Healthy Skepticism Announcements

New book - A Bitter Pill: How the Medical System is Failing the Elderly

John Sloan has announced a new book: "A Bitter Pill: How the Medical System is Failing the Elderly".

“A Bitter Pill” describes how, through misapplication of health information which promotes prevention and rescue to people who can’t benefit from prevention or rescue, all of us in the healthcare system harm the fragile elderly and waste increasing amounts of resources in the process. The inescapable illogic of prevention in frailty is described, along with the futility of hospital-based high-tech rescue. An individual, hands-on, 24-hour, home-based approach is presented is preferable.

For more information see the Bitter Pill webpage.

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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963