Reviews
“A brilliant, humane and urgently needed account of medicine’s critics, casualties and contradictions. Caitjan Gainty shows that doubt is not medicine’s enemy, but one of its most necessary correctives. It should be prescribed reading for clinicians and patients alike.” — Guddi Singh, health campaigner and TV broadcaster
“Healthy Scepticism shows why doubters and activists deserve serious attention. With radical empathy, Caitjan Gainty takes us on an imaginative tour of contrarian ideas, from ancient philosophy to today’s debates. Exposing the fragile certainties underpinning modern medicine, Gainty offers a refreshing and compelling corrective.” — Baroness Anne Marie Rafferty, former president of the Royal College of Nursing
“Who gets to question medicine – and why does it matter? Caitjan Gainty offers a lucid, patient-centred argument for the indispensable role of sceptics and outsiders in holding healthcare to account.” — Charlotte Blease, author of Dr. Bot
About
In today’s medical world, scepticism is marginalised: dissenting doctors and uncertain patients are seen as hardly more rational than anti-vaxx conspiracists or questionable wellness gurus. Yet legitimate doubts have been raised throughout human history—and persist for a reason.
This sharp, compassionate book rejects unhelpful binary thinking to explore the vast middle ground where we all really live. Many of us need medicine, and trust science—but still feel wary of big pharma, unsure about new treatments, and let down by a healthcare culture that gaslights and prejudges as often as it helps or heals. From chronic sufferers to minoritised communities, Caitjan Gainty tells the stories of medicine’s critics, victims and outsiders, and unveils the illogical thinking that created both modern medicine and its many sceptics.
Entertaining, enlightening and occasionally enraging, Healthy Scepticism revisits our ancient tradition of distrusting doctors and prescribes a new course of treatment. With a well-founded dose of doubt, we can see medicine’s successes and shortcomings—and understand where our broken system went wrong.
EXCERPT
It's Not Personal
The cardiologist on the other side of the desk was confident I had the disease that had just killed my brother Denis. It was called Arrhythmogenic Cardiomyopathy, or AVC for short. The test results weren’t all in, but the fact that my brother had died
from it got me 50 percent of the way to a diagnosis; 75 percent certainty came from the fact that ever since my brother Denis’s death, and the revelation it was his heart that killed him, I’d had unrelenting palpitations. “Actually,” the cardiologist told me. “That isn’t true. You’ve always had them, you only just became aware of them.” He was certain of it. It seemed to me a strange assertion for someone who I knew had never lived in my body. We’d only just met.
The doctor pulled out a piece of paper and hastily drew a graph on it, upside down as if to save the energy of having to turn it around. It was an act he had clearly done many times before – part of his choreographed routine for patients like me, who he
suspected were having a hard time accepting their diagnosis or, rather, a hard time accepting his expertise.
He shoved it toward us. "What's that?" my husband asked. "It's a graph that shows how bad exercise is for your heart,'" the doctor replied. "I don't know why people exercise so much. It's just not good for you." We both looked at him. I may have nodded politely, because I am unfailingly polite in such situations. My heart thumped around in my chest. It said what I couldn't say aloud. What a dick.
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