Posted on 03/14/2005 3:25:09 AM PST by Humblebum
By Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD
ABSTRACT
A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million.1 Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC, in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics.2, 2a
The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million.3 The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million.4 The total number of iatrogenic deaths shown in the following table is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251.5
long article, click the link to read
This people are being used a shill for a book. Eat right and exercise more type of thing. Very admirable goal. However, anyone who thinks this statement of "more harm than good" is true should go live in a country where there is no medicine whatsoever.
Cut your foot and let it get infected. The object of the game is to see if it clears up on it's own or with your amateur nursing, or if you get a systemic infection and die.
Sheesh. Can our hospitals do better? Absolutely.
Are they a gross negative? Absolutely not. This is just plain stupid.
Having said that, I admit that if we exercized and ate right and kept our weight down and got lots of sleep and had lower divorce rates and watched less TV and spent less time on the computer, we probably wouldn't need to take quite so many medications.
And then, you have explosive diarrhea, naseau and erectile disfunction.
I don't know about you but I would rather be depressed.
Why are the liberals that want to ban guns not bleating, whining, and wetting their beds about banning doctors, medicine, and medical instruments, which are, according to this article, so deadly?
Maybe it is because doctors, medicine, and medical instruments, are, in large part, more helpful and useful to society than they are detrimental.
Wait a minute...
Isn't that true of guns and gun owners to?
Sounds like a shill for government -run and rationed health care. The gist of the article is that like food, which BTW the health nazis want to ration also, we Americans use way too much health care and it hurts us more than it helps us. So we need a new bureaucracy to save us from ourselves.
Some depression is a fatal illness.
You have to play off the risks versus the benefits.
you take it and it kills every germ, but if you stop taking it you will die.
In other words, we need certain germs and filth to live.
but, I am not depressed, just slowed down.
If that is the case, in a PERFECT world, would we need liberals and criminals (often, one in the same)?
A well-publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report entitled "To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System" determined that between 44,000 and 98,000 patient deaths are caused by medical personnel annually. The report and it's conclusions are hailed as 'landmark' in a May 2002 statement posted on the website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: For the first years the Life/Death Clock was published, we used the value of 71,000 Deaths/Year, splitting the difference of the range reported by the Institute of Medicine. However, a 2004 study by the Denver-based professional health-care rating service HealthGrades® has more that doubled the conclusion of the earlier report, declaring that, according to the Boston.com news, "...there were 195,000 deaths annually from 2000 to 2002, and estimated that Americans paid an extra $19 billion in medical care costs for the victims of mistakes..."
The article quotes Dr. Samantha Collier, vice president of medical affairs at HealthGrades®, "...The equivalent of 390 jumbo jets full of people are dying each year due to likely preventable, in-hospital medical errors, making this one of the leading killers in the US..."
The HealthGrades® report is available here. (PDF)
Unfortunately, I believe this to be true. I see very few success stories from patients going to medical doctors. We were in a Bible group last night that after the study, our conversation turned to something like this. We were comparing stories. It's pretty scary and the medical doctors in this country had better wake up. I haven't been to one in 9 years and would love to find one I can trust to treat me in my best interest. They don't have a clue what they're doing.
I was talking about, the body physical........
not, the body politic!!
This report is stunning. Fatal medical mistakes. Unless you've had it happen to you, it's easy to be cavalier. Do you know how many nutritional courses doctors take--maybe ONE. They rely on drugs which poison the body in one way or another. Chemotherapy is POISON. Radiation is burning tissue. Much surgery is unnecessary. My old pappy used to say of surgery: The doc's wife needed a new purse! Just because a doc knows the anatomy of the body does not mean he/she knows how to take care of it. Doctors should be paid only when they help people get well. Then the whole system would change. They wouldn't make as much money, of course, but less people would die.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
There are so many errors and distortions and outright dishonesty in this artitcle that one barely knows where to begin. I delivered babies (obstetrics) and did gynecologic surgery for over 26 years and would like to offer a few comments. 1. "healthcare spending reached $1.6 trillion in 2003. Considering this enormous expenditure we should have the best medicine in the world." We do. For Cancer, Heart attacks and premature babies (brain and survival) we are best and get handed some very tough patients, ie obese,uneducated, HIV positive, cocaine using, etc who get pregnant unlike say Holland or Norway where they are fairly clean, educated, take their vits, come for visits, etc. 2. "medicine is in need of complete and total reform'..Medicine operates at such a higher level than the rest of society that it takes my breath away. Who is going to supervise this reform, the post office, government bureaucrats? the people who ran Amtrak and the Vietnam war? 3. "powerful pharm companies....special interest groups.....with deep pockets they entice scientists...." You can just feel the liberals' hatred for these people. My young uncle died at home in the 1920's from diphtheria, choking to death in front of his parents. Tuberculosis killed as many as cancer kills today. At the time of the Civil War 5% of women died in childbirth (at 4 million births today that would be 200,000 dead instead of several hundred). In 1900, the average American woman died around 45 years old (she didn't live long enough to worry about menopause) instead of almost 80 today. Remember the thousands who died of Polio and the ironlungs? The people in the Drug companies do a lot more to make ours lives better than the lawyer -politicians ever will. 4. Re: med mistakes, " a great deal of sweeping under the rug....no Grand Rounds on medical errors, no sharing of failures..." In every hospital I have worked in there were conferences and grand rounds to investigate in detail, (in front of everyone,docotrs, nurses, hosp people, other experts, etc.) what happened and how to prevent it. Every Cesarian section is reviewed, every uterus is checked to see is it was appropriate to remove, every time pitocin is used to stimulate labor it is reviewed by a committees (of doctors, nurses, hospital people, etc). Are the authors of this article in an alternate reality or is their burning desire for socialised medicine blinding them to the reality of modern day medicine? (I guess our farms will be so much better after they collectivize them.) I trained 14 years (after high school) to be a doctor. It is so long and hard and grueling. I worked 60 to 80 to 100 hours a week as an obstetrician to be of service to my patients, including the poor and illegal aliens. The average OBGYN probably SAVES about 500 lives (babies in distress, women hemorhaging, infections, cancer and precancer, ruptured ectopic (tubal) pregnnacies, etc). They do a lot more good for society than most people, esp the slip and fall lawyers who are heroes to the liberals, the democrat's biggest source of money, and are in the process of destroying the best medical system in the world. robin
One of the problems may be that the body of medical knowledge is growing faster than the ability of one person (a physician) to assimilate it. But as for medicine itself, I can say that without it I'd be very badly crippled by bronchial asthma. One little pill and one little puff of a certain inhaler per day, and I'm perfectly normal.
If that's true, why, oh why is the age rate for survival steadily going up?
Is the medical profession perfect? Not by a long shot, being populated by fallible people. Is it better then at any time in human history? The evidence says yes. Enjoy your blessings and quityourbitching.
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