Truth in medicine
Published Jul 19, 2022 12:05 am
UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Dr. Raymund W. Lo
The practice of modern medicine is very much truth-based in terms of the science behind it. Medical literature gives us an abundance of information, which we use to treat patients. The science is robust and evidence-based. Besides being peer-reviewed and vetted, an article that claims a breakthrough isn’t just believed as the gospel truth. It has to be reproducible by other researchers. In other words, if you claim that a drug has a cure rate of 99 for a disease, others will try to duplicate your findings. Woe is the one whose findings don’t pan out for others. That claim is quickly shown out the door.
The rigor is justifiable, because patients’ lives are at stake. Medicine is practiced at the highest levels, especially by the specialists and subspecialists, who train for years on end to achieve mastery of their craft. If you need to have brain surgery, you look for a neurosurgeon. If you have to be biopsied for a lung mass, you go to an interventional radiologist. If you want that biopsy to be diagnosed properly, you ask an anatomic pathologist — preferably with training and experience in lung pathology — to read the slide. You don’t look for a medical graduate who’s fresh out of school.
The training is also the means by which older practitioners pass on their wisdom and experience in the specialty. This is the part where the science meets the art of medicine.
Medical practitioners ignore the truth in medicine at their peril. The evidence doesn’t lie. Ignoring facts can get a patient maimed or killed, and their medical license can be taken away for such errors. Or land them in jail.
But recently, truth seems to be in retreat, even in medicine. Medical charlatans abound, peddling half-truths and claiming to cure Covid-19 with Ivermectin (and also undermining vaccine confidence). There’s the doctor who practices a specialty he has not had a day of training in. There’s the lawyer who claims to know more about disease causation than the real medical experts.
When these dubious characters are given widespread publicity by media, which does not consistently fact-check, the effects are far-reaching, especially on public health issues.
Case in point: Dengue. With the recent epidemic resurgence of dengue, there were calls by infectious-disease specialists to revisit the use of the dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia. They point to the widespread use of Dengvaxia all over the world, and yet it is only in the Philippines where it is not licensed for use. In fact, it is in the World Health Organization (WHO) list of essential medicines.
Lo and behold, following these calls for resuming Dengvaxia use, the lawyer-doctor duo was back on the airwaves, shrilly repeating their unsubstantiated claims that the vaccine was “very, very dangerous.” Did they cite any evidence at all, other than their claims that many children have died due to the vaccine? No, not a single piece of literature was cited. Instead, they cite this doctor’s series of “autopsies” on long-buried bodies — even just skeletal remains — to claim that the deaths were caused by Dengvaxia. This doctor hasn’t had one day of training in pathology, or any specialty for that matter. (Note: Only pathologists have the training and experience to conduct autopsies and determine cause of death). Yet, they managed to raise hell by stirring up the fears of parents whose children were vaccinated, giving rise to mass hysteria.
The aftermath was predictable. Parents were no longer willing to have their children vaccinated with ANY vaccine. Our vaccination rate rapidly dropped from 93 percent to 32 percent within a year of the Dengvaxia furor. Suddenly, we had a measles outbreak that killed hundreds of babies. Polio was back. To think we were on the verge of declaring polio as eradicated, and measles cases were almost non-existent.
Even Covid vaccination was affected. The government had to resort to a carrot-and-stick approach to get the public to have their shots. Now we still have very low uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine in the provinces. The fear is very real, thanks to this cohort of vaccine-deniers. No matter how you slice and dice it, the Dengvaxia issue is still the “Elephant in the Vaccination Room” (see my Oct. 26, 2021 column).
We have a situation where the public no longer believes in the real experts but would rather listen to a hysterical lawyer dressed in white to simulate a doctor.
Who are responsible for the hundreds of deaths due to measles, and now dengue, when we could have controlled them with a vaccine? What about the enormous economic burden of dengue hospitalizations and the untold suffering of thousands of children and their parents?
This is the cost of not believing the truth in medicine. This is a crime against humanity, and the perpetrators are still very much at large.
(The author is a respondent in some of the Dengvaxia cases now being tried in court. But in the subsequent batch of cases, the DOJ Prosecutors Panel found ‘that no probable cause exists against him.’)
Dr. Raymund W. Lo
The practice of modern medicine is very much truth-based in terms of the science behind it. Medical literature gives us an abundance of information, which we use to treat patients. The science is robust and evidence-based. Besides being peer-reviewed and vetted, an article that claims a breakthrough isn’t just believed as the gospel truth. It has to be reproducible by other researchers. In other words, if you claim that a drug has a cure rate of 99 for a disease, others will try to duplicate your findings. Woe is the one whose findings don’t pan out for others. That claim is quickly shown out the door.
The rigor is justifiable, because patients’ lives are at stake. Medicine is practiced at the highest levels, especially by the specialists and subspecialists, who train for years on end to achieve mastery of their craft. If you need to have brain surgery, you look for a neurosurgeon. If you have to be biopsied for a lung mass, you go to an interventional radiologist. If you want that biopsy to be diagnosed properly, you ask an anatomic pathologist — preferably with training and experience in lung pathology — to read the slide. You don’t look for a medical graduate who’s fresh out of school.
The training is also the means by which older practitioners pass on their wisdom and experience in the specialty. This is the part where the science meets the art of medicine.
Medical practitioners ignore the truth in medicine at their peril. The evidence doesn’t lie. Ignoring facts can get a patient maimed or killed, and their medical license can be taken away for such errors. Or land them in jail.
But recently, truth seems to be in retreat, even in medicine. Medical charlatans abound, peddling half-truths and claiming to cure Covid-19 with Ivermectin (and also undermining vaccine confidence). There’s the doctor who practices a specialty he has not had a day of training in. There’s the lawyer who claims to know more about disease causation than the real medical experts.
When these dubious characters are given widespread publicity by media, which does not consistently fact-check, the effects are far-reaching, especially on public health issues.
Case in point: Dengue. With the recent epidemic resurgence of dengue, there were calls by infectious-disease specialists to revisit the use of the dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia. They point to the widespread use of Dengvaxia all over the world, and yet it is only in the Philippines where it is not licensed for use. In fact, it is in the World Health Organization (WHO) list of essential medicines.
Lo and behold, following these calls for resuming Dengvaxia use, the lawyer-doctor duo was back on the airwaves, shrilly repeating their unsubstantiated claims that the vaccine was “very, very dangerous.” Did they cite any evidence at all, other than their claims that many children have died due to the vaccine? No, not a single piece of literature was cited. Instead, they cite this doctor’s series of “autopsies” on long-buried bodies — even just skeletal remains — to claim that the deaths were caused by Dengvaxia. This doctor hasn’t had one day of training in pathology, or any specialty for that matter. (Note: Only pathologists have the training and experience to conduct autopsies and determine cause of death). Yet, they managed to raise hell by stirring up the fears of parents whose children were vaccinated, giving rise to mass hysteria.
The aftermath was predictable. Parents were no longer willing to have their children vaccinated with ANY vaccine. Our vaccination rate rapidly dropped from 93 percent to 32 percent within a year of the Dengvaxia furor. Suddenly, we had a measles outbreak that killed hundreds of babies. Polio was back. To think we were on the verge of declaring polio as eradicated, and measles cases were almost non-existent.
Even Covid vaccination was affected. The government had to resort to a carrot-and-stick approach to get the public to have their shots. Now we still have very low uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine in the provinces. The fear is very real, thanks to this cohort of vaccine-deniers. No matter how you slice and dice it, the Dengvaxia issue is still the “Elephant in the Vaccination Room” (see my Oct. 26, 2021 column).
We have a situation where the public no longer believes in the real experts but would rather listen to a hysterical lawyer dressed in white to simulate a doctor.
Who are responsible for the hundreds of deaths due to measles, and now dengue, when we could have controlled them with a vaccine? What about the enormous economic burden of dengue hospitalizations and the untold suffering of thousands of children and their parents?
This is the cost of not believing the truth in medicine. This is a crime against humanity, and the perpetrators are still very much at large.
(The author is a respondent in some of the Dengvaxia cases now being tried in court. But in the subsequent batch of cases, the DOJ Prosecutors Panel found ‘that no probable cause exists against him.’)