Editor's Introduction: Poisonous Medicine

To say that the profession of medicine is about helping others is a banality beneath the standards of even a high school student. Nonetheless in an era of clinical practices driven by a shenanigan-infested pharmaceutical industry, cunning insurance companies, and penny-pinching hospital administrations, it is not out of place to remind oneself of what the medical profession is really about, namely, relieving the suffering of fellow human beings. It seeks to eliminate or reduce pain, control infection, remove dangerous growths and foreign bodies within the body, heal wounds, mend broken structures, overcome obstacles to the proper flow of bodily fluids, replace deficient hormonal and enzymatic supplies, help regenerate dying tissue, and restore energy to organs that are beginning to fail in their function. Through all this and more, the diverse network of medical and surgical specialties attempts to bring human disease and dysfunction to a tolerable minimum, if not to its complete elimination and cure. Less dramatically, the same applies to the field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Their interventions, while less visible and “loud”, also lead to the reduction of suffering and improved quality of human life. This is what medicine is about.

But is this always true? Are physicians always kind? Does the profession of medicine invariably abide by the reminder contained in the Hippocratic Oath: “first, do no harm”? Shameful as it is, the answer to these questions is a meek and contrite “no.” Leaving Drs Frankenstein (Shelley, 1817) and Moreau (Wells, 1896), the diabolical caricatures of popular fiction aside, the fact is that physicians as individuals and the medical professional as a whole have not always acted with the benevolence assigned to and expected of them. At the individual level, more than a few doctors are known to have betrayed and cheated their patients, sexually abused them, and even deliberately harmed and killed them; Ramsland's (2007) disturbing document