For a country whose president is proposing universal healthcare, visiting lecturer David Healy — a professor of psychological medicine at Cardiff University, North Wales — said it is essential to foster an understanding of what good healthcare really is. Healy was the featured professor at this year’s Nordlander Lecture in Science and Public Policy on Wednesday, Mar. 25, established by the science and technology studies department in memory of J. Eric Nordlander, a prominent educator and scientist. Professor Bruce Lewenstein, science and technology studies, introduced David Healy as well as the Nordlander family who was in attendance.

While Healy’s lecture was entitled “The Future of Medical Care: Can Obama’s Healthcare Plan Work?” the talk focused on the history of psychopharmacology, one of Healy’s main interests. Healy, who spends one third of his time as a practicing psychiatrist, began his discussion with the question of what good medical care is.

Healy showed a picture of a painting by Samuel Luke Fildes entitled “The Doctor,” 1891, depicting doctor waiting with a child and the parents. The doctor is standing by, caring for the child instead of just giving medication. Healy said good medical care is giving cures, as well as not giving or doing things that could cause harm.

During the time of the painting, patent medicine like snake oil and Beecham pills containing unknown ingredients were taken for a variety of maladies. Such medications were publicly advertised, and were essentially about making a person feel and look good instead of getting better.

At the end of the 19th century, doctors faced conditions like diphtheria, which appeared to be unfixable. Doctors tried using tubes to clear a space in the throat to allow the patients to breathe, until an innovative doctor used an antitoxin to address the problem on a chemical level. Chemical industries developed in places like Germany, where the use of dyes in cellular and bacterial staining (as well as the killing of bacteria) became widespread. Antifebrin, bayer asprin, and even heroin (considered legitimate at the time) were born, but the industrial boom made medical care a more surgical process, Healy said.

Peter Collier, the creator of “Collier’s: The National Weekly” and head of the fifth Division of Chemistry, urged the federal administration to impart food and drug regulations. His successor, Harvey Wiley, helped found the food and drug administration. In 1909, the British medical association permitted producers of pharmaceutical drugs to keep their remedies secret, and prices increased fivefold. Prescription-only medications were established, and by 1962, doctors began to hold back on giving drugs and started using controlled trials to test the medicine.

Pharmaceutical companies have since developed, and conflicts of interest have arisen with the distribution of free products to doctors. The national institute for health and clinical excellence sets guidelines to keep rogue doctors (who dispense drugs excessively to turn a profit) at a minimum.

Healy contended that illnesses have been reconfigured to produce new conditions to treat with new drugs. Bipolar disorder is a term that comes with a completely new set of connotations, and thus medication. Healy questioned whether this is ethical. “If you sell the illness, you sell the treatment,” he said.

In 1983, Zantac grossed 1 billion dollars, and products like Prozac and Lipitor produced similar revenues. Contrary to popular belief, Healy clarified, Pfizer buys the drug, but does not actually make it. “More people die on these treatments than not,” Healy said, adding, “there are more dead bodies in the antidepressant column than the placebo [column].”

Healy is a proponent of evidence-based medicine, which is concerned with the procedural guidelines for drug testing. Looking at experiments created to test drugs, Healy argued that companies may have fudged results by setting vague conditions to make their drug appear more effective. Healthcare, he said, is in danger of becoming more about statistics than individual patients.

“At the moment, I’m not sure if the science is working on our behalf, rather on the behalf of the pharmaceutical companies,” he said. “Medical care tries to give people the best opportunity to fill their potential, and it does so by being realistic with them.” Doctors report only one in 100 serious drug problems that their patients face to the FDA.

In the field of medicine, certain publications employ ghostwriters to write entire articles that are later attributed to certain scientists not part of the original writing process, according to Healy. He said one solution may be reclassifying medical journals as magazines.