What happened to ‘Do no harm’?

It’s time to radically rethink how we practice medicine to unlock our full healing potential.

It’s confusing for a lot of people knowing that your doctors have signed up to a medical code of conduct—proposed 2,500 years ago by the Greek doctor and philosopher Hippocrates—that undertakes they must “First, do no harm.”

Yet we also know that prescription medicine, the most common intervention offered by your doctor, is recognized as the third biggest cause of death in modern society. What’s going on?

Unraveling this paradox is not as easy as it might sound. There are a bundle of factors that contribute to it, many of them pulling in different directions. They include, for example, the fact that many people who die from prescription medicines are already very sick. The medicine then catalyzes their death.

Then there’s the doctors’ medical training: if you’ve been trained in pharmacology and the prescription of drugs, you’re hardly going to engage in therapies that are less likely to cause harm. When you have a few generations who’ve grown up with the notion of “a pill for an ill,” many patients demand a prescription. In fact, they don’t leave the doctor’s office until one has been written.

Another factor is the sheer burden on doctors, especially in primary care. If you need to see over 40 patients a day, and your consultation window is just eight minutes, what else can you really do as a doctor in that snapshot of time?

Of course, there’s a whole lot that can be done, but most of it requires seismic changes in how medicine is practiced.

It also requires that one of the most economically powerful and politically influential industries on the planet step aside, or diversify, to find business opportunities that don’t involve patented new-to-nature chemistries with shocking safety records. (Did you read the patient insert for the last medication you took?)

A recent study by a team at Manchester University in the UK reminds us once again that doctors in developed countries inflict considerable harm, and much of this is preventable. In fact, 12 percent of this preventable harm was found to be severe or led to death.1

This is consistent with our own commissioned studies of government data from the UK and EU, which show that hospitals are among the most dangerous places to be, and that preventable deaths in hospitals are the biggest single cause of death, affecting by far the greatest number of people.

Another big part of the problem is our expectations on doctors. Most primary care physicians are so heavily burdened that their burnout rate and suicide risk are greater than any other group in society. Mistakes are always going to happen, but when you’re under massive stress, mistakes happen more often.

Sooner or later, every doctor makes a mistake. The legal system, especially in the US, has reinforced the importance of being silent in order to avoid incrimination. But silence doesn’t help patients, nor does it help doctors in the long term.

One of the most outspoken doctors on this subject is Canadian emergency physician Brian Goldman (www.doctorbriangoldman.com). His TED talk on the subject of why doctors should be able to say sorry for their mistakes has had nearly 1.5 million views, so it’s clearly struck a chord.

The big question is to what extent preventable medical errors and their resulting harm could be reduced by doctors being less reliant on drugs.

Cochrane cofounder Dr Peter Gøtzsche, who was expelled in 2018 by the very organization he founded for being outspoken about controversial issues relating to drugs and vaccines, said in the BMJ  back in 2013, “There are simple solutions to our deadly drug epidemic.

“Make fewer diagnoses, prescribe fewer drugs and tell the patients to read the package insert on the internet. Then they might never take the drug . . . A life without drugs is possible for most of us most of the time.”

Sounds simple enough, right? Hippocrates, some 2,500 years before Gøtzsche, also understood the dangers of drugs and the need to do things differently. In the Hippocratic Oath, he suggested: “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan. I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.”

Any health or fitness practitioner who has been trained in a healthcare field that doesn’t involve delivering drugs or surgery may in many instances be your best bet. Perhaps non-drug therapies should at least be your first port of call, rather than a primary care physician who’s got to deal with 40 or more patients on the same day.

There’s also an incredible amount you can do yourself. Self-care should be more about giving your body the right environment—both internally and externally—and not just telling you when and how to take your meds.

Let’s radically rethink how we practice medicine and learn all we can about unlocking that extraordinary internal pharmacy of ours to promote self-healing.

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