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Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O
"Christopher Wanjek uses a take-no-prisoners approach in debunking the outrageous nonsense being heaped on a gullible public in the name of science and medicine. Wanjek writes with clarity, humor, and humanity, and simultaneously informs and entertains."
-Dr. Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine; monthly columnist,
Scientific American; author of Why People Believe Weird Things
Prehistoric humans believed cedar ashes and incantations could cure a head injury. Ancient Egyptians believed the heart was the center of thought, the liver produced blood, and the brain cooled the body. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was a big fan of bloodletting. Today, we are still plagued by countless medical myths and misconceptions. Bad Medicine sets the record straight by debunking widely held yet incorrect notions of how the body works, from cold cures to vaccination fears.
Clear, accessible, and highly entertaining, Bad Medicine dispels such medical convictions as:
* You only use 10% of your brain: CAT, PET, and MRI scans all prove that there are no inactive regions of the brain . . . not even during sleep.
* Sitting too close to the TV causes nearsightedness: Your mother was wrong. Most likely, an already nearsighted child sits close to see better.
* Eating junk food will make your face break out: Acne is caused by dead skin cells, hormones, and bacteria, not from a pizza with everything on it.
* If you don't dress warmly, you'll catch a cold: Cold viruses are the true and only cause of colds.
Protect yourself and the ones you love from bad medicine-the brain you save may be your own.
-Dr. Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine; monthly columnist,
Scientific American; author of Why People Believe Weird Things
Prehistoric humans believed cedar ashes and incantations could cure a head injury. Ancient Egyptians believed the heart was the center of thought, the liver produced blood, and the brain cooled the body. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was a big fan of bloodletting. Today, we are still plagued by countless medical myths and misconceptions. Bad Medicine sets the record straight by debunking widely held yet incorrect notions of how the body works, from cold cures to vaccination fears.
Clear, accessible, and highly entertaining, Bad Medicine dispels such medical convictions as:
* You only use 10% of your brain: CAT, PET, and MRI scans all prove that there are no inactive regions of the brain . . . not even during sleep.
* Sitting too close to the TV causes nearsightedness: Your mother was wrong. Most likely, an already nearsighted child sits close to see better.
* Eating junk food will make your face break out: Acne is caused by dead skin cells, hormones, and bacteria, not from a pizza with everything on it.
* If you don't dress warmly, you'll catch a cold: Cold viruses are the true and only cause of colds.
Protect yourself and the ones you love from bad medicine-the brain you save may be your own.
288 pages, Paperback
First published October 17, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 16, 2016
Better than not, and more interesting than not, usually. The biggest issue is that it reads far more like a collection of articles or essays (it is not) than a full length book that was written as such. Also, and this is not the book's fault, many of the topics, like homeopathy, have had better, more interesting, and more thorough rebuttals since.
September 2, 2019
Readable survey of pseudoscientific ideas and practices
Actually some of the medicine debunked here is merely not effective beyond the placebo. Homeopathy is a case in point. Wanjek includes it because he believes that people relying on such medicines tend to deprive themselves of real medicine. This may indeed be the case sometimes, but more often people turn to alternative medicine when conventional medicine fails. Clearly if one has an affliction that can be cured by conventional medicine and instead flies to the Philippines for some fake surgery, this is not good. On the other hand if the medical profession has stopped treating somebody's cancer, it is understandable that one might try anything. Still even this is sad since such desperation rewards quacks and charlatans.
But this book is about much more than bad medicine. Wanjek actually takes on a wide range of phoniness from bad TV health reporting to urban witch doctors, from why we go gray to why the Rambo-like violence in movies is unrealistic and dangerously misleading In fact, Wanjek's book is the widest ranging book of its kind that I have read and I've read a few; furthermore as far as I can tell he is right on the money.
Some things I learned with interest: what the appendix actually does, and where the silly idea that we only use ten percent of our brain comes from, and why "Vitamin O" (oxygen) is just so much bunk. Also: how health studies are conducted well and not so well and how they can be fudged, and why it is highly unlikely that Julius Caesar was born of a Caesarean section since his mother lived on and in those days nobody, but nobody ever survived such an operation.
There is also of course a lot that I already knew including the fact that the black plague is still with us, and that cold weather does not cause colds, and that antibiotics are useless against viruses (such as flu or cold viruses), and that radiation used in radiating food does not contaminate the food anymore than baking the food in a conventional oven does.
Wanjek even changed my mind on a couple of things, and for these old eyes to see new light is a rarity. I used to give Chinese medical practice and India's ancient ayurvedic treatments the benefit of the doubt believing that all those many centuries of experience counted for something. However, Wanjek makes the very excellent point that such medical traditions existed not because they were effective but because there was nothing else. He adds that conventional medicine is largely replacing these practices in their very countries of origin. Wanjek adds in implication that the entire history of medical practice up to (and to some very real extent) including modern times has been one long exercise in malpractice and painful ignorance. What horrors are we practicing on our patients today, one might ask, horrors to compare with bloodletting and Mayan brain surgery? Try chemotherapy for cancer, Wanjek suggests.
The only fault I could find with the book is that in his discussion of why we are getting so fat and in his eagerness to nail the Atkins diet to the wall he failed to mention so-called "carbohydrate intolerance." (Maybe he doesn't like the phrase.) I want to therefore remind him that in the prehistory there were not only no fatted calves or choice cuts of beef but no amber waves of grain either. Humans have little tolerance for living with a lot of easily gotten carbs anymore than they have genes for resisting fat-laden foods. Before the rise of agriculture, gathering wheat and other grain plants was such a labor-intensive process that not even Momma Cass could get fat from eating grass seeds.
Bottom line: the most comprehensive book on pseudoscience that I have read in recent years and one of the most readable.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Actually some of the medicine debunked here is merely not effective beyond the placebo. Homeopathy is a case in point. Wanjek includes it because he believes that people relying on such medicines tend to deprive themselves of real medicine. This may indeed be the case sometimes, but more often people turn to alternative medicine when conventional medicine fails. Clearly if one has an affliction that can be cured by conventional medicine and instead flies to the Philippines for some fake surgery, this is not good. On the other hand if the medical profession has stopped treating somebody's cancer, it is understandable that one might try anything. Still even this is sad since such desperation rewards quacks and charlatans.
But this book is about much more than bad medicine. Wanjek actually takes on a wide range of phoniness from bad TV health reporting to urban witch doctors, from why we go gray to why the Rambo-like violence in movies is unrealistic and dangerously misleading In fact, Wanjek's book is the widest ranging book of its kind that I have read and I've read a few; furthermore as far as I can tell he is right on the money.
Some things I learned with interest: what the appendix actually does, and where the silly idea that we only use ten percent of our brain comes from, and why "Vitamin O" (oxygen) is just so much bunk. Also: how health studies are conducted well and not so well and how they can be fudged, and why it is highly unlikely that Julius Caesar was born of a Caesarean section since his mother lived on and in those days nobody, but nobody ever survived such an operation.
There is also of course a lot that I already knew including the fact that the black plague is still with us, and that cold weather does not cause colds, and that antibiotics are useless against viruses (such as flu or cold viruses), and that radiation used in radiating food does not contaminate the food anymore than baking the food in a conventional oven does.
Wanjek even changed my mind on a couple of things, and for these old eyes to see new light is a rarity. I used to give Chinese medical practice and India's ancient ayurvedic treatments the benefit of the doubt believing that all those many centuries of experience counted for something. However, Wanjek makes the very excellent point that such medical traditions existed not because they were effective but because there was nothing else. He adds that conventional medicine is largely replacing these practices in their very countries of origin. Wanjek adds in implication that the entire history of medical practice up to (and to some very real extent) including modern times has been one long exercise in malpractice and painful ignorance. What horrors are we practicing on our patients today, one might ask, horrors to compare with bloodletting and Mayan brain surgery? Try chemotherapy for cancer, Wanjek suggests.
The only fault I could find with the book is that in his discussion of why we are getting so fat and in his eagerness to nail the Atkins diet to the wall he failed to mention so-called "carbohydrate intolerance." (Maybe he doesn't like the phrase.) I want to therefore remind him that in the prehistory there were not only no fatted calves or choice cuts of beef but no amber waves of grain either. Humans have little tolerance for living with a lot of easily gotten carbs anymore than they have genes for resisting fat-laden foods. Before the rise of agriculture, gathering wheat and other grain plants was such a labor-intensive process that not even Momma Cass could get fat from eating grass seeds.
Bottom line: the most comprehensive book on pseudoscience that I have read in recent years and one of the most readable.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
July 24, 2016
Did you know Phil Plait's
Bad Astronomy
was only the first in a series of Bad [noun] books? No, me neither.
The series seems to have foundered after the second one, though I'm not sure if that's because they ran out of topics (Bad Physics and Bad Biology would probably resemble the previous two too much, and I don't even know what a Bad Chemistry book would look like) or because Bad Medicine had disappointing sales.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were the latter: Bad Medicine could be better than it is. If the writing in Bad Astronomy is uneven, Plait can be forgiven because he was an actual astronomer with—at the time—relatively little experience in writing for the general public; Wanjek, though, is a professional journalist (though he also has a degree in public health) who had been writing for the general public in mainstream publications for years. His constant forced jokes may be a matter of taste (``People use all of their brain, not just 10%. But something something television! Yuck yuck.'') and the lack of coherence between chapters can be blamed on it being his first book-length work (and Wiley being awful about providing editors), but the stilted pacing of the prose itself is hard to defend.
The content itself is mostly fine, I guess. Wanjek occasionally veers into territory where he does not and cannot support himself, on the assumption that the sympathetic reader will follow him regardless—the chapter on race, though well-intentioned, isn't great, and at various points he tries so hard to fight the notion of genetic determinism (mostly when it comes to aging) that he says things that are plain wrong (underestimating genetic predisposition to disease, for example). The chapter on vaccines is a bit rough around the edges, but it may only seem that way because we've had another decade of excellent take-downs since. Perhaps most significantly, Wanjek is a bit too fond of his herbals, committing the exact same errors of reasoning for which he blasts believers in ginkgo in the defence of milk thistle.
(The decision to print an endorsement by serial rapist Michael Shermer on the cover probably shouldn't count against the book, given that this was 2003.)
Broadly, I'd say the book is acceptable. But ``acceptable'' is a bit underwhelming given that there are other books on the same subject that are actually good—such as Ben Goldacre's Bad Science , which is not related to this series.
(If you are going to get this one, though, get the original version with the proper cover. This one is too plainly contemptuous of readers, messing up page references and having meta information that wasn't even glanced at before going to print. I did order the nice one originally (to match my copy of Bad Astronomy on the shelf, of course), but apparently you can't trust the Dutch.)
The series seems to have foundered after the second one, though I'm not sure if that's because they ran out of topics (Bad Physics and Bad Biology would probably resemble the previous two too much, and I don't even know what a Bad Chemistry book would look like) or because Bad Medicine had disappointing sales.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were the latter: Bad Medicine could be better than it is. If the writing in Bad Astronomy is uneven, Plait can be forgiven because he was an actual astronomer with—at the time—relatively little experience in writing for the general public; Wanjek, though, is a professional journalist (though he also has a degree in public health) who had been writing for the general public in mainstream publications for years. His constant forced jokes may be a matter of taste (``People use all of their brain, not just 10%. But something something television! Yuck yuck.'') and the lack of coherence between chapters can be blamed on it being his first book-length work (and Wiley being awful about providing editors), but the stilted pacing of the prose itself is hard to defend.
The content itself is mostly fine, I guess. Wanjek occasionally veers into territory where he does not and cannot support himself, on the assumption that the sympathetic reader will follow him regardless—the chapter on race, though well-intentioned, isn't great, and at various points he tries so hard to fight the notion of genetic determinism (mostly when it comes to aging) that he says things that are plain wrong (underestimating genetic predisposition to disease, for example). The chapter on vaccines is a bit rough around the edges, but it may only seem that way because we've had another decade of excellent take-downs since. Perhaps most significantly, Wanjek is a bit too fond of his herbals, committing the exact same errors of reasoning for which he blasts believers in ginkgo in the defence of milk thistle.
(The decision to print an endorsement by serial rapist Michael Shermer on the cover probably shouldn't count against the book, given that this was 2003.)
Broadly, I'd say the book is acceptable. But ``acceptable'' is a bit underwhelming given that there are other books on the same subject that are actually good—such as Ben Goldacre's Bad Science , which is not related to this series.
(If you are going to get this one, though, get the original version with the proper cover. This one is too plainly contemptuous of readers, messing up page references and having meta information that wasn't even glanced at before going to print. I did order the nice one originally (to match my copy of Bad Astronomy on the shelf, of course), but apparently you can't trust the Dutch.)
August 29, 2013
For a pulp piece of non-fiction attempting to dispel common medical myths, Wanjek's book works. I'd highly recommend giving it to your favorite hypochondriac, provided they have a sense of (sarcastic) humor. Overall, there's some great information in here and the short chapters prevent boredom, but the tone bothered me, especially in the Introduction where Wanjek flames almost all of ancient medicine. He also emphasizes the obvious (exercise and a healthy diet) as the true preventative in every chapter on homeopathic medicine (feel his wrath) which I can't fault but the tone and all the joking attempts at humor can get a bit annoying. But he does redeem himself with an excellent (possibly dated) bibliography and well presented chapters on how peer-reviewed studies and television medical stories work, which I would excerpt and use in classes on information literacy. (Peer-Reviewed for Your Pleasure: How Health Studies Work; Candy Adds Years to Your Life: And Other Important Health Study Findings; I'm Not a Reporter, but I Play One on TV: The Accuracy of Television Medical News)
March 28, 2013
Obviously, there is a form of selection bias with reading this book - you'd already be of a certain stance to read about the poor way medicine is explained in the media and the misinformation about vaccines etc etc.
This is getting a little dated in terms of some of the examples, however the subject matter is sadly still happening.
I found this quite readable - while other books have cleared the ground in more detail, I found I could pick this up and put this down quite easily because of the shorter chapters - and the balance of information versus "yeah, look this up if you want to know more" was very good.
This is getting a little dated in terms of some of the examples, however the subject matter is sadly still happening.
I found this quite readable - while other books have cleared the ground in more detail, I found I could pick this up and put this down quite easily because of the shorter chapters - and the balance of information versus "yeah, look this up if you want to know more" was very good.
September 11, 2009
This was OK, but if you are at all skeptical about bogus medicine you probably won't learn anything new.
August 29, 2011
A good survey of some of the pseudo-medicine out there - a bit old now, but still a good intro.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews