Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Mendelsohn Robert S.
Title : Confessions of a medical heretic
Year : 1979

Link download : Mendelsohn_Robert_S_-_Confessions_of_a_medical_heretic.zip

I do not believe in Modern Medicine. I am a medical heretic. My aim in this book is to persuade you to become a heretic, too. I haven't always been a medical heretic. I once believed in Modern Medicine. In medical school, I failed to look deeply into a study that was going on around me, of the effects of the hormone DES -- because I believed. Who could have suspected that twenty years later we would discover that DES causes vaginal cancer and genital abnormalities in children born to women receiving the drug during pregnancy? I confess that I failed to be suspicious of oxygen therapy for premature infants, even though the best equipped and most advanced premature nurseries had an incidence of partial or total blindness of around ninety percent of all low birth weight infants. A few miles away in a large, less "advanced" hospital, the incidence of this condition - retrolental fibroplasia - was less than ten percent. I asked my professors in medical school to explain the difference. And I believed them when they said the doctors in the poorer hospital just didn't know how to make the correct diagnosis. A year or two later it was proved that the cause of retrolental fibroplasia was the high concentrations of oxygen administered to the premies. The affluent medical centers had higher rates of blinding simply because they could afford the very best nursery equipment: the most expensive and modern plastic incubators which guaranteed that all the oxygen pumped in reached the infant. At the poorer nurseries, however, old-fashioned incubalors were used. They looked like bathtubs with very loose metal lids. They were so leaky that it made very little difference how much oxygen was pumped in : not enough reached the infant to blind it. ...