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I should mention here that I also remember the days when doctors were afraid to prescribe strong painkillers to the dying for fear of addicting them in the last weeks of their lives. This was cruel absurdity in an equal and opposite direction, and there was (rightly) a reaction against it.

So many doctors prescribed with the best of intentions and the worst of outcomes. Suffice it to say that certain drug companies encouraged them in this by means of propaganda in favor of their products in which they told no lies but refrained from telling the whole truth. Their advertisements have to this day studiously avoided mention of the fact that their products have caused (and a necessary condition is to all intents and purposes a cause) scores of thousands of deaths while they accentuated the positive. This is the modern pharmacological equivalent of the old surgical saw: The operation was a success, but the patient died. Of course, it is still up to the doctors to treat pharmaceutical sales talk with proper skepticism.

Regulators, bureaucrats, and politicians, generally so eager to intervene, have hitherto remained curiously passive. Now that they are deciding to act, the American Medical Association has warned that doctors”€™ freedom to prescribe is in danger, an argument with which in general I am in sympathy. But it cannot in all honesty be said that the doctors have regulated themselves very well.

It is wonderful to think that there are so many blameworthy people in this matter, enough to satisfy for quite a time anyone’s need to blame others. One of the most fundamental of human necessities, after all, is to have someone to look down on or feel morally superior to. I thoroughly recommend the story.