Conventional Medicine is the Leading Cause of Death

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https://draxe.com/conventional-medicine-is-the-leading-cause-of-death/

Conventional Medicine is the Leading Cause of Death

Prescription Death
You may have thought cancer or heart disease takes the lives of more Americans than any other illness or event. But conventional medicine is actually the leading cause of death today!

Iatrogenesis is known as the “inadvertent and preventable induction of disease or complications by the medical treatment or procedures of a physician or surgeon.”

Health Care in America Today

The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was created by Congress to analyze scientific and technical issues in America. From 1972 to 1995, the OTA conducted studies on health care, pollution and other such topics.

After producing an unfavorable report of US health care, the agency was disbanded by Congress.

The OTA’s 1995 report on health care found that:

Life expectancy in the US was among the lowest in developed countries
Infant mortality rates in the US are poor
Technology in US medicine is expensive and unrestrained
67% of physicians in the US in 1990 were specialists
The drug industry exacerbates health care costs while new drugs rarely provide more benefit than old
The FDA doesn’t consider the effectiveness of new treatments or compare new products to old
The FDA does not consider non-drug alternatives
The pre- and post-approval processes for drugs is lacking
The report concluded with these statements:

“Only 10-20% of all procedures used in medical practice have been shown to be efficacious by controlled trial,” and “There are no mechanisms in place to limit dissemination of technologies regardless of their clinical value.”

The Nutrition Institute of America funded an independent review of “government-approved” medicine that was published in 2006. Professors Gary Null and Dorothy Smith, along with doctors Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman and Debora Rasio titled the report “Death by Medicine.”

The researchers found that America’s leading cause of death isn’t heart disease or cancer: its conventional medicine. They found that the iatrogenic death rate in the US (death caused by doctors and/or medical treatments) is 783,936 a year. That’s 84,059 more deaths than those caused by heart disease in 2001 and 230,865 more deaths than those caused by cancer.

Over a decade, the scientists predict that iatrogenic deaths will total about 7.8 million, “more than all the casualties from all the wars fought by the US throughout its entire history,” a death rate equivalent to that caused by six jumbo jets falling out of the sky every day.

They also believe the numbers are actually much higher because most iatrogenic deaths aren’t reported as such: only 5 to 20% of iatrogenic deaths are reported for fear of lawsuits and because codes for reporting deaths due to drug side effects and other medical errors don’t even exist in many cases. The number of deaths due to conventional medicine may be 20 times higher than the numbers depicted here.

The study authors, using the most conservative statistics they could find, broke down iatrogenic deaths over ten years as following:

Adverse Drug Reactions   1.06 million
Medical Error   0.98 million
Bedsores   1.15 million
Hospital Infections   0.88 million
Malnutrition in Health Care   1.09 million
Outpatients   1.99 million
Unnecessary Procedures   371,360
Surgery-related   320,000
The “Death by Medicine” doctors also took a look at unnecessary medical care over the course of a decade. They found that 89 million people are hospitalized unnecessarily each year and that 17 million iatrogenic events will occur among this number. 75 million Americans receive unnecessary medical procedures over a decade, 15 million of which result in an iatrogenic event. 164 million people will receive unneeded medical treatment within a decade.

So what’s behind these death rates and adverse events? Profit, politics, defensive medicine, lack of research on treatments, one-size-fits-all drugs, lack of doctor-patient time and the abuse and overmedication of our elderly are all culprits.

Conflicts of Interest

Former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Marcia Angell has written that pharmaceutical stock and other financial incentives for scientists are twisting medical research and science altogether to suit business goals.

Not only do such credible journals accept studies from researchers with conflicts of interest, when a drug company funds a study, ABC News found that there is a 90% chance that the drug will be deemed effective compared to the 50% rate of this conclusion when a study isn’t funded by a pharmaceutical company.

The US General Accounting Office found that “of the 198 drugs approved by the FDA between 1976 and 1985…102 (or 51.5%) has serious post-approval risks,” including “heart failure, myocardial infarction, anaphylaxis, respiratory depression and arrest, seizures, kidney and liver failure, severe blood disorders, birth defects and fetal toxicity, and blindness.”

Antibiotics

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that 90% of upper respiratory infections are viral; more than 40% of the 50 million prescriptions written each year for antibiotics are prescribed for such infections. Antibiotics have no effect on viruses and the overuse of antibiotics has likely led to the drug-resistant superbugs and the 88,000 deaths due to hospital infections every year.

The CDC does not report on the research that supports nutraceuticals for viral infections and immune system strengthening that could lessen antibiotic abuse, the study authors lament.

Hospitals receive funding based on how many beds they fill. This fact, and the fact that doctors practice defensive medicine to protect themselves from lawsuits, results in unnecessary hospitalizations and many unnecessary screenings and treatments.

Unnecessary Treatments

The media often drives unnecessary treatments and the prescribing of unneeded drugs. While cosmetic surgeries may number the greatest of these, cesarean sections, cardiac surgeries, endoscopies, back surgeries and pain-relieving surgeries are vastly over-used.

Dr. Barbara Starfield reports that the overuse of technology creates a “cascade effect” in treating patients: unnecessary outpatient treatment often leads to more visits, more prescriptions, more hospitalizations and deaths.

X-rays, CT scans, mammograms and other such diagnostics are costly and cumulatively dangerous, yet they are given regularly to soothe patient fears and often lead to unnecessary surgeries.

Pregnant women used to have x-rays regularly until a study found that they increased death in children from cancer by 40%.

Coronary angiography, the use of radiation to look at blood vessels and the heart, is another widely practiced diagnostic whose effects are unknown.

Dr. John Goffman believes that x-rays, CT scans, mammography and fluoroscopy contribute to 75% of the new cancers diagnosed every year and increases in heart disease. He believes that ionizing radiation will cause 100 million premature deaths from 2006 to 2016.

Orthopedic surgeon Dr. John Sarno says that many back surgeries are based on abnormal x-rays even though multiple studies have found that there is often no connection between abnormalities on x-rays and back pain.

Chemotherapy

Professor Ulrich Abel analyzed the use of chemotherapy for epithelial cancer and published the results in 1989. He found no direct evidence that chemotherapy helps people with advanced carcinoma to survive; only a slight benefit in patients with small-cell lung cancer; and perhaps some slight benefit in those with ovarian cancer.

He said that the belief that chemotherapy can prolong survival is an “opinion based on a fallacy which is not supported by clinical studies.”

High-dose chemotherapy (HDC) is still a treatment of choice, however, for breast cancer unchecked by normal doses, even though a March 2000 study found that HDC held no benefits and even slightly reduced survival rates.

Women and Conventional Medicine

The “Death by Medicine” doctors take special note of the unnecessary procedures practiced on women in America. 19th-century views of women, the idea that women’s reproductive organs were the basis of physical and mental illnesses have leftover influences on medicine today.

Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman has studied this influence on conventional medicine. She reports that:

thousands of “preventive” mastectomies are performed every year
more women than men are prescribed drugs
women are more often given preventive medications that result in side effects than men
one-third of women are given hysterectomies before they’ve even gone through menopause
fetal monitoring is common practice even though the CDC doesn’t recommend it, it’s use isn’t supported by research and it may result in higher rates of cesarean section
menopause and childbirth are considered medical conditions rather than normal biological practices
the one-third of post-menopausal women on synthetic hormones don’t experience heart disease prevention or cognitive benefits but do experience increased risk of cancer, heart disease and stroke
Obstetric-gynecologic surgeries represent 23% of all US surgeries performed in 1983, reports the study authors. Cesarean sections take top billing and hysterectomies come in second place.
They estimate that 640,000 cesarean sections are performed each year in the US and that these increase mortality rates 3 to 4 times and disease rates by 20 times compared to vaginal deliveries.

Sick Care System

The “Death by Medicine” doctors say that the overuse of medical testing, technology, surgery and drugs does little to prevent disease and results in the most US deaths.

What is more important to consider, they say, is the practice of preventive  medicine, changes that would address the root causes of disease: stress and its effects on the immune system, a compromised brain/body connection, lack of physical activity, denatured and processed food intake, and exposure to environmental toxins.

Sources

Life Extension Foundation (2006)

National Institutes of Health (2004)

Journal of American Medical Association (1998)

Center for Science in the Public Interest (2004)

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2400038

Format: AbstractSend to
Am J Public Health. 1990 Oct;80(10):1253-6.
Patient, provider and hospital characteristics associated with inappropriate hospitalization.

Siu AL1, Manning WG, Benjamin B.
Author information
Abstract
To determine the relation between patient and provider characteristics and inappropriate hospital use, we examined adult nonpregnancy hospitalizations from a randomized trial of health insurance conducted in six sites in the United States. Appropriateness of inpatient treatment was based on medical record review; patient characteristics on sociodemographic, economic, and health status; and provider characteristics on descriptors of physician practice and hospital facilities. Twenty-seven percent of admissions attended by physicians licensed for more than 15 years were judged inappropriate, compared to 20 percent for younger physicians. Admissions were more likely to be inappropriate if the patient was female (27 percent compared with 18 percent). Controlling for patient and provider characteristics reduces but does not eliminate the differences in the appropriateness of inpatient care across the study's six sites. Differences in available provider and patient characteristics do not account for geographic differences in inappropriate hospitalization in this study.

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9555760

Format: AbstractSend to
JAMA. 1998 Apr 15;279(15):1200-5.
Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies.

Lazarou J1, Pomeranz BH, Corey PN.
Author information
Abstract
OBJECTIVE:
To estimate the incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions (ADR) in hospital patients.
DATA SOURCES:
Four electronic databases were searched from 1966 to 1996.
STUDY SELECTION:
Of 153, we selected 39 prospective studies from US hospitals.
DATA EXTRACTION:
Data extracted independently by 2 investigators were analyzed by a random-effects model. To obtain the overall incidence of ADRs in hospitalized patients, we combined the incidence of ADRs occurring while in the hospital plus the incidence of ADRs causing admission to hospital. We excluded errors in drug administration, noncompliance, overdose, drug abuse, therapeutic failures, and possible ADRs. Serious ADRs were defined as those that required hospitalization, were permanently disabling, or resulted in death.
DATA SYNTHESIS:
The overall incidence of serious ADRs was 6.7% (95% confidence interval [CI], 5.2%-8.2%) and of fatal ADRs was 0.32% (95% CI, 0.23%-0.41%) of hospitalized patients. We estimated that in 1994 overall 2216000 (1721000-2711000) hospitalized patients had serious ADRs and 106000 (76000-137000) had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death.
CONCLUSIONS:
The incidence of serious and fatal ADRs in US hospitals was found to be extremely high. While our results must be viewed with circumspection because of heterogeneity among studies and small biases in the samples, these data nevertheless suggest that ADRs represent an important clinical issue.

Comment in
Adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. [JAMA. 1998]
Adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. [JAMA. 1998]
Adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. [JAMA. 1998]
Drugs and adverse drug reactions: how worried should we be? [JAMA. 1998]
Adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. [JAMA. 1998]
Adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. [JAMA. 1998]

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1758071/

Iatrogenic illness on a general medical service at a university hospital*
K Steel, P Gertman, C Crescenzi, and J Anderson
Author information ► Copyright and License information ►
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.


Abstract

We found that 36% of 815 consecutive patients on a general medical service of a university hospital had an iatrogenic illness. In 9% of all persons admitted, the incident was considered major in that it threatened life or produced considerable disability. In 2% of the 815 patients, the iatrogenic illness was believed to contribute to the death of the patient. Exposure to drugs was a particularly important factor in determining which patients had complications. Given the increasing number and complexity of diagnostic procedures and therapeutic agents, monitoring of untoward events is essential, and attention should be paid to educational efforts to reduce the risks of iatrogenic illness.

Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

BARR DP. Hazards of modern diagnosis and therapy: the price we pay. J Am Med Assoc. 1955 Dec 10;159(15):1452–1456. [PubMed]
MOSER RH. Diseases of medical progress. N Engl J Med. 1956 Sep 27;255(13):606–614. [PubMed]
Kane RL. Iatrogenesis: just what the doctor ordered. J Community Health. 1980 Spring;5(3):149–158. [PubMed]
SCHIMMEL EM. THE HAZARDS OF HOSPITALIZATION. Ann Intern Med. 1964 Jan;60:100–110. [PubMed]
Reichel W. Complications in the care of five hundred elderly hospitalized patients. J Am Geriatr Soc. 1965 Nov;13(11):973–981. [PubMed]
Steel K, Gertman PM, Crescenzi C, Anderson J. Iatrogenic illness on a general medical service at a university hospital. N Engl J Med. 1981 Mar 12;304(11):638–642. [PubMed]
Cowan N. The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behav Brain Sci. 2001 Feb;24(1):87–185. [PubMed]

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http://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2004/3/awsi_death/Page-01

Death by Medicine
March 2004
By Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, PhD

Something is wrong when regulatory agencies pretend that vitamins are dangerous, yet ignore published statistics showing that government-sanctioned medicine is the real hazard.

Until now, Life Extension could cite only isolated statistics to make its case about the dangers of conventional medicine. No one had ever analyzed and combined ALL of the published literature dealing with injuries and deaths caused by government-protected medicine. That has now changed.

A group of researchers meticulously reviewed the statistical evidence and their findings are absolutely shocking.4 These researchers have authored a paper titled “Death by Medicine” that presents compelling evidence that today’s system frequently causes more harm than good.

This fully referenced report shows the number of people having in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs to be 2.2 million per year. The number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections is 20 million per year. The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million per year. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million per year.

The most stunning statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year. It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US. (By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was 699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer was 553,251.5)

We placed this article on our website to memorialize the failure of the American medical system. By exposing these gruesome statistics in painstaking detail, we provide a basis for competent and compassionate medical professionals to recognize the inadequacies of today’s system and at least attempt to institute meaningful reforms.