Megalomania' in Modern Medicine?

[Guest guest]

" Zeus " <info

 

Megalomania' in Modern Medicine?

Sun, 15 May 2005 01:23:56 +0100

 

 

 

Megalomania in Modern Medicine?

Margaret Williams

7th May 2005

 

The ME community may like to know of a review by psychiatrist

Anthony Daniels (who also writes under the pseudonym of

Theodore Dalrymple) of a book about treatment for mental

illness published on 1st May 2005 in The Sunday Telegraph.

The article is called " The madness of a cure for insanity. " ­ Henry

Cotton pioneered an unusual treatment for mental illness. But

his methods killed a third of his patients " and the title of the book

is " Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern

Medicine " by Professor Andrew Scull published by Yale.

 

A few quotations from Daniels' review seem to strike a chord:

The history of medicine is replete with theories and practices

that seem absurd and bizarre to subsequent generations. How

could any sensible person have entertained ideas or done things

that were so obviously wrong-headed and even cruel?

 

How do we know that the present generation of doctors is not in

the grip of some collective delusion, as previous generations of

doctors so obviously were?

 

Andrew Scull, a social historian of psychiatry, has uncovered

one such delusion from the first quarter of the 20th century, which

had terrible consequences for untold numbers of patients.

 

Dr Henry Cotton was the medical director of the Trenton State

Hospital, a lunatic asylum in New Jersey, who convinced himself

that madness was caused by focal sepsis. The answer, he

believed, was to remove the teeth and tonsils, wash out the

sinuses and most dramatic of all, cut out the colon. The latter

operation, performed by himself although he had no formal

training in surgery, had a death rate of up to 33 percent, but this

did not stop him from continuing his 'pioneering work'. He

claimed a very high success rate for his operations. "

A skilful self-promoter and publicist, he was widely believed,

especially in Britain.

 

" His claims were disputed, particularly by the investigations of Dr

Phyllis Greenacre, who proved that the chief clinical effect of his

operations was the death of his patients. "

 

But Cotton was protected by his former teacher and mentor at

Johns Hopkins medical school, Professor Adolf Meyer. Meyer

was a Swiss psychiatrist, an intimidating pedant rather than a

real scientist, who was the undisputed doyen of American

psychiatry for many decades.

 

He wanted above all to avert ascandal that would damage the power and

standing of the profession, and was prepared to countenance the continued

mutilation of patients by Cotton to do so. He suppressed Dr

Greenacre's work.

 

" How did so flimsy, and in our eyes, foolish a theory come to be

accepted in the first place? "

 

" Dr Cotton was an avid self-promoter, whose zeal to discover

something medically important was probably greater than his

ability to do so. "

 

" His theory more or less died with him in 1933 (but) Meyer wrote

a laudatory obituary of Dr Cotton, though he must have known by

then that Dr Cotton was responsible for hundreds of deaths and

untold misery besides. "

 

Professor Scull believes that the case of Dr Cotton is

emblematic of the inevitable abuse of professional power once it

is handed over to so-called experts.(Scull) cites other examples of

horrific treatments developed by 20th century psychiatrists.

 

Daniels finishes his review with the following: " (Scull's) excellent

book stands as a warning to doctors to remember that not

everything done in the name of therapeutics is justified.

However, I wouldn't like to swear that another Dr Cotton is

completely impossible " .

 

Given Daniels' own track record of published ridicule of ME

patients, his last sentence in his review is risible. For example,

on 14th February 1992 in an article called " Myalgic

encephalomyelitis --- my eye " he alleged in Medical Monitor that

ME is " an escape route for the middle classes " and that " My

experience of ME sufferers is that they suffer triumphantly, and

their claim that the disease has ruined their lives is not to be

believed " and he described the self-help groups as " pestilential " ,

whilst in his article called " Some people live to be ill " (Monitor

Weekly, 2nd June 1994) he wrote about Gulf War Syndrome and

food intolerance: " What is the link between food intolerance and

this syndrome? I suspect it is modern man's craving for illness:

not a real illness, but something impossible to disprove (and)

able to defeat the best efforts of doctors " .

 

And then there is his piece in The Daily Telegraph in April 1996

called " Chronic Litigation Syndrome " on the successful High

Court action of Ron Page, who was awarded damages for

exacerbation of ME following a road traffic accident: " By

equating psychological and physical damage, courts help create

a nation of writ-happy inadequates. It takes even well-paid

people quite a long time to accumulate £162,000, but that was

the sum awarded recently to a man involved in a minor traffic

accident in which he received no serious injury, but he was

suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome at the time and claimed

that the accident had caused his condition to deteriorate to such

an extent that he could no longer work.

 

It is not always easy to distinguish conscious dissimulation from more

genuine cases of self-deception. If one were actually trying to

create a population of litigious, querulous, self-absorbed people

without the slightest

resilience or self-reliance, one could not do better than to make

it widely known. "

 

There are more examples that could be quoted, of course, yet

curiously, Dr Daniels appears unaware of how the social history

of present-day psychiatry might judge HIM in time to come.

 

 

forwarded by

Zeus Information Service

Alternative Views on Health

www.zeusinfoservice.com