The ignominous story of Modern Medicine over the last century. There will be more horror stories like these taken from drugs we routinely use today. And there will be many more horror stories that never get told because the horrific side effects are too specific to particular patients. This "Medicine" is not really medicine.
Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole)
The year is 1925. Your doctor says you look run down and writes down the name of a tonic, and you drink it the way you drink anything a doctor names, a bottle a day, feeling marvellous. It is radium in distilled water. Four hundred thousand bottles are sold on medical endorsement, and the steel magnate who got through fifteen hundred of them is buried in 1932 in a lead-lined coffin.
The year is 1948. Your baby is screaming with teething, so you do what the health visitor says and work a fingertip of powder into his gums, morning and night, for months. Then his hands and feet go raw and pink, daylight becomes unbearable, and the child who was babbling in the spring stops speaking. The powder is mercury, a fifth of the babies it does this to die, and it stays on the shelf until 1954.
The year is 1958. Your wife is seven months gone and they send her down the corridor for the routine X-ray, and she lies on the cold plate with her coat over the chair and thinks nothing of it. An Oxford epidemiologist has just shown that one abdominal X-ray in pregnancy roughly doubles the child's chance of dying of cancer before adolescence. The profession declines to believe her, her funding dries up, and the radiographers carry on for twenty years.
The year is 1983. Your son has haemophilia, and the new treatment means no more nights in hospital, just a vial from the fridge and a needle at the kitchen table before school. The vial is pooled from thousands of paid American donors, some of them prisoners. Around twelve hundred and fifty British haemophiliacs are given HIV this way, and the inquiry that finally says so out loud reports in 2024.
The year is 1989. You are on a ward after your heart attack watching the monitor throw an extra beat, and they start you on a tablet to stop it doing that, because obviously a heart that skips is a heart about to stop. Somebody finally tests the tablet against a placebo. Seven point seven per cent dead within ten months on the drug, three per cent on the dummy, and the trial is halted early.
The year is 1995. Your sister takes the high-dose chemotherapy with the bone marrow transplant because her oncologist calls it her best chance, and you sit in that corridor for four weeks while it takes her hair, her gut lining and two stone. Forty thousand American women go through it. In 1999 the trials find no survival advantage over ordinary treatment, and in 2000 the data that convinced everybody turns out to have been invented.
The year is 2016. Your daughter is epileptic and pregnant and stays on the medicine that has kept her seizure-free since she was nineteen, because nobody at any appointment has ever told her otherwise. That is the year the warning finally reaches the box. The risk had been in the literature since the seventies, and roughly twenty thousand British children were born into it while the paperwork caught up.
Now it is today.
Your doctor has new drugs, new numbers and a fresh consensus, and he can tell you exactly what the evidence shows.
So could every doctor on this list.
None of it was quackery. All of it was the standard of care, taught in the schools, printed in the guidelines, paid for by the state.
That is what a wrong answer looks like from the inside, and you are standing in one now.
— https://nitter.net/SamaHoole/status/2083637681817289015#m