Article archive / March 1, 2015
Originally published: . Volume 6, No. 3. Source pages: 2.
A Time Machine Would Help by J. Nelson
“No doctors,” rasped the character Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. The movie reminds us that Hawking, now age 72, was diagnosed at 21 with ALS and given only two years to live. There is no biological treatment for ALS so medical experts can’t explain it. Some are willing to claim the null and say it’s not due to his psychology (mind- body), demonstrating that they haven’t read A Brief History of Time or an introductory statistics text.
Hawking may have been spared iatrogenic problems but there is ample evidence that they abound for the rest of us. A recent study showing that heart patients died significantly less when their cardiologists were off at conventions adds to the picture. There’s even a slogan, “First, do no harm.” When you have a slogan, you know you have a real problem.
Robert Whitakers’ presentation last month at the Louisiana Marriage & Family Therapists Association convention brings the iatrogenic theme into focus when it comes to psychiatric drugs. If Whitaker is right, and he makes a compelling case, then not only antidepressants, but anti- psychotics, and stimulants might well be doing more harm than good.
It is of some comfort that Whitaker, an investigative journalist, leans on the work of psychologists, including Irving Kirsch who was hosted by the Louisiana Psychological Association and Tulane in 2013. Whitaker also leans on research by Martin Harrow, a psychologist who has been doing longitudinal research with schizophrenics for decades. Once at Yale, Harrow is also a chess master. So who are you going to believe––Big Pharma or someone who tied Bobby Fischer twice?
Kirsch’s and Whitaker’s mass market books are beginning to move the beliefs of the large social system–no easy feat. It took the medical profession 25 years to stop x-raying pregnant women after the evidence showed that it harmed the baby.
Last year researchers in a JAMA article took up Kirsch’s ideas and spurred debate picked up in news outlets such as The New Yorker, Newsweek, and New York Times. Even Dr. Oz got into it with his “Truth about Antidepressants,” episode, demonstrating the problem by pouring blue liquid into a plexiglass head with holes drilled in it so the blue stuff splashed out everywhere.
Whitaker casts serious doubt on these drugs, but his perspective also shows deficiencies in the problem-solving function of the healthcare social system. Science works by successive approximations to a goal of pure truth that we can never reach. But are we to expect consumers to wait 30 years for medical science to figure things out and be harmed in the meantime?
Do we opt for a symptom treatment, with volume sales potential, and stop searching for real causes of disease? Some recent findings in nutritional mental health tell us we’re better off popping a probiotic than a Prozac. If Whitaker is right about psychiatric drugs, what are we to think about the validity behind the rest of the almost $1 trillion drug market, like those for treating cancer and immune disorders?
Psychologist Philip Tetlock concludes in his book on human judgment that we don’t have to fully accept George Bernard Shaw’s definition of professions––conspiracies to defraud the public––in order for us to recognize our problems.
“… there is a strong desire among mass-public consumers to believe that they live in a predictable world and an equally strong desire among more elite consumers in the media, business, and government to appear to be doing the right thing by ritualistically consulting the usual suspects from widely recognized interest groups,” Tetlock writes.
Some feel the “…tight symbiotic embrace between self-confident suppliers of dubious products and their cling-on customers,” is inevitable, Tetlock says. But he believes that with the analytical tools we have in science, and journalism, and with thoughtful application, we can build self-correcting epistemic systems.
Or, we could get a time machine.
In the 1960 classic movie, Time Machine, the underworld trolls, the Morlocks, fatten up and feed off the Eloi, the above ground, complacent, and woefully out-of-touch Agreeables. It isn’t until Rod Taylor comes sailing in from the long ago past that the Eloi wake up to the fact that there’s a big problem.
We can’t always count on someone to put the self-interest of others above his or her own interests. It is not how we are wired. We can’t even always depend on ourselves.
But we can count on an open, self-correcting system to help discover the truth, or some approximation of it, hopefully sooner rather than later. We’re wired for self-interest but we’re also wired to do the right thing.
Photos are from H.G. Wells’ 1960 movie, The Time Machine production and Yvette Mimieux’s photo archives.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.