Healthy Scepticism

A searing account of controversy, complexity and conspiracy in the medical world, diagnosing both healthy and unhealthy doubt.

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 about medicine have been important throughout human history—and persist for a reason.

In this sharp, compassionate book, Caitjan Gainty clears away tribalism and binary thinking to explore the vast middle ground where we all really live. Many of us need medicine, and trust science—but still find ourselves wary of big pharma, unsure about new treatments, and let down by a healthcare culture that gaslights, prejudges and paralyses as often as it helps or heals. 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. From chronic sufferers to minority communities, she dissects healthcare’s problems and asks how we can live well.

Entertaining, enlightening and occasionally enraging, Healthy Scepticism revisits our ancient tradition of distrusting doctors; probes our experiences in the twenty-first century; and calls for a new course of treatment. With a well-founded dose of doubt, we can see what medicine does well, where its limits lie, and what has gone wrong in today’s broken system.