What Kind Of Doctors Are An Embarrassment To The Medical Profession?

This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Vivienne Marcus, got a medical degree once.




I can think of a few who have done some mischief. Surgeon Simon Bramhall signed his initials (SB) on the liver of his patients with a laser while he was operating on them. You have to have a pretty monumental ego to think that your patient is merely the canvas upon which you work your mastery—and that you should sign your work as every great artist does.

But Bramhall, egregious though he was, harmed his patients only slightly, and managed only one at a time.

For a whole order of magnitude worse, we need to go to Andrew Wakefield. This “doctor” was trying to sell a single vaccine for measles. Unfortunately he wasn’t getting anywhere, because we already had the MMR triple vaccine: cheap, safe, easy to administer and effective.

So he cooked up an idea to discredit the MMR vaccine. He performed some junk science on some young children, including tests they didn’t need looking for problems they didn’t have, and pretended to find bowel conditions which he linked to the MMR vaccine. Worse, he drew a link between the MMR and the development of autism and put this out in a press conference. His paper was published in the Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.

And Wakefield hit the jackpot. His message went viral. The anti-vaccination campaign lauded him a hero on both sides of the pond. Uptake of MMR plummeted.

It took some years for all this to emerge. The paper was retracted. Wakefield was struck off as a doctor in the UK (although he was already working in the US).

The furore around this has caused enormous harm. The rates of measles and the other viruses have jumped sharply. Measles isn’t just a spotty rash with a couple of weeks off school: it can actually kill you, and it has. Rates of measles encephalitis have risen sharply.

Even though Wakefield was a charlatan, interested in money, who didn’t directly kill anyone with his hands, hundreds of cases of measles have appeared unnecessarily, and the resulting deaths are due to Wakefield’s actions.

And worse, even though Wakefield has been roundly discredited; even though rigorous followup research shows not a vestige of truth in his claims, he is still causing harm. For one thing, he still insists there is a link. But there are plenty of people out there who think “there must be something in it” or there wouldn’t have been such a fuss about it all. People still believe he is right, and people are still withholding vaccinations from their children.

If you are asking about the type of doctor who makes me embarrassed, whose very name makes me want to spit, Andrew Wakefield is that person.

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