The Medical Advisor

I’m a smoker. I’ve smoked a pack a day for almost 20 years. Knowing all that I do about health and medicine, you’d have to think I’m either crazy or suicidal, right? Why would I carry on smoking veritable cancer sticks, day in day out, knowing all we do about the risks? I do not fear cancer. (Nor the other pathologies it can cause - but that’s a discussion for another day.) If I die of cancer one of these days, please feel free to put this right alongside my obituary and laugh at me, because it isn’t going to happen. One of the most insidious methodological switches that has been applied to modern medicine is a severe overreliance on statistical interpretations of trial data, to the exclusion of any significant consideration of proteomic interactions or mechanisms, which are instead relegated to curiosities of interest only to the scientists investigating them, with very little transference to the discovery and announcement of useful therapeutics. This switch has enabled the powers th...