On August 30, 2009, Kurt G. Harris MD writes:
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to know that medical schools receive massive funding from pharmaceutical companies who fund much of their research. What happens to your career and the future money flow when you publish articles saying the drug you studied is dangerous, worthless or just not worth the effort?
The Cartesian, mechanistic paradigm of medical science reigns at every turn. The bias to look at drugs as generally efficacious and highly specific runs deep and fits with this mechanistic paradigm, and is not so subtly supported by where the money comes from in our major teaching universities. It is not a conscious conspiracy, just a dysfunctional Kuhnian paradigm, like our industrial agricultural neolithic diet – the Standard American Diet.
If you start to think critically about basic medical science, and think like a biologist instead of just an engineer of the body, the idea that drugs are in general highly efficacious looks very questionable.
There is a wry joke among Doctors that since aspirin, morphine, penicillin and prednisone (all dirt cheap and at least 50 years old) few useful drugs have been created.
That is a bit of a stretch but closer to the truth than most realize.
There are some highly useful drugs that are of recent vintage.
However, sometimes the useful, specialized expensive and highly specific drugs are treating some complication of the SAD that can be outright cured or prevented at zero cost with a radical change in diet.
My own view is that on balance the typical drug first marketed in the past 20 years is at best just a waste of money. That is why the “prescription drug subsidy” promoted by Bush II is such a travesty.
The influence of big food in medical schools is more a result of a power vacuum. The primary influence of big food is at the government level (think ADM and corn into ethanol). This in turn can affect NIH funding priorities, hence all the billions wasted trying to prove (and failing) that we should avoid saturated fat and eat fiber, etc.
The influence of big food via these effects on government funding is mainly because the state of nutrition as science is so abysmal. Most nutrition departments are a joke, as described so well by Gary Taubes in GCBC. Most medical students rightly perceive this and so don’t take nutrition seriously. “Food is fuel and genetics determines disease” -that is exactly how I thought until a few years ago.
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