Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial pot

[...]... was largely responsible for the death of George Washington Unfortunately, because these anti-bloodletting conclusions were contrary to the prevailing view, many doctors struggled to accept them and even tried their best to undermine them For e x a m p l e , when Pierre Louis published the results of his trials in 22 TRICK OR TREATMENT? 1828, m a n y doctors dismissed his negative conclusion about bloodletting... determine whether or not it was advisable to bleed patients Ideally, his clinical trial would have e x a m i n e d the impact of bloodletting on a single disease or s y m p t o m , such as gonorrhoea or fever, because the results tend to be clearer if a trial is focused on one treatment for one ailment H o w e v e r , the trial took place while Hamilton was serving in the Peninsular War in Portugal, where... and the sixth pair received t w o oranges and a lemon each day A n o t h e r g r o u p of sick sailors w h o continued with the normal naval diet w e r e also monitored and acted as a control g r o u p There are t w o important points to clarify before m o v i n g on First, the inclusion of oranges and lemons was a shot in the dark Although there had been a few reports of l e m o n s relieving s y... trial was carefully controlled, which m e a n s that the separate groups of patients were treated similarly except for one particular factor, namely bloodletting This allowed Hamilton to isolate the impact of bloodletting Had the bloodletting group been kept in poorer conditions or given a different diet, then the higher death rate could have been attributed to environment or nutrition, but Hamilton... bloodletting trial had no impact on the widespread enthusiasm for the practice Instead, it would take a few more years before other medical pioneers, such as the French doctor Pierre L o u i s , would conduct their o w n trials and confirm Hamilton's conclusion These results, which were properly published and disseminated, repeatedly showed that bloodletting was not a lifesaver, but rather it was a potential... 'Truth exists - only lies are invented.'' Georges Braque THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ESTABLISHING THE TRUTH IN RELATION TO alternative medicine W h i c h therapies work and which ones are u s e less? W h i c h therapies are safe and which ones are dangerous? T h e s e are questions that doctors h a v e asked t h e m s e l v e s for millennia in relation to all forms of m e d i c i n e , and yet it is only c o m... bloodletting began to decline Prior to the clinical trial, a doctor decided his treatment for a particular patient by relying on his o w n prejudices, or on what he had been taught by his peers, or on his m i s r e m e m b e r e d experiences of dealing with a handful of patients with a similar condition After the advent of the clinical trial, doctors could choose their treatment for a single patient by examining... French invasion T h e fate of a nation is of major historic importance, yet the application of the clinical trial would have even greater significance in the centuries ahead Medical researchers would go on to use clinical trials routinely to decide which treatments worked and which were ineffective In turn, this w o u l d allow doctors to save hundreds of millions of lives around the world because... n body contains only 5 litres of b l o o d , so a significant fraction was being bled from Washington at each session Dr Craik did not seem concerned He performed venesection again in the afternoon, r e m o v i n g a further whole litre of blood Over the next few h o u r s , it appeared that the bloodletting was helping Washington seemed to recover and for a while he was able to sit 10 TRICK OR TREATMENT?... successful trial, the simple lemon cure was ignored, scurvy continued unabated and m a n y more sailors died By the time that the Seven Years War with France had ended in 1763, 18 TRICK OR TREATMENT? the tallies showed that 1,512 British sailors had been killed in action and 100,000 had been killed by scurvy H o w e v e r , in 1780, thirty-three years after the original trial, L i n d ' s work caught . population use alternative medicine in one form or another. Indeed, it is estimated that the annual global spend on all alternative medicines is in the region. whether or not it works, rather than relying on somebody's opinion. Science employs experiments, observations, trials, argument and discussion in order