Don’t believe in miracles

28 October 2009

/article_images/articledir_10964/5482063/1_listing.jpg

Everyone likes to attack Western medicine, says Anthony Daniels, but we must ignore the siren song of hocus-pocus and respect rationality

But as one grows older one grows more tolerant, or more aware that no one conducts his life as if it were an algorithm, at each branch of which he decides which way to go on strict evidence of what is best. A doctor becomes aware that a considerable part of his own beneficial effect depends upon his almost shamanistic authority; even a patient’s consent to treatment depends upon faith and trust.

Here there is something of a paradox. Partly because of the increased coverage of matters medical in the press and in broadcasting, in which stories swing, pendulum-like, between the miracle-working and the murderous doctor, trust in the profession has declined (much greater as it remains by comparison with that in, say, politicians). So the doctor increasingly is seen either as denying his patient the best treatment, or as maliciously maltreating him. The patient’s defence against this is the internet, information on which is often treated with all the credulity worthy of, or attaching to, a miracle-working virgin.

The sceptical, it turns out, are certainly not immune from the siren song of credulity. It is as if, exhausted by the mental effort of taking nothing on trust, they suddenly throw in the sponge and believe the most implausible nonsense that would not take in someone half as educated as they.

Every day for many years, on my way to work in hospital, I passed an establishment offering high colonic lavages to the public, by way of panacea. Whether this was a front for other services, I never discovered; but my grandmother, who believed implicitly in a weekly clearout by means of castor oil, would have approved.

At first I used to experience irritation every time I passed the establishment. But when I reflected that it was appealing to the same nonsense that my grandmother had believed in a hundred years earlier, I calmed down and was much comforted.