Rather, he argues, it falls into two distinct phases, a "Golden Age", from the 1940s to the 1970s whose twelve "definitive moments" include antibiotics, cortisone, open heart surgery, kidney transplants, the cure of childhood leukaemia, etc.
Le Fanu claims that this was followed, for complex reasons, by a decline in the rate of therapeutic innovation creating an intellectual vacuum filled by two complementary scientific disciplines, epidemiology and genetics, that sought to explain the causes of disease.
[6] His 2018 book, Too Many Pills, investigates the reasons behind the threefold rise in the number of prescriptions issued by doctors in Britain over the prior 15 years and the consequences for many of what he calls a "hidden epidemic" of drug-induced illness.
Le Fanu claims that the discovery of the equivalence of genomes across the vast range of organismic complexity has failed to identify the numerous random genetic mutations that, according to Darwinian theory, would account for the diversity of form of the living world.
As for neuroscience, he claims that while sophisticated PET and MRI scanning techniques allow scientists to observe the brain in action from the inside, the fundamental question of how its electrochemistry translates into subjective experience and consciousness remains unresolved.