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PICTURES OF HEALTH I
Alternative Images of Medicine
Colin Downes-Grainger
The images in this collection illustrate the other side to the generally accepted face of medicine. Each illustrates something which has happened and does happen. Many doctors really are more ignorant than informed non-doctors about the background to drugs and their effects. Politicians really do hide the truth with the invaluable aid of bureaucrats and advisers.
Drugs' regulation is a system which is supposed to protect patients from damaging side-effects but doesn't. Regulators supposedly collect reports from doctors to form a bigger picture of drug safety (The Yellow Card system), but the majority of doctors have never reported a side-effect. Indeed a survey by Ipsos Mori in 2006 found among other things that over 90% of doctors seemed oblivious to the fact that suspected adverse drug reactions should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority (the equivalent of the FDA). No more than one in five doctors was aware that the MHRA regulates medicines and devices. In spite of that, almost 90% of doctors thought that medicines are adequately regulated in the UK. Most worryingly for the patient, doctors saw drugs risk assessment as a trial and error process whereby they 'experiment' with new drugs. It is doubtful whether the many thousands of Benzodiazepine/Vioxx;/SSRI/Anti-psychotic-damaged patients were ever aware that they were part of a medical experiment.
None of these images represents exaggeration. As Charles Medawar of Social Audit said at a London conference in November 2008, we all proceed largely in ignorance of health output's destructive effects. Feeble drug regulation sustains the illusion that all is well enough with our medication use and dishonest and irrelevant scientific inquiry aids the neglect of adverse effects. Globalisation has magnified the dominant influence of commercial and financial interests on the character of medicine and the role of medicines in medical intervention. Innovation used to be the mainstay of these endeavours; now it is marketing. He described how the treatment one gets is the product of a "system" in which the doctor plays an increasingly marginal part. In recent times professional understanding of drug treatment modalities and outcomes is overwhelmingly guided by market forces.
Colin Downes-Grainger
20 April 2009
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