Guesswork in Medicine

When you go to the doctor for help and treatment you probably assume that once he has decided what is wrong with you the doctor will automatically give you a treatment that is quite specific for your disease. Nothing could be further from the truth.

With a very few exceptions there are no certainties in medicine. What you will get will depend more on chance and your doctor’s personal prejudices than on science.

This problem isn’t a new one, of course.

In the preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, playwright George Bernard Shaw pointed out that during the first great epidemic of influenza which developed towards the end of the nineteenth century, a London evening newspaper sent a journalist posing as a patient to all the great consultants of the day.

The newspaper then published details of the advice and prescriptions offered by the consultants.

The whole proceeding was, almost inevitably, passionately denounced by the medical journals as an unforgivable breach of confidence, but the result was nevertheless fascinating: despite the fact that the journalist had complained of exactly the same symptoms to all the physicians, the advice and the prescriptions that were offered were all different.

Nothing has changed.

Even in these days of apparently high technology medicine, there are many — almost endless — variations in the treatments preferred by different doctors.

Doctors offer different prescriptions for exactly the same symptoms, they keep patients in hospital for vastly different lengths of time, and they perform different operations on patients with apparently identical problems.

There are, it seems, no certainties in medicine.

As one doctor put it rather concisely, your treatment (and possibly your future) depends entirely on which way you turn at the end of the hospital corridor. Go left and you will end up having a six hour operation. Go right and you’ll go home with a prescription for pills.

There is, indeed, ample evidence now available to show that the type of treatment a patient gets when he visits a doctor will depend not so much on the symptoms he describes but on the doctor he consults.

So, for example, consider what happened when 430 family doctors were asked to explain how they would treat a 35-year-old accountant complaining of backache brought on by digging in his garden.

The ‘case history’ was deliberately made fairly precise.

However, despite this precision, the recommended treatments varied enormously.

Less than a quarter of the doctors said that they would definitely prescribe a painkiller. Nearly ten per cent said that they hardly ever prescribed a painkiller in such circumstances. Eight percent of the doctors said they might refer the patient to hospital but fifty two percent said that they never referred such patients to hospital. Forty eight percent said that they usually advised bed rest for up to one week while eight percent said that they usually advised bed rest for between one and four weeks.

Around ten percent of the doctors said that there was a good chance that they would refer the patient to an osteopath but the other ninety percent said that they hardly ever, or never, referred patients to osteopaths.

Another survey, involving 700 general practitioners, showed that twelve percent of family doctors might be willing to prescribe a sleeping tablet without even seeing the patient involved. Over half the general practitioners confessed that they would prescribe a cough medicine without seeing a patient and nearly two thirds of the doctors said that they might prescribe an antacid without a patient needing to come into the surgery.

A third survey of over 400 doctors showed that some doctors never provide their patients with any contraceptive advice at all.

Visit three doctors with symptoms of cystitis.

One will give you an antibiotic for five days. One will give you an antibiotic for seven days. And one will give you an antibiotic for ten days. They are all guessing.

Despite all these variations in the type of treatment offered, most doctors in practice seem to be convinced that their treatment methods are beyond question.

Many general practitioners and hospital doctors announce their decisions as though they are carved on stone.

But on the basis of the evidence it seems that most decisions about how patients should be treated are based on nothing more scientific than guesswork, personal experience, intuition and prejudice. And fashion.

See more here: vernoncoleman.org

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Comments (15)

  • Avatar

    Hubert

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    I completely agree. I have never trusted GP’s. They use us as guniee pigs in a never ending social medical experiment.

    Reply

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    JaKo

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    There are the ‘old school’ MD’s and there is this ‘new approach’.
    The old-school relied on a true hands-on examination, personal experience and associated intuition — one of those MD’s I know says: “I often knew what was wrong with a patient as they walked into my office.”
    While the most up-to-date ways are void of human experience and clearly, as I see it, geared toward a high-tech robotic system. This has began a good generation ago; now, whether it Is a part of dehumanizing medicine to weed out a ‘human error’ or part of a grand plan eliminating most of humanity — I don’t know, but anything’s possible and nothing should ‘surprise’ us.
    Cheers, JaKo

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Alan

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    shortly after I moved to my present house I was at the local barber and there was a conversation about the doctor I was registered with. The customer said he had asked the doctor how he kept so well after dealing with ill patients. The doctor’s reply was I avoid doctors. Confirming perhaps they are pointless.

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Bevan

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    It looks as though all we need to do is go to ‘Dr. Google’.

    Reply

  • Avatar

    sir_isO

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    I dunno about the guesswork in medicine so much. I mean, it’s obvious…

    But then,

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2020/06/12/willowbrook-scandal-hepatitis-experiments-hideous-truths-of-testing-vaccines-on-humans/?sh=31706bd8279c

    ” From 1955 to 1970, the children were injected with the virus itself or made to drink chocolate milk mixed with feces from other infected children in order to study their immunity.”

    I don’t need “guesswork” to know what vaccines, pharma, healthcare, “viruses” are about.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      sir_isO

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      If you are part of the modern “healthcare” system, we will not be associating. No pharma whatsoever, no vaccines, don’t care. I’ll die without you, thanks.

      Reply

    • Avatar

      Wojt

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      Interesting Forbes article about dr. Krugman..thanks.

      Reply

  • Avatar

    Graham

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    After complaining about his GP not giving him a correct diagnosis, a friend of ours made the statement “That’s why they call a GP’s surgery a ‘Practice’!”

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Tom

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    It is more frightening to me to have to depend on the modern stone-age medical mafia to help get you well than is having the actual disease they may be treating.

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Andrew Pilkington

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    My physical Body leaves me no opportunity whatsoever but to be totally reliant on this whole corrupt system.
    But we have the Doctors who diagnose COVID-19, and/or record “Death by/with COVID-19”, and the Death Certificates themselves, which make it impossible for the likes of me, to explain anything other than what they have have been told or seen in writing, for themselves. Be

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Andrew Pilkington

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    I apologise.
    … Because these people would obviously Never, in a million years, tell a lie, but obviously nut jobs like me must be making it all up and lying through our teeth?
    All of which, in turn, leaves us open to Ridicule and Hostility, even from other members of our own Families?

    Maybe there should be a database kept, containing all the details, for each of these so-called “Trusted” Officials, for their part in this Covid Agenda, because, one way or another, they are either unqualified to make such a diagnosis, incompetent, or a bought & paid for Enemy of Humanity, owned by the Government’s of Occupation’s Satanic Cabal Overlords?

    Great article, as always. Many thanks, much appreciated.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      sir_isO

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      “…or a bought & paid for Enemy of Humanity, owned by the Government’s of Occupation’s Satanic Cabal Overlords?”

      You may have seen me mention the Qlippoth, which would be exactly what you describe there. Yes, that’s what they are. Anti-life industrial cultists, zombiedronerobosheepclone. It seems to me that they get “possessed” when they’re souled out, like assimilated borg.

      There’s just too much from actual experience (particularly lately) for me to ignore it.

      And I just read something about that yesterday said by Dietrich Klinghardt, which reads to me like the same thing…

      “…the people that come under the influence of something absolutely dark and destructive … and I do believe it’s possible that enough scientists and politicians have come under the influence of those higher fields and are acting according to it, actually not knowing on a human level why they’re doing what they’re doing.”

      Reply

      • Avatar

        sir_isO

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        Even fairly recently, I encountered some of those “things” at a clinic.

        I went to a clinic because of excruciating pain (nervous system damage), so I’m not admitted there, not signed in. A doctor speaks with me while I’m waiting, and I describe the pain and ask for anti-inflammatories. Doctor disappears. I sit there for a bit too long, and I can’t stand the pain. So I figure “Nah I’m wasting my time”, get up and walk out.

        As I’m busy walking away that doctor returns and says I shouldn’t go, I mean I notice he’s “off”. I’m like “Nah, it’s cool, I’m out”. So I keep walking, that doctor then, tells the security guards to stop me.

        Eventually I get to the road, with two security guards hanging on to me. By now, off their premises. I’m also reeeaally tired at that point (days of no sleep, exhausted). That did not concern them much as I was practically assaulted and dragged back into the clinic.

        They strap me down, and 6 doctors talk between themselves which drugs each of them would like to administer me with. No diagnoses, either. They just injected me with a bunch of crap of their choosing.

        I wake up, in a completely different hospital. Found out I had a lumbar puncture and they’re giving me more drugs.

        And while I really did not appreciate the “healthcare” system before that (because of massive amounts of experience with them through my life), at that point I decided I will never associate with “healthcare”.

        They are sick fucks. And even potentially “good” doctors are fundamentally undermined by pharma and such. That is, what could be a good doctor is immediately a shit doctor when that doctor reverts to pharma toxins.

        Reply

  • Avatar

    sir_isO

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    Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world.

    Is he disillusioned now? Because this is what he’s posting these days:
    https://z3news.com/w/how-to-dull-peoples-minds-and-then-kill-them-dr-dietrich-klinghardt/

    I really don’t know much about Klinghardt, or what he does, but some of what he says seems awfully familiar to me.

    Reply

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