The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine

by James Le Fanu

  4.Spencer King, ‘Angioplasty from Bedside to Bench’, Circulation, 1996, Vol. 93, pp. 1621–9.

  5.Richard Mueller and Timothy Sanborn, ‘The History of Interventional Cardiology: Cardiac Catheterisation, Angioplasty and Related Interventions’, American Heart Journal, 1995, Vol. 129, pp. 146–72.

  6.Josef Rosch, Frederick Keller and John Kaufman, ‘The Birth, Early Years and Future of Interventional Radiology’, Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology, 2003, Vol. 14, pp. 841–53.

  7.J. Eduardo Souza, Marco Costa et al., ‘New Frontiers in Interventional Cardiology’, Circulation, 2005, Vol. 111, pp. 601–81.

  8.Carl Pepine, Xavier Prida et al., ‘Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty in Acute Myocardial Infarction’, American Heart Journal, 1984, Vol. 107, pp. 820–22.

  9.Maude Page, Michel Doucet et al., ‘Temporal Trends in Revascularisation and Outcomes After Acute Myocardial Infarction Among the Very Elderly’, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2010, Vol. 182, pp. 1415–20.

  10.A. Melzer, ‘Endoscopic Instruments – Conventional and Intelligent’, Endosurgery, eds. J. Tooli, D. Gosset and J. G. Hunter (Philadelphia, PA: Churchill Livingstone, 1997).

  11.Office of Health Economics, Compendium Health Statistics 20th Edition (Office of Health Economics, 2010).

  12.‘Dr Foster’, ‘Trends in Day Surgery Rates’, BMJ, 2005, Vol. 331,p. 803.

  13.Edward Phillips, Morris Franklin et al., ‘Laparoscopic Colectomy’, Annals of Surgery, 1992, Vol. 216, pp. 703–05.

  14.Anthony Senagore, Martin Luchtefeld et al., ‘Open Colectomy Versus Laparoscopic Colectomy: Are There Differences’, American Surgeon, 1993, Vol. 59, pp. 549–53.

  15.L. Bardram, P. Funch-Jensen and H. Kehlet, ‘Rapid Rehabilitation in Elderly Patients After Laparoscopic Colonic Resection’, British Journal of Surgery, 2000, Vol. 87, pp. 1540–5. See also L. Basse, D. H. Jakobsen et al., ‘Functional Recovery After Open Versus Laparoscopic Colonic Resection: A Randomised, Blind Study’, Annals of Surgery, 2005, Vol. 241, pp. 416–23.

  16.D. G. Jayne, H. C. Thorpe, J. Copeland et al., ‘Five Year Follow-up of the Medical Research Council, CLASICC Trial of Laparoscopically Assisted Versus Open Surgery for Colo-Rectal Cancer’, British Journal of Surgery, 2010, Vol. 97, pp. 1638–45.

  17.Garth Ballantyne, Jacques Marescaux and Pier Giulianotti (eds), Primer of Robotic and Telerobotic Surgery (Philadelphia, PD: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2005).

  18.George Tibault, ‘Too Old For What?’, NEJM, 1993, Vol. 328, pp. 946–50.

  19.Matthew Bacchetta, Wilson Ko et al., ‘Outcomes of Cardiac Surgery in Nonagenarians: A Ten-Year Experience’, Annals of Thoracic Surgery, 2003, Vol. 75, pp. 1215–20. See also Padmini Varadarajan, Nikhil Kapoor and Ramesh Bansal, ‘Survival in Elderly Patients with a Severe Aortic Stenosis is Dramatically Improved by Aortic Valve Replacement’, European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, 2006, Vol. 30, pp. 722–27. See also J. Unsworth-White, ‘Cardiac Surgery for the Elderly: A Surgeon’s Perspective’, Heart, Vol. 82, p. 125.

  20.Raymond Tesi et al., ‘Renal Transplantation in Older People’, The Lancet, 1994, Vol. 343, pp. 461–4.

  21.Stephen Preston, Ashley Southall, Mark Nel et al., ‘Geriatric Surgery is About Disease Not Age’, JRSM, 2008, Vol. 101, pp. 409–15.

  2: The New Genetics Triumphant – or Not

  REFERENCES

  1.Kevin Davies, Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2001). See also John Sulston and Georgina Ferry, The Common Thread: A History of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome (Bantam Press, 2002); Nicholas Wade, Life Script (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

  2.International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, ‘Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome’, Nature, 2001, Vol. 409, pp. 890–921; J. Craig Venter, ‘The Sequence of the Human Genome’, Science, 2001, Vol. 291, pp. 1304–49.

  3.Francis Collins and Victor McKusick, ‘Implications of the Human Genome Project for Medical Science’, Chalmer, 2001, Vol. 285, pp. 540–4.

  4.J. Craig Venter, ‘Multiple Personal Genomes Await’, Nature, 2010, Vol. 464, pp. 676–8.

  5.‘Science in the Petabyte Era’, Nature, 2008, Vol. 455, p. VII.

  6.Francis Collins, ‘Has the Revolution Arrived?’, Nature, 2010, Vol. 464, pp. 674–6.

  7.Erika Check Hayden, ‘Life is Complicated’, Nature, 2010, Vol. 464, pp. 664–7.

  8.Phillip Ball, ‘Bursting the Genomics Bubble’, Nature, 2010, doi: 10.1038/news.2010.155.

  9.Editorial, ‘The Human Genome Project: Ten Years Later’, The Lancet, 2010, Vol. 375, p. 2194.

  10.Nicholas Wade, ‘A Decade Later, Genetic Map Yields Few New Cures’, New York Times, Vol. 12, 2010.

  11.Steve Jones, ‘One Gene Will Not Reveal All Life’s Secrets’, Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2009.

  12.Brendan Maher, ‘The Case of the Missing Heritability’, Nature, 2008, Vol. 456, pp. 18–21.

  13.Peter Donnelly, ‘Progress and Challenges in Genome-Wide Association Studies in Humans’, Nature, 2008, Vol. 456, pp. 728–34. See also Teri Manolio, ‘Genome Wide Association Studies and Assessment of the Risk of Disease’, NEJM, 2010, Vol. 363, pp. 136–76.

  14.Anne Bocock, ‘Guilt by Association’, Nature, 2007, Vol. 447, pp. 645–9.

  15.Teri Manolio, ‘Cohort Studies and the Genetics of Complex Disease’, Nature Genetics, 2009, Vol. 41, pp. 5–10.

  16.Jeffrey Barrett, Sarah Hansoul and Dan Nicolae, ‘Genome-Wide Association Defines more than Thirty Distinct Susceptibility Loci for Crohns Disease’, Nature Genetics, 2008, Vol. 40, pp. 955–61.

  17.D. F. Gutbjartsson, G. B. Walters and G. Thorleifsson, ‘Many Sequence Variance Affecting Diversity of Adult Human Height’, Nature Genetics, 2008, Vol. 40, pp. 609–15. See also Michael Weedon and Timothy Frayling, ‘Reaching New Heights: Insights into the Genetics of Human Stature’, Trends in Genetics, pp. 695–700.

  18.Steve Jones, ‘One Gene Will Not Reveal All Life’s Secrets’, Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2009.

  19.Amy McGuire, Mildred Chow et al., ‘The Future of Personal Genomics’, Science, 2007, Vol. 317, p. 1687.

  20.Emmanouil Dermitzakis and Andrew Clark, ‘Life After GWA Studies’, Science, 2009, Vol. 326, pp. 239–40.

  21.Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  22.J. Riboul, P. Waglio, N. Tzellas et al., ‘The Gene Number Dilemma: Direct Evidence for at Least 19,000 Protein-encoding Genes in C. elegans, and Implications for the Human Genome’, Nature Genetics, 2001, Vol. 27, p. 3.

  23.Sean Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 2005).

  24.James Le Fanu, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (HarperCollins, 2009).

  3. Big Pharma Rules

  REFERENCES

  1.Jerome Kassirer, On the Take (OUP, 2004); Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (New York: Picador, 2008); John Abramson, Overdosed America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008); Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: How Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Bloomsbury, 2008); Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients (New York: Nation Books, 2005).

  2.Marcia Angell, The Truth about the Drug Companies, How They Deceive Us and What to Do About it. (New York: Random House, 2004).

  3.Ibid.

  4.Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassells, Selling Sickness (New York: Nation Books, 2005).

  5.Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds (New York: Picadfor, 2008).

  6.Vince Parry, ‘The Art of Branding a Condition’, Medical Marketing and Media, 2003, Vol. 38, pp. 43–8.

  7.Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath and David Henry, ‘Selling Sickness: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Disease Mongering’, BMJ, 2002, Vol. 324, pp. 886–90.

  8.Marcia Angell, The T
ruth About the Drug Companies (New York: Random House, 2004).

  9.S. Heres et al., ‘Why Olanzapine Beats Risperidone, Risperidone Beats Quetiapine, and Quetiapine Beats Olanzapine’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 2006, Vol. 163, pp. 185–294.

  10.Marcia Angell, ‘Is Academic Medicine for Sale?’, NEJM, 2000, Vol. 342, pp. 1516–18.

  11.Martin Keller, James McCullough, Daniel Kline et al., ‘A Comparison of Nefazodone, the Cognitive Behavioural-Analysis System of Psychotherapy, and Their Combination for the Treatment of Chronic Depression’, NEJM, 2000, Vol. 342, pp. 1462–71.

  12.Thomas Bodenheimer, ‘Uneasy Alliance: Clinical Investigators in the Pharmaceutical Industry’, BMJ, 2000, Vol. 342, pp. 1539–41.

  13.Irvine Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs (Bodley Head, 2009).

  14.William Appleton, Prozac and the New Antidepressants (New York: Penguin, 2000).

  15.R. Kessler, K. McGonagle, S. Zhao et al., ‘Lifetime and Twelve Month Prevalence of DSM – III – R Psychiatric Disorders in the United States. Results from the National Comorbility Survey’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 1994, Vol. 51, pp. 8–19.

  16.Alisdair Santhouse, ‘The Person in the Patient’, BMJ, 428:a2262.

  17.Quoted in Jackie Law, Big Pharma: How the World’s Biggest Drug Companies Control Illness (Constable, 2006).

  18.Cheryll Barron, ‘Big Pharma Snared by Net’, Observer, 26 September 2004.

  19.Jackie Law, Big Pharma: How the World’s Biggest Drug Companies Control Illness (Constable, 2006).

  20.Irvine Kirsch, 2009, The Emperor’s New Drugs (Bodley Head, 2009).

  21.Dr Malcolm Kendrick, The Great Cholesterol Con (John Blake, 2007).

  22.C. T. T. Collaborators, ‘Efficacy and Safety of Cholesterol-Lowering Treatment: Prospective Meta-Analysis of Data from 90,056 Participants by the Incidents of Fourteen Randomised Trials of Statins’, The Lancet, 2005, Vol. 366, pp. 1267–72.

  23.‘Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults. Executive Summary of The Third Report of The National Cholesterol Education Programme’, JAMA, 2001, Vol. 285, pp. 2486–97.

  24.D. Ricks and R. Raben, ‘Cholesterol Guidelines, Drugs Panelist Links Under Fire’, Newsday,15 July 2003.

  25.J. Abramson and J. M. Wright, ‘Are Lipid Lowering Guide Lines Evidence-Based?’, The Lancet, 2007, Vol. 369, pp. 168–9.

  26.Uffe Rabnskov, Paul Rosch, Morley Sutter and Mark Houston, ‘Should We Lower Cholesterol as Much as Possible?’, BMJ, 2006, Vol. 232, pp. 1330–2.

  27.D. S. King, A. J. Wilburn, M. R. Wofford et al., ‘Cognitive Impairment Associated with Atorvastatin and Simvastatin’, Pharmacotherapy, 2003, Vol. 23, pp. 1623–7.

  28.L. R. Wagstaff, W. Mitton et al., ‘Statin-Associated Memory Loss: Analysis of Sixty Case Reports and Review of the Literature’, Pharmacotherapy, 2003, Vol. 23, pp. 871–80.

  29.Christopher Hudson, ‘The Wonder Drug That Stole My Memory’, Daily Telegraph, 12th March 2009.

  30.D. Gaist, U. Jeppesen, M. Andersen et al., ‘Statins and Risk of Polyneuropathy: A Case Controlled Study’, Neurology, 2002, Vol. 58, pp. 123–7.

  31.Julia Hippisley-Cox and Carol Coupland, ‘Unintended Effects of Statins in Men and Women in England and Wales’, BMJ, 2010, Vol. 340, p. 1232.

  32.Kausik Ray, S. R. K. Seshasai, Sephat Erqou et al., ‘Statins and All-Cause Mortality in High-Risk Primary Prevention’, Archives of Internal Medicine, 2010, Vol. 170, pp. 1024–31.

  33.Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study Group, ‘Randomised Trial and Cholesterol Lowering in 4444 Patients with Chronic Heart Disease: The Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study (4S)’, The Lancet, 1994, Vol. 344, pp. 1383–9. See also Uffe Ravnskov, The Cholesterol Myths (Washington, DC: New Trend Publishing, 2002).

  34.Jack Scannell, Alex Blanckley, Jeremy Redenius and Lisa Clive, ‘The Long View: Pharma R&D Productivity – When the Cures Fail, it Makes Sense to Check the Diagnosis’, Bernstein Research,30 September 2010.

  35.Mark Matthieu (ed.), Parexel’s Bio/Pharmaceutical R&D Statistical Source Book, 2009/2010 (Paraxel International Corporation, 2009).

  36.Jack Scannell et al., ‘The Long View’, Bernstein Research, 30 September 2010.

  37.Steven Paul, Daniel Mytelka, Christopher Dunwiddie et al., ‘How to Improve R&D Productivity: The Pharmaceutical Industry’s Grand Challenge’, Nature Reviews: Drug Discovery, 2010, Vol. 9, pp. 203–14.

  38.Pat Price, Karol Sikora and Tim Illidge, Treatment of Cancer, (5th edn), (Hodder Arnold, 2009).

  39.Vincent deVita and Edward Chu, ‘A History of Cancer Chemotherapy’, Cancer Research, 2008, Vol. 68, pp. 8643–53.

  40.Martine Piccart-Gebhart, Marion Procter, Brian Layland-Jones et al., ‘Trastuzumab after Adjuvant Chemotherapy in HER2-Positive Breast Cancer’, NEJM, 2005, Vol. 353, pp. 1659–72. See also Harold Burstein, ‘The Distinctive Nature of HER2-Positive Breast Cancers’, NEJM, 2005, Vol 353, pp1652–4.

  41.David Howard, John Kauh, Joseph Lipscomb, ‘The Value of New Chemotherapeutic Agents for Metastatic Colorectal Cancer’, Archives of Internal Medicine, 2010, Vol. 170, pp. 537–42.

  42.Deborah Schrag, ‘The Price Tag on Progress – Chemotherapy for Colorectal Cancer’, NEJM, 2004, Vol. 351, pp. 317–20.

  43.Silvio Garattini and Vittorio Bertele, ‘Efficacy, Safety and Cost of New Anti Cancer Drugs’, BMJ, 2002, Vol. 325, pp. 269–71.

  44.Karol Sikora, personal communication.

  45.Catherine Arnst, ‘Soaring Cancer Drug Costs May Cripple Medicare’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 27 January 2009.

  4: The Next Ten Years

  REFERENCES

  1.B. G. Charlton and P. Andras, ‘Medical Research Funding May Have Overexpanded and Be Due for Collapse’, QJM, 2005, Vol. 98, pp. 53–5.

  2.Jonathan Rees, ‘Complex Disease and the New Clinical Sciences’, Science, 2002, Vol. 296, pp. 698–700.

  3.Jeffrey Bennetzen, ‘Biology and the Beasts: Individual Investigator-driven Research in the Mega Projects Era’, Trends in Genetics, 2008, Vol. 25, pp. 57–61.

  4.Morton Meyers, Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs (New York: RK Publishing, 2007).

  5.Marcia Angell, ‘Big Pharma, Bad Medicine’, http://bostonreview.net/br35.3/angell.php.

  APPENDICES

  I: Rheumatology

  REFERENCES

  1.George Kersley, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, 1990, Vol. 49, p. 734. See also George Kersley and John Glyn, A Concise International History of Rheumatology and Rehabilitation (Royal Society of Medicine Press, 1991); Geoffrey Storey, A History of Physical Medicine (Royal Society of Medicine Press, 1992).

  2.H. M. Rose et al., ‘Agglutination of Normal and Sensitised Sheep Erythrocytes by Sera of Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis’, Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, 1948, Vol. 68, p. 1. See also M. M. Hargraves et al., ‘The Tart Cell and LE Cell’, PSMMC, 1948, Vol. 23, p. 25.

  3.E. G. L. Bywaters, ‘The History of Paediatric Rheumatology’, Arthritis and Rheumatism, 1977, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 145. See also R.C. Lancefield, ‘Haemolytic Streptococcus’, Harvey Lectures, 1940–41, Vol. 36, p. 251.

  4.ERC, ‘Trial of Gold in Rheumatoid Arthritis’, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, 1960, Vol. 9, p. 95. See also J. Forestier, ‘Gold Treatment in Rheumatoid Arthritis’, Revue du Rhumatisme et des maladies osteo-articulaires, 1935, Vol. 2, p. 472.

  5.Derek Freeland et al., ‘Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis With Phenylbutazone’, The Lancet, 1953, Vol. 1, p. 1227. See also Walter Sneader, Drug Discovery: The Evolution of Modern Medicines (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1985).

  6.J. S. Nixon, Ibuprofen: Chronicles of Drug Discovery (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1982).

  7.Francis Page, ‘Treatment of Lupus Erythematosus With Mepacrine’, The Lancet, 1951, Vol. 2, pp. 755–8.

  8.A. L. Scherbel et al., ‘Comparison of Effects of Two Antimalarial Agents in Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis’, Cleveland Clinic Quarterly, 1957, Vol. 24, p. 98.


  9.I. A. Jaffe, AJM, 1963, Vol. 75, p. 63.

  10.W. Dameshek, ‘The Use of Folic Acid Antagonists in the Treatment of Acute Leukaemia’, Blood, 1949, Vol. 4, p. 167. See also W. F. Edmundson and W. B. Guy, ‘Treatment of Psoriasis With Folic Acid Antagonists’, Archives of Dermatology, 1938, Vol. 78, p. 200; W. M. O’Brien et al., ‘Clinical Trial of Methotrexate in Psoriatic and Rheumatoid Arthritis’, Arthritis and Rheumatism, 1962, Vol. 5, p. 312.

  11.R. W. Rundles, ‘Allopurinol in the Treatment of Gout’, Annals of Internal Medicine, 1966, Vol. 64, pp. 229–58.

  II: The Pharmacological Revolution in Psychiatry

  REFERENCES

  1.Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker, Annales Medico-Psychologiques, 1952, Vol. 110, pp. 267–73.

  2.Hans J. Eysenck, ‘The Effects of Psychotherapy: An Evaluation’, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1952, Vol. 16, pp. 319–24.

  3.Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).

  4.John Cade, ‘Lithium Salt in the Treatment of Psychotic Excitement’, Medical Journal of Australia, 3 September 1949, pp. 349–51.

  5.John Cade, ‘The Story of Lithium’, Discoveries in Biological Psychiatry, ed. F. Ayd (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1970). See also F. Neil Johnson, The History of Lithium Therapy (Macmillan, 1984).

  6.D. Rice, personal communication, in F. Neil Johnson, The History of Lithium Therapy (Macmillan, 1984).

  7.A. C. Corcoran et al., ‘Lithium Poisoning from the Use of Salt Substitutes’, JAMA, 1949, Vol. 139, pp. 685–8.

  8.Mogens Schou, ‘Lithium: Personal Reminiscences’, Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottawa, 1989, Vol. 14, pp. 260–2.

  9.Roland Kuhn, Schweizerisch Medizinisch Wochenschrift, 1957, Vol. 87, pp. 1135–40.

  10.A. Todrick, ‘Imipramine and 5HT Reuptake Inhibition: A Narrative’, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 1991, Vol. 5, pp. 263–7.

  11.Brian B. Molloy, ‘The Discovery of Fluoxetine’, Pharmaceutical News, 1994, Vol. 1, pp. 6–10.