Epilepsy Talk

The Trouble with Doctors: Fraud and Deceit in Medicine | January 31, 2025

An account written by Dr. “Jock” Anderson and Helen Weinel 

Most of us think we know the answers already. Everyone oversells us, including ourselves.

Politicians impose absurdly unrealistic time frames for untested reforms; the drugs industry seeds the media with stories of wonder drugs of marginal benefit; patients won’t accept the inevitability of disease and death; and it’s a brave surgeon who’ll admit to being below average.

And in our blame culture if you don’t get it right first time in under five minutes you’ll be splashed all over the Sunday Mercury.

The ethicist David Seedhouse defines health as the extent to which what is expected of us matches what we achieve, and by that measure doctors are unhealthy from just about every angle.

No wonder so many are in brain meltdown.

Yet medicine has progressed enormously in the last 50 years—so why is nobody celebrating? Dally reaches the same conclusion that we all do: unrealistic expectations.

Her contention is that such expectations have arisen because we have failed to appreciate the central role of fashion in medicine and the variability between doctors, not just in ability but in belief and desire.

The book has an interesting chapter on motivation—how doctors act in their own interests as well as those of patients—but we’re too quickly into the territory of Shipman and Eichmann before she offers the disclaimer, “Killing patients for pleasure or relief of tension is probably extremely rare.”

But her end thought—that doctors are human, and we need to get real about their motives—is wise enough.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC313921/ Phil Hammond

To read this unsettling and eyeopening account and learn more, you can purchase the book at: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Doctors-Fraud-Deceit-Medicine/dp/B0C9VW8YJ7

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