Fear mongering is the norm. People get sick because of the fear instilled by advertising. This provides fodder for pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs

"They laugh at me because,
  I'm different; I laugh at them because,
  They're all the same."  - Kurt Cobain
 

John Kenneth Galbraith, if he were alive today, would have changed the definition of advertisements in his famous book, Affluent Society, written in 1958. He had written that advertisements are not to inform the buyer about the product but to make him want to buy that product even when it is not needed. He made a clear distinction between needs and wants, rightly so for an Harvard ace economist! If Mr Galbraith were to see cancer technology advertisements today, with poor patients walking to the scanner in hospital robes, every fifteen minutes, he would have died of fear of cancer! Incidentally, John died at the ripe old age of 97, in 2006. It is as if advertisements are inviting you to be a cancer patient to avail of their wonderful hi-tech facility! The cancer technology television advertisements reminds one that cancer is is due to attack any time soon, creating morbid fear of cancer and death. This happens hundreds of times daily.
 

Advertising for killer cooking oils, full of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), so called ‘heart healthy oil’, with a picture of a beating heart evokes viewers the alarm reaction of an impending heart attack if one does not use the advertised oil, is another fear mongering tactic. The truth is that PUFA are very bad for the heart. The first New York study in 1957 by Dr Norman Jollife, director of the New York City Health Department, of 1,100 people who were given polyunsaturated fats showed that their blood fat reports all came to accepted NORMALS; however, 26 of those people had died of premature heart attacks in one year while only six had died in the control group. This sordid drama has been repeated in every other study since. Now, it is also known that atherosclerotic plaques are filled with polyunsaturated fats. The ‘heart healthy oil’ advertisements are thus a double edged sword—with one edge inducing fear of heart attacks to kill more people and the other creating advanced atherosclerosis because of polyunsaturated fats in those oils.
 

There’s one where young children drool at an advertisement of fried chicken with another poisonous free drink by its side as a bonus. These drinks are advertised separately by sports and film stars. In return, they get a few crores! I must congratulate our prime minister for awarding the Bharat Ratna to Sachin Tendulkar despite reservations from the home ministry. Sachin Tendulkar, as Bharat Ratna, can no longer advertise those bottled drinks and unhealthy desiccated milk drinks. Thank God, millions of his fans’ health will thus improve. Our prime minister is a brainy hero who had killed two birds with one stone-improving the health of young Indians and boosting his party’s sagging vote bank.
 

We seem to think that western science is the be all and end all of human wisdom. Those who follow that get funding from the government and are praised to the skies. Let us examine and see what the great western thinkers think about their own science? In his editorial for Science, former President Clinton wrote, "...we must always remember that science is not God. Our deepest truths remain outside the realm of science." Our prime minister, a good friend of Clinton, would take this advice to know what the limits of science are before being lead to allot more and more money for science research in India. To exculpate science’s inability to to answer the ultimate questions in life, Peter Medawar, a Nobel Laureate in his book Limits to Science, tries to do his best to protect scientific endeavour against damage by people and governments. He takes up important matters but admits that science as an enterprise, although the best to date, has its own inherent limits! ‘Science’, he feels, is built to answer certain questions but not all questions and compares science to a railway engine that can only move on a track but cannot be made to fly like an aeroplane. This is a wonderful book that should be read before claiming that science is the best that can happen to mankind.
 

‘Science’ came up at a time when the earlier enterprise called ‘religion’ was reigning high and mighty causing havoc. Rightly, scientific enterprise has been able to counter the religious monopoly to a great extent. Unfortunately, there has not been an enterprise to keep scientific arrogance under control so far. So, ‘science’, as I shall show, is running unchallenged to date.
 

Paul Feyerabend, a former colleague of Karl Popper, was the professor of science philosophy at UC Berkeley and later at Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich, wrote a classic Against Method. He takes the reader through a maze of science to show the truth hidden somewhere else. Along with Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discoveries and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Feyerabend’s Against Method has become a classic in its own right. He writes, “Western science now reigns supreme all over the globe; however, the reason was not the insight in its inherent rationality but power play. The colonising nations imposed their ways of living and their need for weapons. Western science so far has created the most efficient instruments of death.” Western medicine helped temporarily to control some infections, but that does not mean that western science is the only tradition that has good and that other forms of inquiry are without any merit whatsoever “First-world science is one science among many; by claiming to be more it ceases to be an instrument of research and turns into a (political) pressure group.” Feyerabend writes extensively on these points in his classic, Farewell to Reason.
 

The best critique of science I saw is in a book by two physicists, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, with an interesting and very apt title, The Golem. They are using Golem as a metaphor for science. It is worth noting that this mediaeval tradition of creature of clay (In India we find it even now on new buildings etc.) was animated by the writing EMETH, meaning truth, inscribed on its forehead. It is the truth that drives it on but it does not mean it understands the truth-far from it! Golem science is not to be blamed for its mistakes (of not going to the moon); they are our mistakes. The Golem cannot be blamed as it is trying to do its best. We must not expect too much from science. A Golem, powerful though it is, is but a creature of our own art and our craft.
 

Medical science has much more to answer for compared to general sciences. We need to worry that the pharmaceutical industry scandals in recent years, including some criminal convictions, billions of dollars in fines, proof of bias in research and publishing and false marketing claims. Even the Ivy League universities in the United States are not exempt from this fraud of potential financial conflicts by faculty members. The Harvard Medical School said it was unable to provide annual measures of the money flow to its faculty, beyond the $8.6 million that pharmaceutical companies contributed last year for basic-science research and the $3 million for continuing education classes on campus. Most of the money goes to professors at the Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals. The dean’s office does not keep track of the total, but no one disputes that Harvard Medical faculty members receive tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through industry consulting and speaking fees. Under the school’s disclosure rules, about 1,600 of 8,900 professors and lecturers have reported to the dean that they or a family member had a financial interest in a business related to their teaching, research or clinical care. The reports show 149 financial ties with Pfizer and 130 with Merck.
 

In our present ‘health SCARE system’, we do not want to be left behind in the advertisement field. Come winter and we are out with the flu vaccine-scare mongering advertisements. Scientific studies have shown that flu vaccine is not effective in the first place and it might even increase the risk of catching flu. But every winter season we are frightened and we want to be vaccinated. Even the World Health Organisation (WHO) was linked to giant pharma lobby in the Swine Flu saga a couple of years ago, when the former unscientifically permitted the tag of ‘PANDEMIC’ to the disease just to help the vaccine manufacturers to get good business, especially from all the governments all over the world. ‘Disease mongering’ has become a routine in our medical establishment.
 

When a company found a new chemical molecule that reduced the blood pressure (BP), they wanted to have more hypertensives. In Germany, where most original ideas emanate, there were ‘WELL MAN’ clinics. These were small vans with a mobile clinic inside having BP apparatuses and cute nurses. These vans would be parked in church squares on Sundays and shopping malls on all days. People are invited for a FREE CHECK UP. When the beautiful nurse holds your hand your BP shoots up and you become a ‘hypertensive’. Then you consume ‘hypertensive’ drugs immediately. Same applies to hyperglycaemia.
 

Morning newspapers carry the ‘scientific’ averments of our sacred thought leaders, especially in our metropolis cities, led from Chennai, now and then are stating that India will be the diabetic capital of the world, thus provoking fear in each of us. In the good old days when we were hunter gatherers, humans were endowed with a wonderful survival mechanism called the autonomic nervous system and the RAAS (Renin angiotensin aldosterone system), to save us from predators in the forest. If one sees a tiger s/he had to run away from the tiger. To run we need energy and better blood supply. The sight of the tiger in the forest makes our blood pressure and heart rate go up and our blood sugar to sharply rise, for energy. This sugar comes from the glycogen stores in the liver meant for such emergencies.
 

Today we have similar ‘urban tigers’ in form of a bad boss, a nasty subordinate, or the fear mongering in daily advertisements. They all provoke the same fright-flight-fight response, similar to our forest ancestors’ days. Our sugars, cortisol levels, heart rates and our BP go up when we see these so called ‘urban tigers’. We cannot run away from today’s ‘urban tigers’. Mostly we sit and endure the fear. If you go for a health check after such encounters your BP and sugars would have have gone up already. Lo and behold you are ‘labelled’ immediately! That adds up, in the long run, to provoke killer diseases like cancer, heart attacks, blood pressure and diabetes.
 

George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma needs no longer be insulated for his restraint. Now David Wootton painstakingly argues in his short, but undoubtedly explosive new book, Bad Medicine, that the history of medicine has been nothing less than a failure and doctors have been the culprits. Look at a recent audit of coronary stents from Boston. “Despite their benefit, the stents form scar tissue inside the metal sleeve in approximately 20% of patients, and when this occurs, it requires re-treatment with another angioplasty or with coronary bypass surgery. The recurrence rate with so called ‘in-stent’ restenosis is higher than after the first time stent placement, and may occur in 30-80% of patients, depending on the degree of the scar tissue within the stent. Thus far, we have been unable to lower this recurrence rate with medicine, drilling devices, or additional stents. The impact on the lives of those patients who develop ‘stent’ restenosis is profound to say the least,” writes Jeffrey Popma, director of Interventions at Harvard. Books and journals are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life’s experiences.
 

 “Don’t confuse your path with your destination,

Because it’s stormy now doesn’t mean,

That you aren’t headed for sunshine.”

Anon   

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, chairman of the State Health Society's Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former Vice Chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for Cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London.)