Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O
by Christopher Wanjek
Wiley & Sons, $15.95, ISBN 047143499X
In this enjoyable history of quackery, Christopher Wanjek discusses bad medicine across the centuries, from Ayurveda to Atkins. He makes a strong and heartfelt case against the current rush to the witch doctor, discussing several telling examples including the widespread use of homoeopathy, the rejection of MMR vaccination and the American craze for shark cartilage supplements.
The first section of the book is a concise and entertaining history of folklore medicine, with colourful descriptions of past plagues as a reminder of how unsuccessful it generally was.
The tone is lively and journalistic, bordering on gratingly chatty (“Let’s cut the ancients a break”) – but some background knowledge is assumed, which could be confusing for certain readers. For example, Wanjek rightly stresses the importance of randomised, doubleblind, placebo-controlled medical trials, but never defines these terms or explains why such safeguards are necessary against error and wishful thinking. Each chapter is an interesting essay in its own right, sometimes at the expense of the whole book’s coherence.
The section on bad medicine in the movies, for example, doesn’t contribute much to the main argument (although it’s highly amusing and will allow you to bore your friends witless at any action flick).
Wanjek occasionally falls into the ‘bad medicine’ trap himself. An otherwise excellent chapter on lifestyle and obesity contains an inaccurate account of the supposed long-term effects of dieting on metabolism. More dangerously, he denounces chemotherapy as “the bloodletting of the 20th century”, as if an unpleasant treatment were equivalent to a worthless one.
This approachable and well-written case against bad medicine has much to recommend it. If you’re sick of health scares, its realistic assessments of the dangers of sedentary lard-eating, antibiotic overuse, and not fastening your seatbelt are a dose of sanity.
