The most underreported crime of the century.
by Thomas Smith The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that as many as 106,000 deaths occur annually in US hospitals due to adverse reactions to prescription drugs that are properly prescribed by physicians that use them as directed by the drug companies.
Even worse, the National Council for Patient Information and Education reported that an additional 125,000 deaths occur annually due to adverse reactions to drugs that the physician never should have prescribed. In these deaths the doctor did not follow the instructions on proper administration of the drugs. For example, Glucophage, a diabetic oral hypoglycemic, should never be prescribed for patients with Kidney disease or Congestive Heart Failure because it can cause fatal Lactic Acidosis in these patients. A warning label is prominently placed on the medication container to warn of this potential misuse.
However, JAMA reported that almost 1/4 of the patients who had been prescribed Glucophage had Kidney damage or Congestive Heart failure or both. The annual death toll from synthetic prescription drugs, both from the correctly prescribed and the incorrectly prescribed, amounts to about 231,000 deaths every year. To put this into perspective, this is the equivalent of a world trade center disaster every week for over a year and a half or the crash of two fully loaded 747 aircraft every day of the year.
No information was reported on the number of outpatient and doctor's office deaths caused by these very same drugs when prescribed by these very same doctors. The reported figures alone, however, make drug deaths caused by physicians the third leading cause of death in the US. It is far ahead of accidents, drunk driving, homicides, airline accidents, as well as all other disease with the sole exceptions of cancer and heart disease.
Many of these drugs responsible for the death statistics cited are diabetic drugs. None of these drugs cure or even were intended to cure diabetes. During the time a patient is on the drugs his body is suffering great damage due to the uncontrolled progress of the disease. This is in addition to the risk and damage caused by the drug itself. (more info: natural diabetes treatments)
According to Dr. Mendelsohn, author of "Confessions of a Medical Heretic", 2.4 million unnecessary operations are performed every year and they cost over 12,000 lives. When the records of six New York hospitals were examined it was found that 43% of the Hysterectomies that were performed were medically unnecessary. No one should ever submit to any surgical procedure without first obtaining several unrelated medical opinions, at least not here in the United States. Women are particularly vulnerable to this type of victimization.
Disease in America
According to the World Health Report 2000 the United States ranks twelfth, that is second from the bottom, in their thirteen country survey of sixteen available health indicators. We are dead last for low birth weight and neonatal and infant mortality. We rank between ninth and twelfth for all life expectancy categories between one year and 40 years. Another study ranked the United States as fifteenth in the twenty-five industrialized countries studied.
Diabetes, Hypoglycemia, Hyperinsulinemia are so widespread in the United States that it is estimated that over half the population exhibits one or more symptoms of these life destroying diseases. Symptoms of Adult onset diabetes are now being routinely noted in six year old children. Obesity and it's related Endocrine dysfunction are commonly observed in teenagers. Heart Failure, a symptom of advanced Type II Diabetes, remains in the top three killer diseases in the Westernized countries.
Although the cause and cure for Type II Diabetes and related endocrine failure has been increasingly well understood in the scientific community for the last forty years, this disease is not being cured by todays orthodox treatment regimens. In order to find a cure it is necessary to seek alternative medical approaches to this disease.
Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients
situations formerly perceived as mild problems are becoming redefined as serious illnesses requiring drugs - courtesy of drug companies seeking to expand their markets. Conflicts of interest abound in the process - expert physicians serving to set treatment protocols or approve drug use are often on the payroll of the very drug companies they are supposed to regulate; similarly, "support groups" for those with various maladies are often partly funded by drug companies seeking endorsements. Another strategm is to utilize scary statistics - eg. "33% decrease," instead of lowers risk from 3% to 2%. Partly as a result, U.S. dollars spent on drugs have increased 100% in the past six years. The bad news is that often these drugs aren't needed and may even harm patients.
Some of the economics of Medicine
A large part of this medical disaster that the United States currently experiences is due to the way our medical community is organized. Basically it is not organized to heal and to cure disease; the medical community, particularly at its upper levels, is a commercial venture organized to make money for its practitioners.
Although the record of the United States Medical community in the cure of disease is deplorable, the same cannot be said for its ability to produce income and profit. For example, for the top fifteen pharmaceutical companies, including such names as Abbot, Wyeth, Hoffman-La Roche, Merck and others, the second quarter revenue for 2002 was reported as $63,520.6 million and the corresponding reported income was 11,731.8 million respectively. This is second only to the defense industry in the United States.
In 1997, the latest year for which we have the figures, the earnings of physicians were reported by Broad as averaging around $200,000 per year. The lowest reporting specialty, Rheumatology reported $158,500 and the highest, cardiovascular surgeon, reported $363,300. When examining the numbers, we noted that the high salaries seemed to be concentrated in members of the AMA. Those belonging to less powerful trade unions did not fare nearly so well even though they did most of the actual patient care work. For example, the median staff salary of registered nurses was $35,256
The Cardiac surgeon, for example, does nothing whatsoever to cure cardiac disease. Three to five percent of the heart surgery patients die on the operating table. Cardiac surgery provides no better three year survival rate than no treatment at all. A Harvard survival study of 200,000 patients revealed that the long term survival rate of patients subjected to surgery was no better than the survival rate of those that had no surgery.
Of course, your cardiac surgeon will not tell you this when you need to make a decision on whether or not to elect cardiac surgery. Never in history have so many accumulated so much wealth for providing their customers or clients or patients with so little real benefit.
Exceptions to the rule
Many doctors of integrity are as much victims of the system as are their patients. Todays doctor is not free to treat disease as his conscience dictates. He is forced to administer approved protocols whether they are known to work or not. To deviate from these approved protocols invites law suits, peer criticism and censure from State medical licensing boards.
This writer knows of two local doctors who tried to buck the establishment and really help their patients. Both lost their license to practice medicine. One is currently working as an administrator in a California hospital and the other has started a nutritional clinic.
Takeover of the American medical Association
This sad state of affairs is directly traceable to the takeover of the American Medical Association by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations in the early part of the twentieth century.
At the turn of the century the medical community was in a sad state of disrepair. There were no qualifications to become a doctor. If one wanted to be a doctor it was only necessary to hang out a shingle and start the practice of medicine. Medical schools were poorly financed, often taught contradictory medical philosophies and had little impact on the practice of medicine. In 1910 the American Medical Association, todays AMA, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Few doctors belonged to it and even fewer paid any attention to it. Quackery of all kinds was rampant. The market was flooded with fake cancer cures and 80 proof liver tonic.
It was in this environment that Rockefeller and Carnegie moved in and bought the AMA and then used it to take control of the entire United States medical establishment. In 1910, Henry Prichard president of the Carnegie foundation, bought control of the AMA for the sum of $10,000. He then financed the publication of the Flexner report, as it was then called, to gain popular support for the changes that were to be made in the medical community. With public backing secured by the publication of the Flexner report, Carnegie and Rockefeller commenced a major upgrade in medical education by financing only those medical schools that taught what they wanted taught. Predictably, those schools that had the financing churned out the better doctors.
In return for the financing, the schools were required to teach course material that was exclusively drug oriented. That is why today our doctors are so heavily biased toward synthetic drug therapy and know little or nothing about nutrition.
Dr. David Edsall, former dean of Harvard medical school, said "I was, for a period, a professor of Therapeutics and Pharmacology, [at Harvard] and I knew from experience that students were obliged then by me and by others to learn about an interminable number of drugs, many of which were valueless, many of them useless, some probably even harmful...."
For a time, these changes actually improved the practice of medicine in the United States. Then, as the distorted medical curriculum began to churn out doctors whose only concern was prescribing synthetic drugs, things began to deteriorate into what we see today.
Today the average medical doctor receives 3 hours or less training on nutrition despite the fact that our bodies are constructed entirely of what we eat and drink. Todays doctor receives much of his ongoing education from detail men. The detail man is the drug company salesman whose job it is to teach the doctor how to use the latest drugs.
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