FYI – Western Health Care takes death toll honors in the US

I think it was Joel Wallach who said “Don’t go to a doctor, given half a chance he’ll kill you.” Well I thought that comment was pretty extreme when I first heard it but now I’m not so sure…

By Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD

First published at the following link: http://www.mercola.com/2004/jul/7/healthcare_death.htm

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 [induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures] 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

TABLES AND FIGURES (see Section on Statistical Tables and Figures, below, for exposition)

ANNUAL PHYSICAL AND ECONOMIC COST OF MEDICAL INTERVENTION - Download Table

We could have an even higher death rate by using Dr. Lucien Leape's 1997 medical and drug error rate of 3 million. 14 Multiplied by the fatality rate of 14 percent (that Leape used in 1994 16 we arrive at an annual death rate of 420,000 for drug errors and medical errors combined. If we put this number in place of Lazorou's 106,000 drug errors and the Institute of Medicine 's (IOM) 98,000 medical errors, we could add another 216,000 deaths making a total of 999,936 deaths annually.

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