Hundreds of years ago, we used bloodletting and purging to cure. Today, we invent fictitious diseases so that specific drugs can be sold.

When your conscience pricks you, sometimes you tell the truth. This is what happened to the American Cancer Society, when Dr Harold Varmus became its new director and found that modern cancer treatments were dangerous. Decades ago, another cancer specialist, David Weatherall, a professor at Oxford, had noted in his book, The Science of Medicine and Its Quiet Art, that cancer therapy reminded him of the red hot iron branding that was practised years ago for every illness. David wrote that our future generation might not forgive us for our sins in the cancer arena today. It also brings back memories of the hoary rituals—of bloodletting, purging and induced vomiting to get the bad tumours out—practised for nearly 2,500 years. But we went on because bloodletting brought money to us.

Similarly, cancer industry is a trillion-dollar one and will continue to get bigger, despite clear indications that we are barking up the wrong tree. Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington had to go through dangerous bloodletting rituals. Napoleon had tubercular constrictive pericarditis and Washington had typhoid fever. Today, we even mutilate the healthy human body in the fond hope of preventing cancer.

There is a disease in children, called ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), and our paediatricians bend over backwards to make the diagnosis and start our innocent children on dangerous chemical drugs at a tender age. But a bombshell was dropped when an 87-year-old American psychiatrist, Dr Leon Eisenberg, made a startling statement to a German magazine, Der Spiegel, a couple of months before his death. He said that ADHD is a fictitious disease which he put together for the benefit of drug companies, in the new disease classification in the American Psychiatry Association’s DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases).

Professor Jörg Blech, another German, had written a beautiful book Inventing Diseases in which he gives a graphic description of hypertension having been discovered as a disease needing drug treatment through the ‘Well Man’ programme on nice air-conditioned vans, with beautiful nurses, parked around Church squares and shopping malls to give people a free check-up. Anyone who walks in becomes a patient.

Another new disease has been added to the list—shift-work syndrome—to sell another deadly drug, Nuvigil. The drug may cause serious side-effects which, according to Nuvigil website, include a serious rash or a serious allergic reaction that may affect different body parts. Shift work does produce some day-time sleepiness as the shift workers lose sleep during night times.

I would never give this drug to normal people knowing what the drug is capable of doing. The hype, aided and abetted by the licensing agencies, will ensure that the drug company will laugh its way to the bank, even as many people die of adverse drug reactions. The best treatment is simple phototherapy—sun therapy.

Vaccination is another fertile ground for the pharmaceuticals industry, where most of what is sold has dubious value. Dr Diane Harper, who was instrumental in creating Gardasil and Cervarix, admitted back in 2009 that the vaccines were essentially useless and more dangerous than the very conditions they were hailed as preventing and treating.

“This is a long way from the thinking 20 years ago when you found a cancer cell and felt you had a tremendous risk of dying,” said Dr Varmus. He put a team of researchers to find cancer treatment outcomes and found that hardly anyone survived the three-pronged attack of deadly chemotherapy, mutilating surgery and burning radiation.

We have come a long way from the 19th century diagnosis of cancer. We need a new 21st century diagnosis where only aggressively-growing cancers need symptomatic treatment. This boils down to what I have been saying about any disease in general.
William Osler’s famous advice—that one should not interfere with the patient when he/she is doing well—is relevant even today. Pre-cancer, pre-diabetes, pre-hypertension and such fancy ideas have resulted in millions undergoing treatment when it was not needed and might be even dangerous.

Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS.