Politics in Healing: The Suppression and Manipulation of American Medicine

Haley gathers 12 medical outsiders' stories to support his theory that the AMA, FDA, and big pharmaceutical companies conspire to prevent new ideas from entering medical research and practice. His subjects include Andrew Ivy, who advocated the discredited anticancer drug Krebiozen; anticancer herbalist Harry Hoxsey; anticancer blood researcher Gaston Naessens; and antineoplastin researcher Stanislaw Burzynski. Those persecuted medical investigators are fairly well known, but some of Haley's other cases concern forgotten men like William Koch, developer of the antipolio drug Glyoxylide, whom many may find more interesting because of their obscurity. The stories of all 12 are often absent from current medical histories, which alone makes this book worthwhile. Haley's thesis that many of his subjects were victims of organized medicine, however, remains unproven. Moreover, his assertion that at least five of the 12 should have been Nobel laureates strains credibility, and the implication that the AMA controls the decisions of the Nobel committees seems dubious. --William Beatty, American Library Association.