Which medicines claim
more human lives than
they save? How can a
disease be invented?
What really decides who
receivesadonatedorgan?
iDonthedarksecretsof
the medical field...T
he contract doesn’t require
a signature or oral consent
or even a handshake to be
considered valid. It goes
into effect automatically—each time
you set foot in the doctor’s offi ce...
In accordance with the treatment
contract, as it’s commonly known,
every doctor is obligated to provide
patients with clear information, to
advise them and steer them away
from harm. But what hardly anyone
knows: Each day this contract gets
broken by doctors. It often happens
unconsciously, but sometimes this
takes place completely deliberately.
But why? There are three cardinal
reasons for this breach of contract:- IGNORANCE. Even groundbreaking
new fi ndings take up to 30 years (!)
until they are taken into account by
all treating doctors. An example: For
three decades it has been known
that the calmative diazepam (Valium)
is as addictive as heroin—yet even
today it is still being prescribed to
millions of people. - DISHONESTY. “What would you do
if you were in my position?” Many
medical professionals dread hearing
this question and avoid answering
honestly or sharing their personal
assessment with patients. Example:
In a Duke University survey doctors
were asked if they would recommend
to patients the treatment that they
would choose for themselves in the
event of a colon cancer diagnosis.
The conclusion alarmed the experts:
Of 500 doctors, 40% advised their
patients to have an operation that
they would reject for themselves due
to too many side effects. - DISINFORMATION. The fact is:
More than 50% of funded drug trials
are infl uenced by the pharmaceutical
companies in their own favor. “On the
one hand you have studies that are
mostly fi nanced and carried out by
the manufacturers, and these tend to
be overly optimistic. And on the other
hand you have those studies that do
not provide the hoped-for results, and
those studies tend to be published
much less frequently,” says medical
researcher Gerd Antes of Germany’s
Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg.
For doctors that means: When they
are advising their patients, they often
rely on studies that aren’t scientifi cally
supportable. That is also concealed
from those who are being treated.
There is, however, one authority
that challenges these deficiencies
in the medical field: the Cochrane
Collaboration (now simply known as
Cochrane), a network of independent
medical specialists as well as other
scientists that has been operating
worldwide for 20 years and that has
developed into a kind of unofficial
quality-control institute for medical
products and procedures. The idea
and name of the group go back to the
Scottish physician Archie Cochrane,
who is one of the founding fathers of
“evidence-based medicine.” The goal
of the researchers is to filter out the
independent and meaningful studies
from all those evaluations that are
commissioned by pharmaceutical
companies with the sole purpose of
getting the tested medicine out into
the market. To prevent the latter, the
effi cacy and risks of a given drug are
controlled by the systematic review,
comparison, and summarization of
different studies, thereby ensuring
the health of patients. Today more
than 37,000 scientists operating in
100 countries work for Cochrane—
without pay. Their goal: “We want to
reduce the risk of doctors killing their
patients just because they put their
faith in a potentially falsified study,”
explains Iain Chalmers, one of the
medical professionals who founded
the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993.
After months of detailed research
and help fromsome of theleading
independent experts in the medical
field, iD reveals on the following
pages how exactly these studies
come about, what information the
doctors withhold from us, and how
some physicians imperil the most
important possession people have—
our health...ideasanddiscoveries.com 61 Mar 2017Body & Mind