Cured yesterday of my disease,I died last nite of my physician.–Matthew Prior, 1664-1721 AD
Columbia Book of Quotations 1996
IT began with the advent of magic bullet drugs, the first being penicillin. While Alexander Fleming was being given credit in 1922 for his discovery that a mould was observed to kill germs in a laboratory dish when viewed under a microscope, actually Louis Pasteur had made the same microscopic observation six decades earlier with fresh-crushed garlic. But garlic could not be made into a patentable molecule and it, like so many other natural remedies, was soon to be cast into a class of snake oil remedies. Pharmaceutical companies thereafter developed vaccines, hormone replacements such as insulin, synthetic thyroid and estrogen/progesterone, and a host of other patentable molecules that are often just altered versions of molecules found in nature. Surgical technology improved until now more than 70 million surgical procedures are performed annually in the US. Use of prescription drugs has soared past $100 billion annually. But with all of this largesse, conventional medicine is collapsing, falling to scientific studies that uncover its many unproven therapies.
Modern medicine has claimed the high road, boasting that it is backed by science and all the other fringe health disciplines, such as chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy and the like, are nothing more than pseudo-sciences. So, let the buyer beware when entering the door of medical charlatans.