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
Why should we be forced to go to many different doctors? I spend lots of time reading health books, internet, etc.
I am not certain if conventional treatments for cancer help or harm. My grandmother lived for at least 7 years after she learned she had breast cancer and she never treated it at all. If she had had treatment, they would have considered her cured after 5 years and she wouldn't have been cured at all. Early detection makes their statistics look better but does a patient really live any longer than if they had not had the treatment?
I've read those with Type A blood are more prone to cancer. I don't know if it's true. I'm just interested in arriving at the truth. I am not having mammograms as I know I will die sometime and I don't know that I would benefit by surgery, chemo and radiation. I'm doing things to minimize my risk. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 87. In my opinion 87 year old women should not be having mammograms but anyway, the surgeon was very happy to remove her breast. I was opposed to it but I wasn't in charge. If she lived the seven additional years such as my grandmother, Mom would be 94 at that time.
Sorry, I can go on and on but thanks for your thoughtful post.
Congratulations on being a childhood survivor of cancer...thats wonderful...
My older boy had a rare and usually deadly form of leukemia...he lived for 15months with his leukemia and for those 15months I am grateful...
Yes, he had chemotherapy, that made him puke...like you, his hair fell out...small price to pay, for buying him some time, for giving him a hope of being cured...
His leukemia was so deadly, that one week after diagnosis, he was almost dead...they did not expect him to live...but thanks to modern medical technology, those wonderful doctors and nurses, were able to give him supportive care, and pull him through...he spent the first five weeks after diagnosis in ICU, and another six weeks in a regular pediatric ward...
He lived 15 months with his disease, 8 months in the hospital...I know full well, that if it were not for the chemo drugs, for the supportive care offered, for the modern medical technology, he would have died right after diagnosis...and tho he spent so much time in the hospital, he was indeed, grateful for every single minute of his life...
If I were to follow the adherents of using strictly alternative modes, I would have condemned my son to an immediate death...
Again, I am so glad that you survived your childhood cancer...cancer is always a horrible disease for anyone to have to bear, but its just the absolute worst when children get cancer...when my son was in the hospital, there was a little tiny baby, only 3 months old, with brain cancer...talk about heartbreaking...
So you can see why, I rejoice whenever I meet a survivor of childhood cancer...God Bless You...
I'll be back in a minute.
i ain't got me no license but I watched me the discovery channel and i think i no medicine reel good. dont need no stinken license. its just a way for them greedy stoopid docors to keep us from treeten folks without so mcuh money. do u wants some viagra? i got me a plant out in my bakyard that'll give u a reel good woodie.
My friend, you are simply wrong on so many accounts. Let me address just a few.
1. Whatever works is cool. We greedy doctors are so egotistical that we'll do anything to effect a cure. We use medications for other than what they are approved for all the time. It's called "off-label indications". I've also advised patients to talk to their ministers. I've had them go to chiropractors and accupuncturists. Where in God's Good Creation did you get the notion that we would lose our license over stuff like that?
2. Thus saith the Mother Superior of the Little Sisters of Charity: "No margin, no mission." IOW if doctors and hospitals and nurses and drug companies don't make money, your healthcare will be to get some Advil distributed by some guy who lives in a cardboard box. If you want to lose money and be financially irresponsible, get elected to Congress. The rest of us have to pay our rent and meet our payroll.
3. Beware statistics. They are often feculent. For example, the liberal community came up with this wonderful statistic; since 1955, the number of children who die from firearms doubles on an annual basis. The only problem is that no one ever did the math. If you start with one death in 1955, 2 in 1956, 4 in 1957, and so on, by the time you get to 1980 you'll have 17,158,897,665 deaths of kids due to firearms. Or you can have liberals just making up stuff.
4. The total yearly deaths from colon, breast and prostate together is about 127,000/ year. The studies that claim we have that many deaths a year from malpractice are clearly bogus. It defies common sense, for whatever that's worth.
"Practicing medicine is like driving a car. Before the State gives you a license to drive a car or practice medicine, the State wants to at least try to find out if you have the slightest clue about what you are doing."
Instead of being analogous to a driver's license, why isn't it analogous to carpentry, masonry, or auto repair? I know that these professions do have some sort of state oversight and requirements, but as a conservative don't you think the free market should be the ultimate oversight? Just like a bad plumber gets drummed out of the business by word of mouth between irate customers, who just might sue him if he messes up too badly, why wouldn't the same happen to non-licensed physicians if they were such hacks?
I think your posts have been well thought out and I would really like to know your thoughts on where the free market stops and government control begins even in such a delicate area as medicine.
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Well, all that covers a lot of ground and deals not only with medicine but with everything else that the Government regulates nowadays.
Back in the 19th Century, the Government didn’t regulate much. You put out your shingle advertising you were a doctor or a butcher or a druggist or a mason and that was the end of that. If the chimneys you built crumbled or if your patients tended to end up in Boot Hill too often, the word got around and you were out of business until you moved to a new town where nobody knew your past reputation.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, there was extensive lobbying for enactment of medical licensure laws. Although the laws were championed as a means to protect the public from incompetents, charlatans, and quacks. there can be no denying that they were also designed to protect the medical business environment from economic competition.
The Early Development of Licensing Laws in the United States, 1875-1900
If truth be told, in 1875, the sate of the art in medicine was such that going to a doctor often did do more harm than good.
In 1905, with the publication of Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle” describing the meat packing industry, President Teddy Roosevelt and the American public experienced a rude awakening in regards to an unregulated food industry.
That was the death knell of “the free market as the ultimate oversight”.
Since the American public could no longer trust Joe’s Meat Packing Company to protect their health out of a sense of public duty and the public had no power to force companies to allow them to see what went on behind the company's closed doors, there was a public outcry that Government step in to protect public health. The same year that Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act, Congress also passed the Pure Food and Drug Act.
As time passed, the Government not only regulated the safety of food and drugs and the qualifications for doctors, they also began to regulate more and more occupations whose incompetent execution could endanger the public.
In the building trades you referenced, it began with architects as a faulty designed building could kill hundreds or thousands of people.
Soon, however, there was “mission creep” to include carpenters, masons, etc.
STUDY GUIDE FOR THE CALIFORNIA MASONRY (C-29) LICENSE EXAMINATION
Michigan House Bill 4739 (H-3) : Carpentry Licensure
So, that is how licensing of not only doctors but even carpenters and masons came about.
Professional licensing laws generally require candidates to meet four types of requirements: (1) formal schooling, (2) experience, (3) personal characteristics, and (4) successful completion of a licensing examination.
In professions with a capability to easily injure or kill someone, those requirements are geared towards decreasing the likelihood that someone in the public will be killed or injured. The greater the chance that you have in your job to potentially injure or kill someone or to cause property damage, the greater the likelihood is that you will require licensure.
Opponents of licensure base arguments mostly on Libertarian considerations and the principle of economic competition. However, until they address the issue of how easy it is to kill or injure someone in a particular profession or occupation, there is really no way that Legislatures will accept turning back the clock to the unregulated days before Upton Sinclair scared the h#ll out of America with “The Jungle” in 1905.
Before 1905, professional associations lobbied for regulation, often to protect their economic turf.
After 1905, the public demanded regulation because they were in fear for their lives and because they felt they had been betrayed by private business.
Regulation introduced the system of "checks and balances" into American businesses and occupations that could, potentially, harm or kill their fellow Americans.
The devil, of course, is in the details and the trick is to legitimately protect the public without abusing the regulatory power.
Ultimately it comes down to, "How much harm can you do?"
In the year 2005, you may convince the Michigan State Legislature that a carpenter can’t do too much harm, no matter how poorly trained he is, and therefore should not be required to obtain a license.
However, in the year 2005, you will never convince the Michigan State Legislature that an architect, whose faulty building design could kill hundreds or thousands, should not be required to have formal schooling, experience, and the successful completion of a licensing examination that a State license requires.
In regards to “Medicine”, some aspects, the potentially killer aspects, are regulated.
However, much of what was considered “Medicine” in the 19th Century is not regulated.
The modern Mom, with her books, the Internet and Eckard’s Drug Store full of hundreds of non-prescription drugs, has more healing knowledge and power than the average 1870’s doctor ever had.
As long as a person avoids playing with the prescription drugs and procedures that the FDA has determined are too dangerous to trust to just anyone, an individual can hang a shingle calling themselves a “Healer” or “Alternative Therapist”, open up a “Healing Inn” and “play doctor” without a license.
Alternative therapies and practitioners in the Omaha, Nebraska area.
One of our neighbors has such a “Healing Inn” and people pay her good money to have their diets adjusted, their life habits analyzed, their gallbladders “flushed”, their colons “cleansed” and their reflexology points poked.
In regards to the issue of doctors going without malpractice insurance, that is not only being done but has, in fact, become a necessity in some specialties in some lawyer-infested regions of the U.S.
Great post bump.
Thanks for your thoughtful contribution to the discussion. I assume your Freeper moniker denotes your particular area of medical expertise -- or are you just commenting on the digestive speed of geese, or maybe you're a laxative salesman? Either way, I celebrate brave proctologists everywhere. It's a dirty job, but I'm grateful someone does it, keeps food on the table of the latex glove makers.
I don't think you'll get many first-hand reports.
bump
Great post! I really appreciate all the effort you put into constructing it. If I ever need x-rays I hope I get a radiologist as thorough and on-the-ball as you seem to be.
I had to read "The Jungle" in middle school. I was disgusted by the sanitary practices depicted therein -- I seem to recall little children meatpackers getting their fingers stuck in machinery which later turned up as Vienna Sausages, a product I can proudly say I've never indulged in. I also remember how it was sort of a banner book for "our saviours, the Unions," and state nannyism.
You do bring up excellent points concerning the state of the medical profession in the centuries preceding this one. In today's age, with the public being exposed to unprecedented levels of education, I would imagine the general populace would be somewhat more aware of quackism being passed off as a treatement for what ails them. In other words, "free market doctors" would be more feasible today, although there would most definitely be some horrendous outcomes, as you rightly point out. I don't know how this could be prevented (I know, I know, it's for the chiilldruun, the chiilldruun) and am loath to drag Ayn Rand out of her godless sepulchre, (oh wait, we've already had some appropriate atlas shrugging analogies up post, yuk yuk) or use the softly muttered Heinlienism TNSTAAFL, besides just coming out and flatly stating LIFE IS HARD.
I reckon I'm just trying to imagine how the medical profession would work without all the artificial controls imposed on it, in the context of the free market. Virginia and other states have "right-to-work" laws, meaning employers are not restricted to hiring union members and that employees are not required to join unions. So, someone can obtain union goods or services, if they wish, but also have the option of purchasing non-union made goods or services if it is cheaper. Some are willing to pay more for the perceived higher standards and quality that union goods supposedly offer. Some say this is hogwash and are willing to take the chance on the so-called inferior non-union products because they are priced more competitively. Non-union products that are priced like junk, because they are in fact junk, eventually are impaled on the spear of consumer awareness. Either way, the customer is not forced to patronize one or the other exclusively, they have a choice. Does the industry of medicine hover so far above the throng that this reasoning doesn't apply to it?
Your link describing the doctors in the Sunshine State who practice without insurance was very interesting. I think it's a step in the right direction, even though for some reason the state requires them to be financially responsible for up to $250,000 if they are sued. Why shouldn't they be able to have a written agreement with their patients designating the amount they would be liable for if something were to go wrong in the treatment or services about to be provided, be it for $1,000,000, $100,000, $10,000, or $100? Do you, as a person operating in the realms of health and medicine, think doctors should have that option? What is your solution for the twitching shoulders of Atlas?
Nice compliment; you get the "best use of a new word award of the day" with feculent.
When I told my career counselor that I wanted a job where I could get in eighteen holes a day, I think I was VERY much misunderstood.
My bad. I thought he said its easy to be cadaver.
LOL!!!
Maybe you and I can get together and create a new reality t.v. show--with your know how and my enthusiasm I'm sure we would have no problem pitching "Tiger Woods,M.D." to unsuspecting network executives. You know the number for FOX?
I like it! I like it!
"Doctor, put down that iron...!"
"every time pitocin is used to stimulate labor it is reviewed by a committees (of doctors, nurses, hospital people, etc)"
I have never heard of this. Are you saying that hospitals regularly review use of pitocin? This sounds hard to believe.
"Opinion stated as fact"
The article referenced many sources of data. You only stated an opinion. Please provide some data to back up your claims, especially about CABG and angioplasty, as the paradigm about treating heart disease has changed the last couple of years.
I'm not anti-doctors or anti-pharmaceuticals, but some of what you just said rings true. Yesterday, I was in a doctor's office listening to two young mothers discuss their newborns' thrush and how the Nystatin the doctor prescribed had such and such side effects and did not work at curing the thrush. One of the mothers said she called to tell the doctor about it, and the nurse told her to go out and buy some gentian violet for less than $2.00 at a pharmacy. The other mother was so happy to hear about it, and I had to put in my two cents about how the stuff really works even if it does turn baby's mouth all purple for a few days. I have no idea how much a Nystatin prescription costs, but it sure isn't as cheap as gentian violet. I do not know why the doctors do not tell folks to use tried and true cures sometimes.
"Every week our dual-skilled proctol...err..protagonist will overcome hazards in dealing with difficult holes..although half the action will have to be blurred out per the FCC. We already have major sponsors lined up, mainly Titleist and Fleet.
Mr. Thru, I salute your wit. Freepers such as yourself make FR the fantastic forum it is. May the wind be always at your back, never in your face.
But seriously, what's your solution to the whole medical insurance/litigation-fueled mess?
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