Death in America
SIR: "The achievements of organic medicine in a country like the United States," John Rowan Wilson writes (June 26) — contrasting them with the failures of psychiatry there — "can be seen very readily, and measured by such criteria as average age of death."
Measured by that criterion, organic medicine in the US has little to be proud of. The death rate there went steadily down from 1900 to the second world war (apart from occasional setbacks, such as the one caused by the influenza epidemic after world war one), chiefly because of improvements in hygiene. During the late 'forties, and coincident with the appearance of the great wonder drugs, the antibiotics and corticosteroids, the death rate levelled out and has since begun to rise again, so that people today are actually dying younger, on average, than they were a quarter of a century ago. And this, according to the US National Centre for Health Statistics, who provide the figures, cannot be accounted for by known causes — traffic accidents, say, and Vietnam.
A possible explanation is that too many patients are having their resistance weakened by too frequent prescriptions of unnecessary and dangerous drugs; psychiatrists, it has to be admitted, being now some of the worst offenders in their prescribing habits.
Brian Inglis 20 Albion Street, London, W2
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