What Doctors Don’t Tell You

WHAT DOCTORS DON’T TELL YOU

The truth about the dangers of modern medicine

LYNNE McTAGGART

Copyright

Every illness and every patient is unique. This book is intended as a source of information only. Readers are urged to work in partnership with a qualified, experienced practitioner before undertaking (or refraining from) any treatments listed in these pages.

Thorsons Element

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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and Thorsons are trademarks of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

First published by Thorsons 1996

This revised and updated edition 2005

© Lynne McTaggart

Lynne McTaggart asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Praise for What Doctors Don’t Tell You

‘This groundbreaking book … has potential to save lives. Stunning stuff!’ Kathryn Marsden, author of The Food Combining Diet

‘A hugely impressive book, and the finest critique of modern medical practice I have yet read. Lynne McTaggart takes a scalpel straight to the heart of medicine’s most cherished dogmas. Essential reading …’ Peter Cox, health campaigner and bestselling author

‘A mine of subversive information … irresistibly argued. Lynne McTaggart is a very big thorn in the side of the medical propaganda machine.’ Dr Keith Mumby, allergy specialist and author of The Allergy Handbook

‘Introduces some welcome sanity by its critical appraisal of the value of many diagnostic and treatment procedures, especially the unbelievable escalation in the use of symptom-suppressive drugs. Excellent, stimulating … and a thoroughly good read.’ Dr John Mansfield, former President of the British Society for Allergy and Environmental Medicine

‘Extremely provocative and meticulously researched … should be part of the medical cabinet in every household in this country. I have long admired Lynne McTaggart’s pioneering spirit, vision and courage, and this book exemplifies it.’ Kitty Campion, practitioner and author

‘A courageous book! I congratulate Lynne McTaggart on her passion, research and indefatigable efforts to bring information to the public that can help people to take control of their own lives.’ Leslie Kenton, broadcaster and bestselling author

‘This book dispels so many harmful medical myths and gives people back the freedom of informed choice. Essential reading for those facing medical intervention.’ Patrick Holford, director of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition

Praise for Lynne McTaggart’s newsletter What Doctors Don’t Tell You

‘What Doctors … has an impressive track record for alerting readers to potential problems …’ Women’s Journal

‘Information that is scientific yet easy for parents to digest is sparse … What Doctors Don’t Tell You provides much damning evidence.’ Guardian

‘Every month What Doctors Don’t Tell You … rings the alarm bells on procedures well before they become the stuff of national panic.’ Observer

‘What Doctors Don’t Tell You … brings together unpublicised medical information.’ Independent

‘What Doctors Don’t Tell You has easy to read and up to date reports on drug side effects.’ Daily Mail

‘A voice in the silence.’ The Times

Praise from her readers

‘Well done with all your efforts to educate, inform, guide and empower people to be active carers and protectors of their own health. Keep the momentum growing and growing.’ I. L., Suffolk

‘An excellent, compelling and informative read. It should be essential reading for everyone!’ E.W., East Sussex

‘I had a reasonable knowledge of the possible pitfalls of drug therapy, but your wide-ranging, well-written and easy-to-understand information has heightened my awareness of this most important subject and you are performing a much-needed and vital service to us all.’ M. G., Bedfordshire

‘As a medical doctor, I am really pleased with What Doctors … and the special work you are doing.’ Dr M. S., Beirut

‘Several years ago I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis … A chance discussion put me on the track of your newsletter, which linked MS-type symptoms with the Pill I’d been taking. Had I listened to my GP and neurologist, I would probably be in a wheelchair. Thank you, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, for saving my life.’ D. J., Norfolk

‘Recently, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with breast cancer. I cannot tell you how encouraging your newsletter was to the whole family … She is faring well and confident she is making the right decisions thanks to your timely advice.’ J. B., Jersey

‘Instead of suffering from asthma, unwillingly forced into the last-ditch resort of taking steroids in order to have any sort of liveable life, I am virtually free of it and, to boot, have lost a surplus two stone. This is all attributable to your informative publications.’ M.B.C.P.-B., Cornwall

‘After a wonderful uncomplicated start in life, my baby contracted whooping cough. Thank you, WDDTY, for putting together so much information. It was you and your publication which put me on the path of being informed. My son made a full recovery. I will be for ever indebted.’ Janet, Berkshire

‘My husband was given three months to live two years ago due to prostate cancer. By reading your newsletter and the information you provide, I contacted the right people and he started an alternative therapy. It succeeded and he was later told that he was clear of cancer. Thank you for being you.’ M. R., Dyfed

‘Two months ago I could barely walk more than 50 yards or stand in the queue at the Post Office. Chronic lower back pain was the problem … now thanks to WDDTY I ramble and cycle miles and miles without pain.’ R. P., Norfolk

‘I was told I had glaucoma and was going blind. I developed a diet and supplement programme based on your information, and two months later I had my eyes examined again, and there was no sign of glaucoma any more.’ G. R., Edinburgh

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for What Doctors Don’t Tell You

Dedication

Introduction

Part I: medicine’s False Science

Chapter 1: The Un-science of Modern Medicine

Part II: Diagnosis

Chapter 2: Diagnostic Excess

Chapter 3: Prenatal Testing: Dead Certainty

Chapter 4: Catching It Early

Part III: Prevention

Chapter 5: Crazy about Cholesterol: Medicine’s Red Herring

Chapter 6: Vaccination: Knee-jerk Jabs

Chapter 7: Hormonal Mayhem

Part IV: Treatment

Chapter 8: Miracle Cures

Chapter 9: Dental Medicine: Safe until Proven Dangerous

Part V: Surgery

Chapter 10: Standard Operating Procedure

Chapter 11: Gee-whizz Technology: The Video-games Wizard and Blocked-drains Mechanic

Part VI: Taking Control

Chapter 12: Taking Control

Keep Reading

Index

Further Resources

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Bryan

Introduction

This book was born from a grand passion I once had: a passion to get better.

In the early eighties, after an extraordinary patch of bad choices, I underwent a prolonged bout of stress. In every profoundly important area of my life, green lights I’d always taken for granted suddenly began turning red. If I had taken one of those little tests you find in women’s magazines that add up your stress quotient – with death, marriage, divorce and moving the most stressful situations – my sums would have leapt off the chart.

In rapid succession I’d struggled under an impossible book deadline, married Mr Wrong, divorced Mr Wrong, bought the wrong flat, accepted the wrong job, suffered the death of a close friend, incurred several large debts, and spent a prolonged period of intense isolation in a foreign country. I couldn’t, in those days, even get a good haircut.

Shortly after emerging from the eye of this personal squall, I began to experience strange symptoms, at first your workaday ‘female problems’ – everything from ferocious premenstrual tension and irregular periods to cystitis and almost constant vaginal infections.

As time wore on, my symptoms multiplied: eczema, hives and allergies to a load of food and chemicals; diarrhoea and an irritable bowel; insomnia and night sweats; and severe depression. I had felt powerless for so long that my body seemed to be reacting in parallel, caving in under any sort of microbial onslaught.

For nearly all of the three years that I was ill, I made the rounds of medical circles – first the standard ones, then the periphery, with nutritionists and homoeopaths, and finally the very outer rim, from breathing specialists to Bioenergeticists. By the autumn of 1986 I was hacking my way though the dense thicket of New Age therapies. I tried breathing from the abdomen. I had the negative emotions Rolfed out of me. Somebody tried to diagnose me by subjecting my hair sample to radio waves. I ploughed through autogenic training, colonic irrigation and even a form of psychotherapy – a mixture of Wilhelm Reich and what felt like being tickled on the face. I learned something about my relationship with my mother. But I did not, at any point, get better.

By the summer of 1987 a sense of hopelessness descended over me. The worst part of being chronically unwell without a diagnosis legitimatizing it is that a lot of people don’t believe you, or view your symptoms as imaginary – as a puerile sort of attention-getter. And in this land of stoics, if your illness isn’t hard-core, like cancer or leprosy, you’re supposed to learn to live with it, to dysfunction quietly, without complaint.

At some point it began to dawn on me that there was no miracle remedy out there that was going to turn my health around. If I was going to get better, I was going to have to take charge of the entire process myself – from diagnosis to, possibly, even the cure. Somehow I would have to figure out what was going wrong with my body and find whatever tools were necessary to cure myself. It began to make sense that I should take control of my health, since no one else would care about its outcome so passionately.

I began reading up on allergies and female problems, and one day came upon a newly discovered illness whose symptoms matched almost every one of mine. When a specialist I consulted wasn’t familiar with it, I searched out a renowned GP specializing in allergies and nutritional medicine, whose battery of tests and diagnostic sensitivity confirmed my own suspicions, and rooted out other contributory problems besides.

What I seemed to have inside me was, essentially, thrush of the body, or polystemic chronic candidiasis. Candida albicans is a yeast that lives in the upper bowel of most of us without doing good or harm, kept in line by our immune systems and the friendly bacteria that coexist with it. But, according to current theories (and that’s all they are at the moment), when the immune system is weakened and the good-guy bacteria fall in numbers, these yeast can start multiplying out of control, sending out toxins that eventually interfere with a range of bodily functions.

Whether or not candida was the main cause of my illness, the root of the problem appeared to be an immune system that wasn’t functioning at full throttle. Prolonged severe stress tends to have a depressant effect on the immune system. That, and a bunch of long dormant allergies, including an allergy to wheat, which probably came to the fore as a result of stress, meant that I was poisoning my body every day with substances it could no longer tolerate. I’d also become sloppy about my diet, and was low in a large number of nutrients.

My treatment consisted of taking large doses of a well-tolerated drug for a time, plus a batch of specially tailored doses of supplements and a restrictive healing diet of fresh, unrefined food. A month after I’d started, my dry cleaner asked me if I’d had a face lift.

However good these initial results, I soon realized that getting better wasn’t going to be an overnight affair. For a year healing became, in effect, my career. Fortunately I had teamed up with an extraordinary doctor, and we worked together as a partnership in recovering my health, and with it, my sense of control. That year was heady and instructive, with plenty of opportunities to meditate on the science and art of healing, as well as the nature of the doctor-patient relationship. It seemed to me that patients were more likely to get better, so long as they were in charge of the decision-making about their care. True healing could only begin if there existed a dialogue between doctor and patient, a democracy of shared responsibility. I also experienced first-hand that people can get well without drugs and surgery, just by altering what they eat and how they live. Healing isn’t simply a matter of finding the right drug or right operation, but a complex process of accepting responsibility for your own life.

This personal experience stirred up dormant memories that had affected me deeply early in my career. As a young journalist in New York, I had headed the editorial department of the Chicago Tribune – New York News Syndicate. There I’d met the late Dr Robert Mendelsohn and helped to launch his column ‘The People’s Doctor’ in the mid-seventies. As former medical director of a national programme for underprivileged children, and chairman of a state licensing committee for doctors, Mendelsohn had been entrenched in the very heart of the American medical establishment. Nevertheless, here was this kindly, mild-mannered man, your prototypical Jewish grandfather, blowing the whistle on all his peers by denouncing medicine as excessive and unproven. Every week his column would savage yet another medical sacred cow. Most famously, it was Bob who likened medicine to the new religion. ‘Medicine’, he wrote, ‘is not based on science – it’s based on faith.’

Bob sent tremors through the very foundation of my belief system. I had been a product of the post-war American baby boom, the Kennedy New Frontier, brought up to regard American science and technology as the saviours of mankind. As a teenager I had believed in the principles of Lyndon Johnson’s American dream. Most of the big problems of mankind – racism, poverty, illness – could be eliminated by social engineering and science, there in the best country in the world.

In my own journalism, when I began examining some of the social ‘goods’ that medical science engages in – such as ‘breakthroughs’ like the Pill – I came to realize that at times they amounted to a great deal of dangerous meddling. But it wasn’t until I began to investigate my own health problems that the prescience of Mendelsohn’s views really came home.

Once I got better (which took, all told, a year), I became drawn in my freelance work to medicine. I began studying the professional literature in medical libraries and learned how to read medical studies. I followed around exhausted junior doctors working a standard 84-hour shift in a special baby unit, to get a taste for the extreme conditions which young doctors had to endure (and the kind of questionable care their patients would receive under these conditions).

In time I began to feel I’d walked through the looking glass. Nothing in my university training prepared me for the peculiar, often tortured logic of medical studies. Treatments had been adopted with little or no scientific basis in fact. Studies which cast doubt on a drug’s effectiveness were nevertheless applauded as evidence of success. Many of the gravest, sloppy mistakes in study design had been overlooked. Studies clearly showed that certain drugs cause cancer, yet here were top scientists dancing all around the numbers to avoid acknowledging the obvious. Medicine’s own scientific literature offered overwhelming evidence that some of it not only didn’t work, but was highly dangerous. This was not a ‘science’. This was a belief system so fixed, so inherent, that any truth to the contrary was dismissed as virtual blasphemy.

Fired by the missionary zeal of the newly converted, at some point I became extremely boring on the subject. Probably out of desperation, my then new partner (now my husband), Bryan, suggested that I start a newsletter about the true risks of medical practices – so I didn’t have to tell him anymore, but could tell the world.

At the time, we didn’t expect that this newsletter, which we planned to call What Doctors Don’t Tell You, would be much more than a hobby. I was pregnant by that time, and we thought it might be a way for me to stay home with our child and make a modest living.

From the outset, after our launch at the 1989 Here’s Health show, people showed keen interest in subscribing. By then I had assembled an advisory panel of 25 top doctors, chosen because they themselves had blown the whistle on unproven medical practice or pioneered less invasive medical procedures. Although we rarely advertised during the first year, the newsletter seemed propelled forward by its own steam and the zealous faith of our initial subscribers; by the end of that first year we had somehow managed to accumulate 1,000 readers, and now we have many thousands of loyal subscribers in Britain, the United States, and all over the world.

Outrage is now the passion that powers the newsletter – as well as this book. I am livid every time I open my post. Each morning I wade through piles of letters containing heart-rending stories of personal catastrophe – children who have been killed, or husbands and wives mutilated or incapacitated through medicine. Whenever we study their cases we usually discover that the dangers of the treatments given to them were well known. Their doctors just hadn’t bothered communicating this vital information to them.

The problem is, by the time they write to us, it is too late.

I have written this book because I don’t want you to be another statistic in my morning post. I do not promise you a comfortable read. Many of the facts in this book are likely to unsettle you. You may learn that much of what your doctor tells you isn’t true. But that is my intention. I want to help you to become a more informed medical consumer by determining when you actually need your doctor and when his advice is best ignored. I want to save you from unnecessary treatments and dangerous cures, from ‘preventive just-in-case medicine’ that will leave you damaged even before you’ve actually become ill. Besides being alerted to the hazards of many accepted practices, you’ll also find many proven, safe alternatives for diagnosing, preventing or treating many illnesses. I want to help you to learn not to be a ‘good’ patient. Good patients, the kind who blindly follow orders instead of demanding answers, sometimes die.

The following pages will open up to you the trade secrets of what has been largely a closed shop. You’ll have a chance to listen to the private conversation that medicine conducts with itself. And, once you discover just how much hokum resides in your doctor’s medicine cupboard, just how much medicine relies on blind faith, received wisdom and selective facts, not reason, science or common sense, you can grab the power away from this false shaman and begin to take back control of your health.

PART I MEDICINE’S FALSE SCIENCE

1 The Un-science of Modern Medicine

It’s comforting in life to have certainties. One of the cosiest of certainties we’ve grown up with is that modern medicine works miracles and doctors cure diseases. In the stories we tell ourselves, Dr Kildare, Marcus Welby, Dr Finlay, clad in symbolically pure white, engage in the business, all day, every day, of saving lives. And even though more people die in our modern-day equivalents like ER and Casualty, those doctors in the emergency room still have gadgets capable of raising the dead.

Our greatest certainty about medicine is that it is a lofty and reputable science, arrived at by scientists in laboratories by exhaustive testing and review. We proudly point to the fact that science has progressed and triumphed over chaos and darkness, over the time when doctors didn’t even know that they had to wash their hands.

Since the Second World War, and the discovery of the two great miracle drugs of this century – penicillin and cortisone – medicine has indeed worked miracles. People who would have died from hormone-related deficiencies such as Addison’s disease, and life-threatening infections such as pneumonia or meningitis, can now recover easily and return to normal lives. Most of the great medical discoveries – painless surgery, antiseptic hospital environments, x-rays – only discovered in the last century, have given us in the West the best emergency medicine in the world. If you have an unforeseen heart attack, an operable brain tumour, a near fatal car accident, an emergency in childbirth, then Western medicine, with its array of space-age gadgetry, is without parallel for sorting you out. If a building ever falls on me, I’d like all the very latest in Western gee-whizz technology to put me back together. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for 20th-century drugs, my mother would have died in her early twenties and I never would have been born.

It was also these discoveries during the Second World War, ending abruptly with the ultimate scientific discovery, the atomic bomb, which left us with a great expectancy about science. The aftermath of victory was also the dawning of the scientific age of medicine. Science had helped us to conquer our human enemies. Now it would do battle with our microscopic ones. We were beginning to conquer space; it wouldn’t be very long, as Life magazine promised my generation in America, before we conquered disease.