The Rise And Fall Of Modern Medicine
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Descripción editorial
The medical achievements of the post-war years rank as one of the supreme epochs of human endeavour. Advances in surgical technique, new ideas about the nature of disease and huge innovations in drug manufacture vanquished most common causes of early death, But, since the mid-1970s the rate of development has slowed, and the future of medicine is uncertain. How has this happened?
James Le Fanu's hugely acclaimed survey of the 'twelve definitive moments' of modern medicine and the intellectual vacuum which followed them has been fully revised and updated for this edition. The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine is both riveting drama and a clarion call for change.
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"Much current medical advice is quackery," cautions Le Fanu in this remarkably engrossing scholarly study of medical progress--and the recent lack thereof--in the 20th century. Le Fanu (a medical columnist for London's Daily and Sunday Telegraph) contemplates what he sees as the unhappy situation of contemporary health care. The decades from the 1940s to the 1980s saw some of the most critically important advances Western medicine has seen, from penicillin to the heart pump that made open-heart surgery possible. Yet doctors are disillusioned, and patients are turning in droves to alternative forms of medicine. How has this dilemma come about? Le Fanu first details the astonishing breakthroughs of the earlier part of the 20th century (he describes, for instance, the progress made by the first patient ever administered penicillin). But, more controversially, he argues that since the 1980s medical progress has been crippled by two developments, which he terms "Social Theory" and "New Genetics," respectively: according to the author, misguided epidemiologists promote a lifestyle changes (low-cholesterol diet, etc.) as a means of preventing heart disease; and geneticists have misled us into thinking that their research breakthroughs can eliminate genetic diseases. Both cases have been overstated, Le Fanu contends, drawing on a wealth of scientific data to attempt to show that dietary changes have done little to prevent heart disease and that genetic experiments, despite "millions of hours of research," have had "scarcely detectable" practical results. He concludes with a plea to return to the traditional in the practice of medicine--the relationship between doctor and patient--and to a renewal of faith in the diagnostic skill and judgment of one's personal physician. B&w photos.