Poisonous Prescription

THE DOCTORS by Martin L. Gross. 605 pages. Random House. $6.95.

The U.S. physician is "a man of mediocre intellect, trade-school mentality, limited interests and incomplete personality." He has trouble diagnosing a boil. Scalpel in hand, he needlessly whacks off the nearest tonsil; absentmindedly, he seals sponges, forceps, suture needles, thread, scissors and drainage tubes into surgical wounds. He takes pharmaceutical lessons from drug salesmen and writes illegible prescriptions that kill his patients. He soaks the sick, cheats on his income tax and, on his inviolable Wednesday afternoons at the country club, devotedly chases par while his patients perish unattended in hospitals, as often as not from falling out of bed.

This savage indictment of U.S. medical practice forms the theme of The Doctors, a book probably headed for bestsellerdom. Its message seems to be that the ailing human being should keep his malaise a secret from the medical profession; otherwise, the doctor will surely blunder, the emergency ward will let him bleed to death, a careless hospital will expose him to infection and, if none of these death agents succeed, some nurse will administer a fatally inaccurate prescription.

The Gap. The Doctors is a prime example of a respectable purpose spoiled by demagoguery. Doctors themselves no longer deny the need of putting their house in order; the more conscientious have begun to re-examine the gap between contemporary medicine and the Hippocratic oath. Where this book rests on statistics, it effectively states its case: a falling life expectancy in U.S. males, an infant-mortality rate that ranks eleventh in the roster of civilized nations (behind even Czechoslovakia), a medical educational establishment that not only fails to meet the numerical need but sometimes licenses inferior and undedicated men.

Gross, however, has elected to aim his book at human passions, at all the unfortunate sick who have been kept waiting in the reception room, who fell athwart the doctor's inhumane side --or thought they did--who are all too ready to believe that the surgeon's main purpose in removing an appendix is to collect a $1,500 fee. That side of medicine unfortunately exists. It is the only side revealed in this book.

Two Assumptions. It is possible that Gross, a freelance writer whose first book, The Brain Watchers, prompted a congressional inquiry into nosy psychological testing techniques, is genuinely interested in sparking a similar inquiry into the medical profession. It is even conceivable that such a thoughtless, careless and incendiary book as this, produced by a layman whose narrative style is not exactly what the doctor ordered ("Major medical policies do not blanketly cover the patient"), will accomplish a worthy end.

That possibility rests on two invalid assumptions. The first is that the medical profession is dominated by money-grabbing scoundrels who will never let the profession heal itself. The second is that the way to repair it is to infuriate patients into action by painting all doctors as evil, incompetent and greedy men.

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