(Image: Random House)
WHILE physicians pledge to “first, do no harm”, Druin Burch‘s alarming history of medicine argues that until quite recently the opposite has been happening. By relying on belief rather than evidence, doctors harmed more often than they healed.
His zigzagging flight through the history of doctoring reminds us how remedies with zero medicinal power – such as the practice of bleeding – were adhered to with what now seems like wanton disregard for the patient’s welfare. Only at the start of the 20th century did doctors move towards evidence-based medicine, in which treatments were tested against placebo…
