When you read the history of medicine, you realize that one fad medication or procedure is slowly replaced with another fad. Not necessarily because the new thing is better, but because it was more popular.  It is a deep human habit to replace one flawed solution with another, which is not merely a technical failing but a recurring flaw in human judgment, driven by popularity, hope, and commerce as much as (or more than) by evidence.

In June 1920, at a meeting of the Ohio State Medical Association in Toledo, Ohio, President J. F. Baldwin, MD, delivered an address that is shockingly truthful.

“It is enlightening, to be sure, but decidedly humiliating, to look over the advertising pages of medical journals of thirty or forty years ago [1880-1890], and see what remedies were then extensively advertised, and extensively used by the profession, which have long since disappeared from our medical journals, and from our pharmacies. They were ultimately found to be valueless...

An exceedingly weak point in our profession is its possession of such an enormous array of useless drugs as presented in our pharmacopeia. No thinking observer can look through the pages of that book without being amazed at the credulity [gullibility] of a profession that tolerates such farrago [mess] of nonsense—such a hodgepodge of trash.

It was reported some years ago that Osler had claimed that there were only four great drugs..., opium, mercury, antimony and Jesuits’ bark. Osler, himself… advises a keenly skeptical attitude toward the pharmacopeia as a whole, quoting Franklin’s shrewd remark: ‘He is the best doctor who knows the worthlessness of the most medicines’...

At the present time the profession is being overwhelmed with traveling representatives who are foisting upon us serums and vaccines and preparations of various organs, practically none of which have been demonstrated to have any value whatever, and most of which are known by intelligent physicians to be worthless or worse.

The ordinary physician who successfully treats pneumonia or typhoid fever, or any other of our self-limited diseases, to say nothing of the host of functional diseases, is very apt to assume that the treatment which he has been giving has been instrumental in effecting the recovery of the patient. He may even get a little chesty over his “results,” as he calls them. He ignores the fact that all these diseases tend to get well, and that as a matter of fact none of these diseases, while pursuing their ordinary course, are in the slightest degree affected beneficially by any drug treatment. Under ordinary conditions in the treatment of these diseases the drugless healer, or even those who give absent treatments will accomplish practically as good results as the best educated physician with the entire armamentarium of the pharmacopeia at his back...

Could the public become fully aware of that with which all intelligent physicians are familiar, namely, that the fact that a patient recovers is no evidence whatever of the value of the medication, indeed, he might have gotten well quicker, if he had had no medication...”

[J. F. Baldwin, AM, MD, FACS, President’s Address Before the Ohio State Medical Association, June 1920, pp. 5–15.]