Education
He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge University and the Royal London Hospital in 1974, and then worked in the Renal Transplant Unit and Cardiology Departments of the Royal Free Hospital and Street Mary's Hospital in London.
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James Fanu
Edit Profilephysician author medical journalist
Career
He is best known for his weekly columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. Foreign the last 20 years, he has been a doctor in general practice. Le Fanu is also a medical journalist and has written articles and reviews both for medical journals such as the British Medical Journal and for magazines, and weekly columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, for which he is best known.
Le Fanu is also an author
In his book The Rise and Fall of Modern, Le Fanu claims that from the 1930s until the mid-1970s was the "Golden Age" for medicine, due to smaller groups of researchers working with rudimentary technology and without modern sophisticated biological knowledge and that since then "the fall of medicine" has occurred. He sees this due to the number of cures declining at the same time as new scientific knowledge of human biology was improving.
He further claims that whilst industrialised medicine has improved because of technological advances, at the same time the costs have increased hugely. Other reasons he lists for the fall of medicine include his argument that medicine has become too centred on a movement he calls "The New Genetics".
He further links the fall of medicine to the "social theory" of public health, such as the work of Ancel Keys in the 1950s.
He is the author of the controversial book Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, in which he claims that Darwin"s theory of evolution is a materialistic theory that fails to explain consciousness and the experience of the human being. According to a review of his book by the New Scientist, Le Fanu argues for the existence of an immaterial "life force". Le Fanu is not a creationist and does not argue for God, instead he argues for a non-physical cosmic force which he claims could explain where consciousness originates from.
He also claims it may explain many of the other mysteries unexplained by material science.
According to Le Fanu: "Darwinism is the foundational theory of all atheistic, scientific and materialist doctrines and of the notion that everything is ultimately explicable and that there is nothing special about it – the self-denigration and self-hatred, the great ‘nothing but’ story.”.
