When a Vegetarian Sausage Beats an MRI Scanner

January 15, 2025 by Doctor Vernon Coleman

The following essay is taken from the book `Why and how doctors kill more people than cancer’ by Vernon Coleman

In the dark old days of medicine, objective judgements were made based on a skilful and knowledgeable interpretation and assessment of a mixture of symptoms and signs. Doctors made diagnoses relying on their own senses, rather than bowing to extremely fallible machines. They relied on experience, instinct and intuition. They used X-rays and laboratory tests to help them confirm their diagnoses.

Today, diagnostic skills are disappearing and doctors are coming to rely almost entirely on laboratory tests and X-ray pictures. Doctors don't dare make diagnoses unless they can provide bits of paper from a laboratory to substantiate their conclusion. Since laboratory tests and investigations are woefully inaccurate, and often misleading, the result is that many patients are wrongly diagnosed (and exposed to unnecessary treatments), many serious problems are missed completely and doctors are making more mistakes than ever.

A growing majority of doctors now do little more than interpret laboratory results; they know that ordering tests is easier than thinking and that they are not likely to be sued if they have bits of paper to support their diagnoses. Doctors have become little more than simple computers: ordering tests and making decisions on the basis of the results obtained. When my wife was taken ill with neurological problems she saw several doctors before anyone thought to ask her about her diet. Numerous tests were performed but no one bothered to ask her what sort of foods she ate. And yet diet is a vital factor in the development of illness.

Modern doctors rely far too much on technology – and far too little on building up any diagnostic skills of their own. Old-fashioned doctors used to rely on what their patients told them and on what their eyes, ears, noses and fingertips told them. Most important of all, perhaps, was the sixth sense that doctors used to acquire through years of clinical experience. Modern doctors rely too much upon equipment which is often faulty, frequently badly calibrated and more often than not downright misleading.

Sadly, doctors seem surprisingly unaware that the high technology alternatives to genuine diagnostic skills are dangerously fallible; they do not seem to know that if you do enough tests you will always find an abnormality. Then the abnormality (which may be entirely harmless) will have to be further investigated and probably treated. Tests are often inaccurate and frequently misleading. They lead to many mistaken diagnoses. (There is a chapter in my book Coleman's Laws dealing with the problems created by misleading tests and investigations.) Many doctors seem quite unable, or unwilling, to reach a diagnosis unless the diagnosis is more or less written out on a form that has been printed by a computer. The best diagnostician I ever knew was not a hospital consultant but a GP. He was old and frail when I knew him. He could make diagnoses more accurately than any doctor relying on technology. His secret was simple: he listened to patients and considered their responses; he looked at them and he noticed things. It wasn't complicated. Today's doctors have lost the skill that was most valued among doctors a generation ago: the skill to make diagnoses. (Treating patients who have been diagnosed is, by comparison, straightforward and simple enough. Any fool can open a textbook, look up a disease, and find out how to treat it.) Doctors don't seem to have realised that you don't need six years of medical school to order a pile of laboratory tests. And you don't need six years of training to `read' the results. If doctors are going to continue to rely exclusively on test results when making diagnoses then medical training could be cut down to a weekend.

The X-rays, blood tests and other investigations which doctors order are not just sometimes lethal but are frequently unnecessary. Many tests are wildly inaccurate and dangerously misleading as well. Tests results are often wrong. It is not unusual to obtain 30% false negatives or false positives. This means that if a doctor performs ten tests then the chances are that three of them will be wrong and quite misleading.

Here are just some of the frightening facts that I can reveal about medical investigations:

1. X-rays are the third biggest cause of cancer (after eating meat and smoking). Many X-rays are done quite unnecessarily – just as a `routine'. In Britain around 20,000 people a year get cancer from medical and dental X-rays. X-rays given to pregnant women during the 1950s and 1960s are responsible for between 5% and 10% of all childhood cancers. Children who develop leukaemia – and other cancers – may have been made ill because their mothers had X-rays while they were pregnant.

2. Tests often wrongly show up disease in healthy individuals. Those patients are then subjected to surgery and drug therapy which they do not need.

3. Tests – which patients and doctors seem to trust too much – often wrongly say that a patient is healthy.

4. About two thirds of all medical tests are worthless and of no help to the patient.

5. Patients routinely admitted to hospital are often subjected to 20 or so blood, urine and other tests. When so many tests are done one or more abnormalities will be found in two thirds of all healthy individuals. Once an abnormal result has been obtained doctors feel obliged to continue doing tests. The tests they do often produce serious complications. Many patients who think they are ill – and have been told that they need to take drugs for life – are not really ill at all.

6. Unnecessary tests are often done out of habit, for personal research, to provide protection in case of lawsuits or simply to impress other doctors. Doctors frequently order tests because it is quicker and easier to fill in a form than it is to talk and listen or to examine a patient properly.

7. When blood tests are done the results are compared against `normal' values. But the `normal' figures may have been produced decades earlier – by testing a few seemingly healthy doctors and nurses. No one really knows what is `normal'. Your `abnormal' result may be more `normal' than the official `normal' result.

8. Doctors who know that tests can be misleading frequently order expensive, uncomfortable and even hazardous investigations – and then ignore the results.

9. Complicated, expensive and potentially dangerous tests are often ordered when simple, inexpensive and perfectly safe tests would be more appropriate. My wife saw a neurologist who decided that her symptoms might be caused by a tumour affecting the top of her spine. The doctor ordered an MRI scan of her brain and spine. But the disease the doctor had thought possible causes a very specific loss of sensation – including a loss of temperature sensation. I took a frozen vegetarian sausage out of the freezer and performed a simple test myself – using the frozen sausage to check for temperature sensation loss. There were no temperature sensation losses. I concluded that the diagnosis was wrong and we cooked the sausage and ate it. Four days later my wife went for the MRI scan as arranged. The scan supported the evidence provided by the cold vegetarian sausage and showed that there was no lesion in my wife's spine. The sausage test, just as reliable as the scan, took a fraction of the time to do and cost about £10,000 less. The results were available instantly.

NOTE
The above essay is taken from `Why and how doctors kill more people than cancer’ by Vernon Coleman. The book is available from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com

Copyright Vernon Coleman 2011 and 2025