud funny in spots. But medicine is no joke. Wanjek and his publishers at Wiley should have treated the subject more seriously.



Rating:
Summary: Been Waiting for This Kind of Book
Review: After seeing countless "feel good" health books stacked up high in bookstores, I was pleased to see Bad Medicine. Here's the first book I saw that counters this silly notion that all "natural" medicine is safe. This book explains why so many alternative medicines don't work. Some have potential, like acupuncture. But so many others are based on ancient ideas based on astrology and superstition. Germs cause disease. We learned this in the 20th century, and now people live longer. Disease doesn't come from being "out of balance" or having "negative energy".

The book also has interesting trivia about the body -- like how that saying that "you only use 10% of your brain" was just a marketing scheme from the 1930s. I learned that the liver doesn't store toxins and that the tongue map (sweet, sour, etc.) is wrong.

Two chapters were a little too sarcastic -- like the chapter about magnet therapy, which is based on the false notion that blood is magnetic because of the iron inside. The author can be a little too sarcastic at times, which comes across as mean sometimes. Other chapters are very funny, though. I laughed out loud after reading Woody Harrelson's connection to oxygen bars.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what alternative medicines really work.

--

Rating:
Summary: Provides a real service by debunking bad medicine
Review: As a non-medical person, I really enjoyed this book. Not only did it give me some insight into the human body, it has helped me start to think more critically about what I hear in the media about medicine and health. The author is a person with a lot of common sense, and he's basically trying to get us to see things from a reasonable, logical point of view. He tells us why the Atkins' diet won't work on a long-term basis, why homeopathy is not necessarily a good thing, and how ancient medicines--which weren't particularly effective--are still with us today. And he does it by giving us the facts. Not only does he tell us why some alternative medicines are bad, he also reveals HOW we have been convinced otherwise. This gives us the tools to debunk bad medicine on our own.

Rating:
Summary: more than a funny writer
Review: I can see that the reviews have become much more positive since I first wrote in 2003. I was hoping the publisher would have the next book in the series out, called Bad Weather, but no such luck.

I did see some reviews questioning Christopher Wanjek's background. A quick Internet check reveals he is a Washington Post health writer with a masters in public health from Harvard School of Public Health. So although he isn't a PhD like the author of Bad Astronomy, I do think he has creditials.

The real question is why the publisher didn't include this information on the book's back cover. They seem to promote his joke writing instead. (He's a contributing writer to the Leno show.) I think more readers would trust his arguments if they understood that he does have academic and professional credentials.

Rating:
Summary: This man thinks we are all stupid
Review: I was predisposed to agree with Mr. Wanjek -- I bought the book for ammunition. But his elitism, constant denigration of TV watchers (of which I am not one), insults of people who disagree with his positions, and sneering at or ignorance of the science that *does* support a number of herbal remedies put me right off. There are better books on the topic, including physicians' handbooks that are quite readable, and which make clear which remedies are scientifically supported and which aren't. I suggest that prospective buyers shop around for something a little less insulting to their intelligence.

Rating:
Summary: OK If you actually think this is a good book i am sorry
Review: Quacks are quacks. It would be great if those homeopaths would actually use scientific methods that were demonstrated to be effective, rather than the vitalism of the 1600's. The logic of throwing out the baby of modern science with the bathwater of medical failure relies on the long con of alternative medicine, if A doesn't work than B must work. Rubbish. This book helps to restore faith in the only practice that has done more to allow us to live longer than anything, besides public health (which is supported by scientific methods). Don't get me started on vaccinations or fluoridation. The real reason homeopaths and vitamin addicts are so against medicine: they are competing for the same market share.

Rating:
Summary: great for the curious
Review: This book is a wonderful and fascinating read for anyone who's curious about medicine, science in general and myths especially. With well reasoned and articulate chapters, Wanjeck discusses the mundane and exotic. An excellent gift to yourself or someone else.

Rating:
Summary: Buy it, read it! (instead of wasting time on this review!)
Review: This book is about so much more than bad medicine. As well as covering, in good but not overwhelming detail, many 'alternative medicine' topics (such as homeopathy which he gleefully destroys) it also covers a wide range of simple misunderstandings, 'old-wives tales' and folk hokum to do with the human body - ranging from the classic, "Don't sit too close to the TV or you'll damage your eyes!" to why we go grey/get fat/go bald/etc/etc.

Wanjek writes with flair and gentle humour. On that note, however, I have noticed in some reviews posted here that people who actually hold any of the pseudoscientific beliefs that Wanjek so neatly destroys may take his humour more seriously. Personally I am heartened by this - Wanjek has clearly touched a nerve.

This book provides an excellent overview of the current state of play in alternative medicine, excellent refutations of AM's sacred cows and, most importantly, some damn good advice. It is hard to overstate the harm done by people's unquestioning belief in alternative medicine - the number of treatable cancers that don't get detected early enough because of someone's misplaced trust in an iridologist, the masses of beneficial medication that never get prescribed because people would rather take water endowed with mystical 'quantum memories' of some unproven herb that used to be there before getting diluted into practical non-existence, ... Wanjek, through this book, provides a serious and valuable tool for sufferers of serious illness to cut through the haze of crap on offer from every late night infomercial peddling false hope.

For those of us fortunate enough to NOT be suffering serious illness, and for those less fortunate who ARE, the book is thought provoking, funny, interesting and informative. And hey - sooner or later we all know someone who gets taken for a ride by some medical scam - this book will definitely come in handy.