In the old days I glanced through the journals and naïvely supposed that the summaries of the scientific papers provided for busy doctors represented the content of those papers more or less accurately and, what's perhaps more important, that the conclusions followed from the evidence. I have found, on reading the journals more carefully, that this is often not so: that the conclusions do not follow from the evidence or are presented in such a way as to be misleading.

I am not a thoroughgoing skeptic about modern medicine, and like almost everyone else I would take myself off to a doctor in the event of illness. If it were not for modern medicine, or comparatively modern medicine, I would have been dead a long time ago. Nevertheless, it is not reassuring that so much of what doctors do, and what I did myself, is less than scientifically sound or justified, and some of it is downright harmful.

"Only one conclusion is possible: the principal beneficiaries of this medical endeavor are the drug manufacturers, with the doctors a poor second."

Here, for example, is a little item from the back of a recent edition of the British Medical Journal. It comes from a column called "Minerva," which supplies very short summaries of interesting papers in other medical journals. It reads as follows: