About the Book: Medicine functions outside of the law and has fashioned its own codes of conduct. Although an arm of government it also functions as a state within a state in which doctors act as little more than commissars. If a patient does not do as the doctor demands, he or she can suffer punishments such as the withdrawal of treatments.

In psychiatry, the doctor has absolute control of patients and can perform invasive brain therapies on very young children, employ memory-destroying ECT on the basis of subjective judgement and medical authority. In this specialisation, as a patient you lose many of your democratic rights on the word of a doctor.

About the Author: Dr Wilkin is a lecturer and writer who has written numerous works on history, psychology and medicine. His series on religion, Ancient Fictionality, deals with Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His series of books, An Unusual Power, details the historical development of medicine and the efficacy of psychiatry. To his credit, he has several books of poetry. For a few years he practised as a counsellor. He has worked in many colleges thoughout the United Kingdom, Africa, Egypt and the Far East.

His work as a therapist created a concern in him on the overall validity of psychiatry and other medical specialisations. Medicine as a whole but psychiatry in particular has its own rules, which often conflict with national law codes. Pervaded by group and individual arrogance, bad medicine, including harmful drugs and doubtful invasive treatments, is propagated as effective and idealised as a science.