21st-Century Medical Practices: This Emperor has no clothes

High blood pressure, headaches, depression…. why?! Some doctors might say, “Because you’re not taking enough drugs.” But Dr. Sarah Myhill disputes this approach, saying, “Masking the symptoms does not explain them.” In her book, Sustainable Medicine, Dr. Myhill lifts the veil on modern Western medical practices, arguing that more “detective work” must be done to really understand the ‘why’ behind patients’ symptoms.

The current system is what she would call “unsustainable medicine” because of the structural reliance on pharmaceuticals to alleviate symptoms and slightly prolong lives rather than find the root causes to reverse and prevent illnesses.

The following excerpt is from Sustainable Medicine: Whistle-Blowing on 21st-Century Medical Practice by Dr. Sarah Myhill. It has been adapted for the web.

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Five years at medical school followed by one year in hospital jobs do little to prepare a doctor for the real world.

I had no answers to the early questions thrown up by National Health Service (NHS) General Practice – ‘Why do I have high blood pressure?’ ‘Why do I get such awful headaches?’ ‘Why am I depressed?’

Correct conventional answers to these questions are deficiency of, respectively, anti-hypertensive drugs, painkillers and SSRIs. But this is not the ‘why’ of the matter.

Indeed, it is hardly even the ‘what’ of the matter. Masking the symptoms does not explain them. The clues, which the symptoms represent, have been missed and the investigative detective work, which should have resulted from those clues, has been left undone.

One year on and I was breast-feeding my daughter Ruth. She had terrible three-month colic and all I could do to lessen the screams was to walk round the house, all night, with her in my arms. My husband Nick’s reaction was, ‘You’re the effing doctor – you sort it out.’ He was right.

It was not until I stumbled across advice for me to give up all dairy products that the problem was resolved. So too was my chronic sinusitis and rhinitis. At the time this was a momentous and life-changing discovery – but this information was nowhere to be found in the medical textbooks.

Thirty years later, this common cause and effect is still nowhere to be found in the medical textbooks. I worried about not knowing causation.

I had been trained to elicit clinical symptoms and signs and recognise clinical pictures, but actually what patients wanted to know was why. What did they need to do to put things right?

My standard line had been, ‘Well, let’s do a blood test and come back next week.’ This gave me time to rifle anxiously through my lecture notes and textbooks looking for answers.

The answers my patients wanted were not there. It came as a great relief to me to find out that my patients really did not mind me telling them I did not know!

Thankfully, they rated my ability to care higher than my ability to know all the answers.

Thankfully, too, they were happy to help me with my researches and act as willing guinea pigs with the dietary and lifestyle experiments that actually addressed the root causes of their problems.

The investigation of a patient should be like a detective story

90 per cent of the clues come from the history and 10 per cent from the examination. Tests may confirm or refute the hypothesis – because every diagnosis is just a hypothesis. Then, once the diagnosis has been further corroborated by test results, it has to be put to the ultimate test.

The ultimate test is response to treatment. Is the patient better? If not, then the diagnosis is wrong.

The word ‘doctor’ originates from the Latin verb ‘doce’, meaning ‘I teach’. My job is to teach my patients to heal themselves and supply them with the necessary tools to do so.

The doctor should be the interface between the hard science and the idiosyncratic patient – the practice of medicine is an Art.

Doctors routinely confuse the making of diagnoses with what are merely the descriptions of symptoms and clinical pictures, neither of which constitute a true diagnosis.

Examples include hypertension (aka high blood pressure), asthma, irritable bowel syndrome and arthritis, all of which terms are in fact descriptions of symptoms and none of which is an actual diagnosis of the underlying cause.

Clinical pictures include Parkinson’s disease, heart failure and Crohn’s disease, but these are convenient titles simply to slot patients into symptom-relieving categories which do little to reverse the disease process or afford a permanent cure.

Symptom-relieving medication postpones the day when major organ failures result. This is unsustainable medicine.

Doctors are dangerous. In the United States, healthcare-system-induced deaths are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. When doctors go on strike, death rates fall, and when they return to work, death rates rise.

However, this effect pales into insignificance when compared with the intellectual neglect demonstrated by doctors failing to understand, recognise and prevent the two major causes of death – namely, heart disease and cancer.

The worst example of this neglect is the nonsense propagated by doctors that a high-fat diet results in high cholesterol and consequently in heart and arterial disease – indeed, this has become the popular accepted wisdom.

Yet it is completely wrong! It is sugar, fruit sugar, refined carbohydrates and grains that are driving the epidemics of arterial disease, heart disease and cancer. The failure of the medical profession to recognise and act on this is a crime against humanity.

These collective failures mean that it is more dangerous to follow your doctor’s advice on diet and take symptom-suppressing medication than to smoke 20 cigarettes a day.

The greatest modern health hazard is metabolic syndrome. This is the clinical picture that results from Western diets and lifestyles. It is easy to diagnose – simply look in the supermarket trolley.

If it is largely composed of bread, cereals, biscuits, pasta, fruits, crisps, sweets, chocolate and alcohol then its owner, and his/her family, has metabolic syndrome.

The early symptoms include having to eat very often, not being satisfied with a meat and vegetable meal until a sweet pudding has been eaten, having to snack regularly and eating or drinking to relieve stress.

Fatigue, mood swings and insomnia follow. Doctors get involved when these apple-shaped people are found to have high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

There follows an inevitable progression to diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

We now know arthritis and osteoporosis are long-term effects of metabolic syndrome. Alzheimer’s disease too – this has been renamed ‘type III diabetes’.

Most doctors have no grasp of the above progression.

They fail to appreciate that carbohydrates are eaten in an addictive way.

The intellectually risible ‘food pyramid’ (which places carbohydrates at the bottom as staple foods, with meat and eggs at the top as occasional extras), is evolutionarily incorrect and upside down.

Symptom-suppressing drugs and lack of attention to causation together accelerate the underlying degeneration; people become patients on the slippery downhill slope to disease and death.

We experience symptoms for good reasons – they protect the body from damage.

Symptom-suppressing drugs allow us to function but do so at the expense of accelerating the underlying disease process. Pain-killing drugs mean joints are damaged faster and so surgery to replace joints is required sooner.

Symptom suppression and accelerated damage result in a snowballing effect of disease, and so more drugs are needed to suppress side-effects.

As just one example – acid-blockers to suppress gut symptoms relieve the discomfort but result in low stomach acid, which is a major risk factor for osteoporosis and stomach cancer.

Someone with a stone in their shoe would feel the pain and remove the stone.

By contrast a doctor would first prescribe a pain killer to restore normal walking. However, the stone would erode the foot and infection would follow – so an antibiotic would be prescribed.

Infection rarely clears where there is a foreign body and so gangrene would ensue, followed by amputation. Crutches or a wheelchair would be prescribed. The dignified, independent person would become a dependant patient facing long-term disability and premature death.

Again, the treatment of asthma has switched what was once a benign, self-limiting condition to a life-long pathology requiring life-long, symptom-suppressing medication.

Indeed, when asthma is poorly managed, patients die. Conventional treatment means first the blue inhaler, next the brown inhaler, then both. No thought is given to the causes of asthma, which may be allergy (to foods, inhalants or chemicals), pollution or hyperventilation.

If symptom-suppressing drugs are ineffective, then a further line of defence is to blame the patient. Psychiatrists call this ‘somatisation’ – people are imagining their symptoms.

This is a highly successful method of preventing these patients from ever returning to that ‘diagnosing’’ doctor again because the patient, quite rightly, loses faith in the doctor’s abilities and looks elsewhere for answers.

However, from the doctor’s perspective, they (usually) never see this patient again and so they wrongly assume that their ‘diagnosis’ of somatisation has satisfied the patient. The doctor is left with the false impression that the patient is cured and pats himself on the back for a job well done.

Worse than this though is what happens if the patient persists, returns to the doctor and does not accept the somatisation ‘diagnosis’. In that case, the patient is blamed, once again, but this time for being a ‘difficult’ patient, or even for having views which are resistant to the ‘cure’ being offered.

The phrase ‘false illness beliefs’ is a common one which is then thrown at such patients.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome – my area of special interest and subject of another one of my books, Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Enchephalitis – It’s Mitochondria, Not Hypochondria (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).

The complete failure of doctors to identify and treat the underlying physical causes of this condition is a disgrace to the medical profession. It has dehumanised hundreds of thousands of potentially healthy people and consigned them to a life of misery.

The undergraduate and postgraduate education of doctors converts intelligent, motivated, caring teenagers into unquestioning, narrow-minded, one-size-fits-all doctors. These young people have all these fine attributes ‘educated’ out of them.

Medical education is a brain-washing process which stupefies and petrifies the ability of the individual doctor to think independently. These disciplined minds become blinkered to see only avenues of treatment as laid down by the pharmaceutical symptom-suppressing approach.

The job of the doctor is to understand the science of the body and convert this ‘raw knowledge’ to the art of treating individual patients, each of whom has a unique constitution that requires a tailored approach.

Indeed, this is where the challenge, the pleasure and the fun of medicine lie. Nothing is so rewarding as the grateful patient whose health has been restored; health is like money –you don’t know you’ve got it until you’ve lost it!

Drug companies were launched on the back of antibiotics

Miraculous life-saving magic bullets which have saved millions of lives. This led to a general belief, happily adopted by the population, that all ills could be dealt with by pills.

Symptom-suppressing drugs were found to bring immediate relief of pain, fever and misery. Massive drug company profits ensued. In modern Western society, money trumps truth.

The drug companies used their new-found wealth to capture the intellectual and moral high ground through manipulation of drug trials.

Either such trials were set up to achieve a desired outcome or adverse outcomes were not published. Doctors achieve academic success and promotion through drug company bank-rolled research – often the drug company reps ghostwrite the academic papers.

If doctors fail to conform to the above expectations, they risk loss of job and status.

Conventional medicine increasingly is being bypassed by intelligent patients who wish to understand the underlying patho-physiological mechanisms which are causing their ill health.

Indeed, I often find myself writing the diagnosis of ‘PMITD’ in the margin of my clinical notes (‘patient more intelligent than doctor’).

In addressing all of these issues, I am whistle-blowing on current medical practice. This Emperor has no clothes.

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