Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs: How Surgery Can Be Hazardous to Your Health - And What to Do About It

by Harvey Bigelsen, John Parks Trowbridge (Foreword), Lisa Haller (Contributor)

Most people would consider a knife wound to the stomach a serious health risk, but a similar scalpel wound in an operating room is often shrugged off. In Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs , Dr. Harvey Bigelsen explains how today’s medical doctors overprescribe surgery and ignore its long-term health implications. Any invasive medical procedure, he argues—including colonoscopies and root canals—creates inflammation in the body, leading to serious and long-lasting health problems.

Inflammation, according to Dr. Bigelsen, is the real cause of all chronic disease (persistent or long-lasting illness). Noting that Western medicine has yet to “cure” a single chronic disease, Bigelsen points to a new one that treats each patient as an individual (rather than as a set of symptoms), avoids further damage to the body through surgery, and looks for the root cause of chronic disease in past damage done to the patient’s body—whether caused by a bad fall or a scalpel. Provocatively written and radical in its approach, Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs challenges readers to rethink everything they believe about illness and how to treat it.

Genres: Health

264 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2011

Reviews

[Linda Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

The overall message of the book is that the entire body responds to invasive surgery or other treatment, not just the organ or disease being treated and thus the whole body should be treated as one living organism....sort of an alternative osteopathic vs traditional allopathic approach. As an example, he argues: surgery--> scars--> hidden inflammation--> partial loss of long-term vitality. Well that explanation certainly resonates with my medical history and there are numerous bits of useful information in this book, but I would surely like to have seen more research and current case studies supporting his theory.

[Ravi Reddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book on what ails modern allopathic medicine

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

A marvelous read for anyone with an interest in medicine. Author is a homeopathic physician, and he clearly presents the argument that less medicine may be best in many cases. Wish I had had some of this knowledge years ago. Think many have had the experience of developing follow-on illnesses from treatments - infections post surgery, etc, etc. A very worth-while read, although I did not always agree with all the premises put forth.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book wasn't quite what I expected it to be. I think the book was suggested to me through Overdrive because I've also read Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health and Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far. Those two books are written by doctors practicing allopathic (modern) medicine, which is what I thought would be the case with this book. While it shares some ideas similar as to what is found in Overdiagnosed (for example, more care should be taken in regard to the use of pharmaceuticals), this book is more alternative medicine in its approach (specifically bodywork.)

Leaving aside what one's beliefs might be in regard to forms of alternative medicine, the author is awfully repetitive in his writing. He says it's a "short book," but it actually could be even shorter! The overarching idea of the book is the body wants to self-heal and the primary mechanism of that is inflammation. The body can process through inflammation on its own, provided there aren't physical blocks such as scarring or misalignments. (Here's where that bodywork comes in.) This results in specific phrases and such getting used again... and again... and again.

Beyond that, I suppose one's opinion on whether this is a good book or not is how well a given reader feels convinced by this particular doctor's explanations and support for "biological medicine" (something more common to Europe but not really practiced in the U.S.)

[Alan Victor Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative and essential reading.