During one of my many jail stints, I read Pyotr Talantov’s book *Evidence-Based Medicine*. It’s a very good book (I recommend it to everyone), very long (if I hadn’t been under arrest, I probably wouldn’t have finished it), and it had one important effect on me: I stopped being afraid of medical texts.
Before that, it had seemed to me like something akin to theoretical physics: incomprehensible sacred knowledge possessed by great minds. But once you learn how everything we now call “medicine” was actually invented, it becomes clear that doctors are indeed remarkable people, but still ordinary human beings. You can understand it all.
I’m saying this because yesterday, after *The Lancet* published an article about my poisoning, many doctors wrote interesting posts full of all sorts of medical jargon and technical details.
For example, from Irina Yakutenko’s excellent article, written in a kind of “let me briefly explain it for beginners” style, I learned that I had, it turns out, been given blood plasma transfusions. And that the symptoms of organophosphate poisoning were so obvious that no one with a medical degree could possibly have missed them. It’s fascinating overall—give it a read. Here is her Facebook post:
I also came across a great post by one doctor who wrote that everything that happened to me was a triumph of modern medicine. In the 1980s, Novichok was developed as a superweapon, and in the 2020s, poisoning by it can be treated in an ordinary hospital.
I kept thinking about that myself while I was at the Charité (well, once I got to the stage where I could think again): I wished this kind of medicine were available to everyone in Russia. There’s nothing especially extraordinary about it there. It’s a university hospital. Not a special one. Not a “Kremlin” hospital, not a “Bundestag” one. It’s just that everyone does everything properly and according to the most up-to-date protocols. And all those hospital cables and things built into the walls actually work.
No matter how many Russian hospitals I’ve been in, there are always various fixtures in the walls that equipment plugs into. You’re supposedly able to get everything from electricity to oxygen through them. But I’ve never once seen them actually work.
In the intensive care room at the Charité, there were loads of devices, and every single one of them actually worked! That felt very unusual. I was lying there completely covered in wires, and for good reason. A doctor would, for example, look at a screen and say: today you slept only four hours.
Modern medicine really is astonishing, and it opens up incredible possibilities for the citizens of countries whose governments actually take healthcare seriously, instead of merely skimming money off various “national programs” and procurement schemes, as ours does.
Sooner or later, things will be much better for us too.
That’s the good part.
And the bad and very sad part is the section of *The Lancet* publication that doctors noticed, but the wider public did not. Because it isn’t about Novichok—it’s about our hospitals:
I remember that too, because it was being discussed right up until I was discharged. The Germans were horrified by the hellish set of antibiotic-resistant bacteria I was covered in after two days in the Omsk hospital. These are so-called hospital-acquired bacterial strains. In Russia, where antibiotics are abused everywhere, this is a colossal problem. While they’re treating the main illness, the infection can kill you.
At the Charité, they were fighting those bacteria almost more than the effects of Novichok—they were afraid that this filth would spread throughout the whole hospital. I heard a lot of jokes about tough Siberian viruses.
But the thing is, Siberia has nothing to do with it. This is simply a failure of hospital management. Failures like this have very direct consequences. Do you know the average life expectancy for a man in Omsk Region? 66 years. It’s a catastrophe.
And of course, one could say that Murakhovsky, the chief physician of the Omsk hospital, lied about my diagnosis because that’s just how the system works. As if anyone would have lied (though we know for certain that not everyone would). Murakhovsky is not just a liar and, as it turned out today, a man with a plagiarized dissertation—he is also the chief physician of a hospital whose intensive care unit is teeming with antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus Pseudomonas aeruginosa Klebsiella E. coli and so on.
And he became the health minister for the entire region. And he was appointed by Russia’s health minister.
So what makes me sad is not even that they lie about diagnoses, but that they are bad people and bad doctors. They are depriving us of access to the achievements of modern medicine. And those achievements are extraordinary.