Time magazine carried an article entitled 'Revenge of the Killer Microbes' in its September 1995 issue. It ran,
"Faced with AIDS, and an ever-increasing number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, doctors were forced to admit that the medical profession was actually retreating in the battle against germs. The question ceased to be 'When will infectious diseases be wiped out?', and became 'Where will the next deadly disease appear?'.....Humanity once had the hubris to think that it could control or even conquer all these microbes. But anyone who reads today's headlines knows how vain that hope turned out to be. New scourges are emerging—AIDS is not the only one—older diseases like tuberculosis are rapidly evolving into forms that are resistant to antibiotics.....In 1992, 13300 hospital patients died of infections that resisted every drug doctors tried."
Food for thought. After World War II the development of new vaccines and the discovery of antibiotics led to the control of many infectious diseases. The virtual disappearance overnight of smallpox, diphtheria and polio led many to believe that Modern Western Medicine was capable of almost anything. By the mid-1970s it seemed as though we were almost there. Then other diseases simply took their place—strokes, heart attacks, rheumatism and cancer amongst others.
US President Richard Nixon famously declared 'War on Cancer' in 1971. However despite spending billions of dollars on research, no cancer incurable then is curable today. Moreover chemotherapy's successes are similar to those thirty years ago—indeed chemotherapy has never been scientifically proved to do any good at all.
The Gold Standard of medical research is the randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. This is deemed to be the measure of the real worth of any drug or treatment. However the New Scientist on the front cover of one of their recent issues claimed that around 80% of medical procedures in common use today have never been properly subjected to this Gold Standard.
Furthermore detractors also point out that the bulk of medical research is potentially tainted, since the majority is funded by the very drugs companies that stand to gain from specific results. They claim that these drugs companies, and their medical research, have a vested interest in ill-health.