injuries would help them get into the safety of a hospital and then back home. To them, the injury was the
best thing that could have happened to them. On the other hand, a similar serious wound afflicted in civil
life through an accident can cause tremendous pain and trauma if it is associated with a loss of health,
mobility, and financial resources. This suggests that our interpretation of a given situation determines the
effect it will have on our lives.
Is Today’s Medical Practice Trustworthy?
To conduct double-blind control studies in order to establish whether a particular drug or treatment is
useful is a very dubious and misleading practice. Because of the highly elusive and undetermined,
subjective state of the tested patients, these studies, which are considered the backbone of medical
science, may in fact produce very unrealistic, contrived results and outright fraudulent results. Yet they
are presented to the public as “proof” for the reliability of scientific research and medical applications. All
this is changing now since recent disclosure of flawed and bad research in medical journals, such as
omitting crucial data concerning the arthritis drug Vioxx, or publishing two papers by the South Korean
researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, who fabricated evidence that he had cloned human cells.
“Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry, say
Dr. Richard Smith, the former editor of BMJ, the British medical journal, and Dr. Richard Horton, the
editor of The Lancet, also based in Britain. The journals have a vested interest in keeping the drug giants
happy. Industry advertisements is what keeps the journals alive (and also the mass media). In addition,
drug companies pay the journals large sums of money for reprints of articles reporting findings from large
clinical trials that involve their products. Some journals fail to retract known cases of fraud for fear of
lawsuits. Editors may "face a frighteningly stark conflict of interest" in deciding whether to publish such a
study, Dr. Smith said. It is often easier to just let fraudulent data slip through their fingers or minds in the
hope that nobody will find out. Fraud has also slipped through in part because editors have long been
loath to question the authors. The peer-review system of medical journals, which is supposed to be the
iron-gate for keeping away fraudulent medical studies, is now more than questionable, given the recent
disclosures of flawed published studies.
There is more reason to be cautious about taking medical research too seriously. In 1994 and 1995,
researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital surveyed more than 3,000 academic scientists and
found that 64 percent of them had financial ties to drug corporations. According to the report, which was
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 20 percent of the 3,000
researchers actually admitted that they had delayed publication of research results for more than 6 months,
to obtain patents and to “slow the dissemination of undesired results.” “Sometimes if you accept a grant
from a company, you have to include a proviso that you won’t distribute anything except with its OK. It
has a negative impact on science,” says Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Paul Berg.
Furthermore, a major research report by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an arm of the
United States Congress, came to the most startling conclusion of all. The 1978 report stated: “Only 10 to
20 percent of all procedures currently used in medical practices have been shown to be efficacious by
controlled trial.” In its October 1991 issue, the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) confirmed this
report by stating that about 85 percent of all medical procedures and surgeries are scientifically unproven.
In other words, 80 to 90 percent of the common medical treatments available to the general population
have no scientific backing, and it is doubtful whether they are justified at all. These findings fall in line
with World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, which confirm that 90 percent of all diseases prevalent
today are not treatable with orthodox medical procedures. Yet, the official medical system claims to have