Heading off course

Holding steadfast to a particular course is generally seen as a good thing. It shows consistency, stability, continuity, perpetuity and all the rest of those positive attributes.

But when it comes to medicine or science, failing to change course can be, at best, blinkered and foolhardy. Often it stems from a fundamentally unscientific refusal to entertain an alternative solution.

Take the case of poor Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor at the Vienna General Hospital, who in 1846 happened to notice that women giving birth in the medical-student-and-doctor-run maternity ward were developing fever and dying in large numbers, while those who had their babies in the midwife-run maternity ward were surviving at much higher rates.

The one difference between the two wards soon became obvious to him: The doctors and their students were showing up in the delivery room straight from the autopsy room, their clothes stained with blood, their hands fresh from dissecting cadavers.

This was before the days of the germ theory, but Semmelweis nevertheless made a connection. He urged his fellow doctors to simply wash their hands with chlorine, and the deaths began to plummet from nearly one-fifth of all women in their care to only 2 percent.

But, stung by the veiled accusation that they might be contributing to the deaths, his colleagues soon rebelled and stopped washing off what Semmelweis believed might be the “cadaverous particles” on their fingers. He spent the rest of his life trying to persuade other European doctors to wash their hands.

But with the exception of the famous British nurse Florence Nightingale, whose adoption of routine handwashing lowered infection rates among the injured from the Crimean War, most health professionals thought he was a nutjob and ignored him.

As a consequence, Semmelweis suffered a nervous breakdown, was admitted to an asylum by colleagues and ironically died from a gangrenous wound, an infection resulting from a beating at the hands of his guards.

Doctors eventually created antiseptic conditions in operating rooms. But it took until the 1980s, amid a batch of outbreaks of foodborne diseases, for the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to finger the culprit as infections transmitted from hand to hand and to espouse washing hands as a way to prevent infection.

And now we have another situation in which the turgid ship of medicine stubbornly refuses to change course. For more than a hundred years, since Alexander Ignatowski discovered that rabbits fed loads of meat, eggs and milk went on to develop atherosclerosis, medicine has believed that excessive dietary fat may contribute to heart disease.

That idea became engrained as orthodoxy after American physiologist Ancel Keys published his famous Seven Countries Study showing that countries with a high-fat diet had a resulting increase in arterial cholesterol. Keys hypothesized that high fat content in the diet and high cholesterol in the blood were wholly responsible for heart disease.

The fact that he was highly selective with his data was ignored, paving the way for statin drugs—among the most popular drugs of all time—and a giant low-fat food industry. Subsequent studies proved Keys’s highly flawed findings wrong. Notably, research showed that heart attack victims often have normal cholesterol levels; fats are healthful, particularly as we age—even necessary; and statins not only don’t prevent heart disease but come with a load of dangerous side effects. In the mid-1960s, a young pathologist named Dr Kilmer McCully noticed that some very young patients sent to him who had died of high levels of homocysteine, an amino acid in the blood, possessed the arteries of an elderly pensioner. Eventually he concluded that high homocysteine was the underlying cause of heart disease

and ultimately of the cholesterol buildup that clogged arteries.

After discovering that B vitamins break down homocysteine into harmless building blocks, McCully worked out that high homocysteine develops when people are extremely low in B vitamins, and his alternate theory of heart disease was born.

The evidence of homocysteine as a factor in so many degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, became impossible to ignore. But drug companies don’t like it when the solution doesn’t entail expensive drugs like statins and consequent rises in share prices. There’s no profit in a better diet and a few vitamin supplements.

As for the ship of modern medicine, it stubbornly plows on along its wrongheaded course. In an article about the flawed reasoning of the cholesterol hypothesis, Gregory Sloop, a pathologist from the Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine, wrote, “Despite 60 years of study and an investment of billions of dollars, the rate of deaths due to coronary artery disease is increasing in the United States and in all other countries except the lowest socio-demographic populations worldwide.”

As for why, Sloop and his cardiologist colleagues also quote a medical historian: “As long as paradigm-compatible findings keep accumulating, it is rather easy to ignore or suppress discordant data as irrelevant or just noisy elements.”

Despite a huge increase in research supporting McCully’s early hypothesis, mainstream medicine continues to dismiss all evidence pointing to a highly processed, high-sugar diet and low levels of B vitamins as the very obvious culprit of heart disease and other degenerative diseases.

The take-home message: Cook from scratch, avoid high-glycemic foods, take your B vitamins and keep the faith that it won’t take 100 years for the medical profession to finally accept the truth.

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