Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates

Wootton's central argument is that medicine was net-harmful for roughly 2,300 of the past 2,400 years, that the obstacles to its disconfirmation were psychological and cultural rather than intellectual, and that even modern medicine accounts for no more than 12 to 20 percent of 20th-century gains in life expectancy. The book traces the persistence of bleeding, purging, and other Hippocratic practices into the 19th century despite repeated experimental disconfirmations, and identifies six structural obstacles (illusion of success, placebo effect, patient-not-disease thinking, pressure to conform, absence of statistical thinking, tacit obligation to give orthodox treatment) that allowed practitioners to ignore evidence. Wootton's operational definition of harmful medicine ('doing worse than a placebo') and his diagnosis of biomarker-driven elite quackery (canonically: Almroth Wright's opsonin index) are the most-cited single passages for any modern scholarly discussion of medicine-as-harm. The book is the strongest secondary source the archive cites for its general analytical frame, though Wootton himself does not address elite-targeted longevity medicine specifically; the archive's contribution is to apply his framework to a domain he does not cover.