Friday 7 October 2016

Former pharma: more bad treatments for bad legs

Danger Man’s Doctor devotees will remember our belated expose of the National Infirmary for Bad Legs – an elaborate long-con hospital that lured thousands into shelling out for a quack leg treatment called Tremol in the early decades of the 20th century.
A British Medical Association investigation of Tremol in 1912 showed that it was a toxic combination of calcium choloride, ferric chloride, hydrochloric acid and rhubarb infusion.
Now, thanks to our reader Marlene Dawson, there are further revelations to be shared. Ms Dawson picked up a dog-eared edition of “Your Bad Leg and The Reason Why” – the Bible of Tremol use – at a jumble sale in Manchester, and kindly sent it to me. It includes a beautiful “Guarantee” from the National College of Health Limited and Infirmary for Bad Legs, complete with a picture of the infirmary. Ms Dawson points out the building still exists on Great Clowes Street, Salford, and is now home to media businesses and fashion photographers. 
The guarantee superbly undertakes to refund all money paid for Tremol treatment if it fails to cure after “a reasonable length of time”, while also stating in the conditions (very small print): “We must be the judges of what is a reasonable time. We give no warranties.”
“Your Bad Leg” sets out the supposedly scientific basis by which Tremol purifies the blood, and therefore cures all types of ulcer, varicose veins and eczema. And its brazen denunciation of quack treatments illustrates superbly how patent remedies throughout history have clung to the edges of respectability, knowing that confidence is at the heart of every con.
“What the proprietors of these so-called cures claim is an impossibility, and the assertions they make are untrue,” it reads. “But this is the treatment foisted on you by unscrupulous persons, and the worst of it is, if you willingly submit yourself to such arrant quackery you become so sceptical when a genuine and guaranteed cure is brought before you, like Tremol, and pains taken with your case, and a lasting cure offered to you that you can hardly believe it is possible, and you doubt that such a thing as a real cure can exist.”
Well, it’s got me. I’m in.

Tuesday 27 September 2016

The circle of ignorance and why stupid people think they know everything


“The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” So wise is the saying (or something like it) that at different times it’s been attributed to Aristotle, Socrates, David Byrne, Donald Trump, Albert Einstein. And me.
A psychologist once demonstrated to me the truth of the saying using a simple visual analogy: let’s call it the circle of ignorance. If everything you know is represented as a circle, then everything you don’t know lies outside the circle. The circle’s border is the limits of your knowledge, and defines your awareness of what you don’t know. By the laws of geometry, the more you know, the bigger the circle, the larger its circumference, the greater your awareness of what you don’t know.
Only stupid people (and reality TV billionaires) think they know everything.
But we can all get a bit a swept away with scientific advance and forget that answering any question usually results in several new questions.  I’ve recently been writing a piece for a national magazine examining exactly how close we are to conquering cancer. And the answer, despite the astounding progress we’ve made since 1970, is still “not very”.  
Just ten years ago, the scientific world was quivering in excitement at a new breed of targeted cancer drugs called monoclonal antibodies that would transform cancer into a condition you lived with rather than died of. And they were certainly a great step forward: today they are helping many people live longer. But no-one’s saying they’re game-changers any more. We’ve discovered that cancers become resistant to them and their effects are often short-lived.
So immunotherapy – treatments that get the body’s own immune system to fight cancer – has become the next big hope for cancer. Again the headlines raise the prospect of cancer being beaten. But the more immunotherapy treatments are tested, the more we understand the severity of their side effects, the more we understand that cancer evolves to evade these approaches too.  
Cause for us to put our heads in our hands and despair? Of course not. Advances in our knowledge of cancer and how to treat it mean we’re twice as likely to survive 10 years after a cancer diagnosis as we were 40 years ago. But let’s start accepting that we’re not always as clever as we think we are. And let’s stop expecting scientists to answer what might be impossible questions.