It looks a lot like the modern equivalent of using leeches to suck blood as a cure. A recent British clinical trial contraindicates traditional head injury treatment that uses corticosteroid drugs. It showed that if used within 2 weeks after serious head injuries, the drugs increase deaths by 20%.

“The study involved 10,000 patients from 239 hospitals in 49 countries and was co-ordinated by scientists from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Universities of Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Oxford.” Of patients treated with the steroid drugs 3 more out of every hundred died than among those on placebos.

The thought now is that steroids and drugs routinely used to treat inflammation in other areas may be way off base–and may be inadvertently killing many people. Here’s what one professor said:

“We are trying to stop inflammation with corticosteroids steroids, but maybe

inflammation is part of the healing process,” he said. “Whenever we are

interfering with nature, we have to have a certain humility because we could be

wrong.” [emphasis mine]

Herein lies the rub for all bioscientists. Everything in the body is so interrelated–and so many substances play both positive and negative roles in health and disease–that attempting to solve a challenge by dealing with only one or a few facets of a problem ends up being, as the doctor said, “playing Russian roulette” with patients’ lives.

This is further evidence of the need to weave more of the mind/body/spirit connection into our Western attitudes about healing. Fewer people died with no medicine at all than those who received treatment considered de rigeur by most physicians. It’s a huge call for rethinking our beliefs and our approaches–perhaps in many areas.