In offering this book to what we hope will be interested readers, we
have several aspirations. We have aspired to present to students and
clinicians a rather narrow view of epidemiology concentrating on the
causal factors and setting of the more usual gastroenterological
problems and giving greater space to conditions of importance for which
major knowledge of causation andcourse is available. Part of the
rationale is thebelief that modern medicine lays excessive emphasis on
therapy with increasingly expensive, and in many cases, dangerous drugs
and too little emphasis on the causes and avoidance of disease. We are
of the view that traditional views handed st down through generations of
clinicians need scrutiny worthy of 21 century medicine whose currency
includes topics like nanomoles, megabytes and logistic regression. We
hope that clinicians will see that there is often a practical
application to the findings of epidemiological exploration and that what
passes for canonical knowledge is so often unsubstantiated myth and are
fully aware of the reluctance of organized medicine to reject old
paradigms in favor of the new, matched by an often uncritical enthusiasm
for new therapies. Our researches have increased our belief in the major
role of social factors especially diet, both in quantity and quality in
many disorders and that clinicians have a responsibility to provide
appropriate advice to policy makers as well as patients.
