Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13636

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Spence D.
X ray specs
BMJ 2008 Apr 26; 336:(7650):962
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/336/7650/962

Abstract:

The back pages of Marvel comics used to have advertisements for “Dynamic Tension” so you could achieve the body of Charles Atlas “in just two weeks,” “magic” insoles that made you taller than adults, and “amazing” x ray spectacles that allowed the wearer to see through people’s clothes (a truly horrifying thought). A friend bought a pair but found just a scantily clad lady painted on the inside of the lenses-it was just a scam. At medical school I took a certificate in radiology legislation, which made it clear that x ray specs would be not only pointless but downright dangerous.

Recently, anxious patients have attended my clinic clutching cut-out advertisements for amazing computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). I investigated some of the claims…

destwo@yahoo.co.uk

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909