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"Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death
in the US, Causing 250,000 Deaths Every Year

This article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is the best article I have ever seen written in the published literature documenting the tragedy of the traditional medical paradigm.
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This information is a followup of the Institute of Medicine report which hit the papers in December of last year, but the data was hard to reference as it was not in peer-reviewed journal. Now it is published in JAMA which is the most widely circulated medical periodical in the world.

The author is Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and she desribes how the US health care system may contribute to poor health.

ALL THESE ARE DEATHS PER YEAR:

12,000 -- unnecessary surgery 8
7,000 -- medication errors in hospitals 9
20,000 -- other errors in hospitals 10
80,000 -- infections in hospitals 10
106,000 -- non-error, negative effects of drugs 2
These total to 250,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes!!
What does the word iatrogenic mean? This term is defined as induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially of a complication of treatment.

Dr. Starfield offers several warnings in interpreting these numbers:

First, most of the data are derived from studies in hospitalized patients.
Second, these estimates are for deaths only and do not include negative effects that are associated with disability or discomfort.
Third, the estimates of death due to error are lower than those in the IOM report.1
If the higher estimates are used, the deaths due to iatrogenic causes would range from 230,000 to 284,000. In any case, 225,000 deaths per year constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from heart disease and cancer. Even if these figures are overestimated, there is a wide margin between these numbers of deaths and the next leading cause of death (cerebrovascular disease).

Another analysis concluded that between 4% and 18% of consecutive patients experience negative effects in outpatient settings,with:

116 million extra physician visits
77 million extra prescriptions
17 million emergency department visits
8 million hospitalizations
3 million long-term admissions
199,000 additional deaths
$77 billion in extra costs"

So let's say "modern medicine kills people, rather than doctors." Happy now?

Or are they letting just anybody post goofy stuff in JAMA nowadays?

Once again, look at the numbers. The premise of the studies are flawed. Bad treatment outcomes are the result of the underlying disease.

The study quotes 80,000 mortalities from infections; so the doctors are the CAUSE of the infections? Or do the patients have illnesses that leave them prone to infection, and theses infections kill the patient?

7000 medication errors. How is this segregated? Unless these are instances where the wrong drug is prescribed, the physician is NOT the problem if the pharmacy mixes the wrong drug, or the nurse gives the wrong drug.

106,000 "non-error, negative effects of drugs"; so if a patient has a very serious heart rhythm problem causing extreme low blood pressure, and a doctor prescribes the correct drug to save his life, and the patient has a fatal allergic reaction [which can happen to anyone with any drug], then that is the DOCTORS' fault? Come on.

Does modern medicine cause illness? Absolutely. A patient comes in with a serious infection. Without an antibiotic they will die. They are given the drug, and they get an allergic reaction, or antibiotic related colitis, or some other side effect of the drug. Is your contention that the life threatening infection should never have been treated in the first place? Yet the treatment made the patient sick! What would you have the doctor do? This is the nature of the business, that every treatment has potential drawbacks, but that on the whole benefit more people than not.

A small percentage of everyone who drives gets in fatal car accidents each year. Car accidents are the risk we take when we drive. Nonetheless, we get behind the wheel and drive away every day, despite the fact that we know we can get killed. We do that because we make the calculation that the odds of the "side-effect" of getting killed in a car accident is too small to deprive us of the benefit of driving.

A small percentage of patients who get antibiotics get a fatal allergic reaction every year. Fatal allergic reactions are the risk we take when we take an antibiotic. Nonetheless when we get pneumonia, we EXPECT our doctor to prescribe an antibiotic to get us better, despite the fact that we know that antibiotics have side effects, including a fatal allergic reaction. We demand treatment because we make the calculation that the odds of a fatal "side-effect" is too small to deprive us of the benefit of getting cured of the pneumonia.

According to your studies, the doctor killed the patient. There was no way to predict the allergic reaction. If the patient didn't get the antibiotic, he would have died. The family would have sued the doctor for not providing an antibiotic for the pneumonia. Yet in those studies, the doctor killed the patient. The studies purport to show that patients are hurt by modern medicine. What the studies ACTUALLY show is that in medicine we choose a lower risk treatment to treat a higher risk disease. The researchers would do better to invent medicines without ANY side effects; as of yet, there ARE no medicines without side effects. Instead, they blame doctors for the fact that the world is imperfect; believe me, if there WERE treaments without side effects, doctors would use them. As it is, the doctors have to use what they have.

I have been in medicine for 25 years. The AMA is a liberal organization which backs liberal secular social causes, and also will publish studies like this which purport to allow "self-examination" of the profession. Many of the articles in JAMA are questionable. The editors have certain agendas. Paradoxically, a good deal of what has been in JAMA over the years is incredibly biased against clinical physicians.

None of us rely on the MSM. JAMA is part of the MSM.