Death by Doctors
Four commercial jets crashed that day. But what if six jumbo jets crashed every day in the United States, claiming the lives of 783,936 people every year? That would certainly qualify as a massive tragedy, wouldn't it?
Well, forget "what if." The tragedy is happening right now. Over 750,000 people actually do die in the United States every year, although not from plane crashes. They die from something far more common and rarely perceived by the public as dangerous: modern medicine.
According to the groundbreaking 2003 medical report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, 783,936 people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes. That's the equivalent of six jumbo jet crashes a day for an entire year. But where is the media attention for this tragedy? Where is the government support for stopping these medical mistakes before they happen?
After 9/11, the White House gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security, designed to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Since its inception, billions of dollars have been poured into it. The 2006 budget allots $34.2 billion to the DHS, a number that has come down slightly from the $37.7 billion budget of 2003.
According to the study led by Null, which involved a painstaking review of thousands of medical records, the United States spends $282 billion annually on deaths due to medical mistakes, or iatrogenic deaths. And that's a conservative estimate; only a fraction of medical errors are reported, according to the study. Actual medical mistakes are likely to be 20 times higher than the reported number because doctors fear retaliation for those mistakes. The American public heads to the doctor's office or the hospital time and again, oblivious of the alarming danger they're heading into. The public knows that medical errors occur, but they assume that errors are unusual, isolated events. Unfortunately, by accepting conventional medicine, patients voluntarily continue to walk into the leading cause of death in America.
According to a 1995 U.S. iatrogenic report, "Over a million patients are injured in U.S. hospitals each year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic death rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality rate of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined." This report was issued 10 years ago, when America had 34 million fewer citizens and drug company scandals like the Vioxx recall were yet to occur. Today, health care comprises 15.5 percent of the United States' gross national product, with spending reaching $1.4 trillion in 2004.
Since Americans spend so much money on health care, they should be getting a high quality of care, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Of the 783,936 annual deaths due to conventional medical mistakes, about 106,000 are from prescription drugs, according to Death by Medicine. That also is a conservative number. Some experts estimate it should be more like 200,000 because of underreported cases of adverse drug reactions.
Americans today are used to fixing problems the quick way – even when it comes to their health. Thus, they rely heavily on prescription drugs to fix their diseases. For every conceivable ailment – real or not – chances are there's a pricey prescription drug to "treat" it. Chances are even better that their drug of choice comes chock full of side effects.
The problem is, prescription drugs don't treat diseases; they merely cover the symptoms. U.S. physicians provide allopathic health care – that is, they care for disease, not health. So, the over-prescription of drugs and medications is designed to treat disease instead of preventing it. And because there are so many drugs available, unforeseen adverse drug reactions are all too common, which leads to the highly conservative annual prescription drug death rate of 106,000. Keep in mind that these numbers came before the Vioxx scandal, and Cox-2 inhibitor drugs could ultimately end up killing tens of thousands more.
American medical patients are getting the short end of a rather raw deal when it comes to prescription drugs. Medicine is a high-dollar, highly competitive business. But it shouldn't be. Null's report cites the five most important aspects of health that modern medicine ignores in favor of the almighty dollar: Stress, lack of exercise, high calorie intake, highly processed foods and environmental toxin exposure. All these things are putting Americans in such poor health that they run to the doctor for treatment. But instead of doctors treating the causes of their poor health, such as putting them on a strict diet and exercise regimen, they stuff them full of prescription drugs to cover their symptoms. Using this inherently faulty system of medical treatment, it's no wonder so many Americans die from prescription drugs. They're not getting better; they're just popping drugs to make their symptoms temporarily go away.
But not all doctors subscribe to this method of "treatment." In fact, many doctors are just as angry as the public should be, charging that scientific medicine is "for sale" to the highest bidder – which, more often than not, end up being pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical industry is a multi-trillion dollar business. Companies spend billions on advertising and promotions for prescription drugs. Who can remember the last time they watched television and weren't bombarded with ads for pills treating everything from erectile dysfunction to sleeplessness? And who has ever been to a doctor's office or hospital and not seen every pen, notepad and post-it bearing the logo of some prescription drug?
Medical experts claim that patients' requests for certain drugs have no effect on the number of prescriptions written for that drug. Pharmaceutical companies claim their drug ads are "educational" to the public. The public believes the FDA reviews all the ads and only allows the safest and most effective drug ads to reach the public. It's a clever system: Pharmaceutical companies influence the public to ask for prescription drugs, the public asks their physicians to prescribe them certain drugs, and doctors acquiesce to their patients' requests. Everyone's happy, right? Not quite, since the prescription drug death toll continues to rise.
The public seems to genuinely believe that drugs advertised on TV are safe, in spite of the plethora of side effects listed by the commercial's narrator, ranging from diarrhea to death. Patients feel justified in asking their physicians to prescribe them a particular drug they've seen on TV, since it surely must be safe or it wouldn't have been advertised. Remember all those TV ads heralding the wonders of Vioxx? One might wonder how many lives could have been spared if patients didn't see the ad on TV and request a prescription from their doctors.
But advertising isn't the only tool the pharmaceutical industry uses to influence medicine. Null's study cites an ABC report that said pharmaceutical companies spend over $2 billion sending doctors to more than 314,000 events every year. While doctors are riding the dollar of pharmaceutical companies, enjoying all the many perks of these "events," how likely are they to question the validity of drug companies or their products?
Admittedly, not all doctors reside in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. Some are downright angry at the situation, and angry on behalf of an unaware public. Major conflicts of interest exist between the American public, the medical community and the pharmaceutical industry. And although the public suffers the most from this conflict, it is the least informed. The public gets the short end of the stick and they don't even know it. That is why the pharmaceutical industry remains a multi-trillion dollar business.
Prescription drugs are only a part of the U.S. healthcare system's miserable failings. In fact, outpatient deaths, bedsore deaths and malnutrition deaths each account for higher death rates than adverse drug reactions. The problems run deep and cannot be remedied without drastic, widespread change in the system's money and ethics.
The first issue – money – is the main reason the medical industry cannot seem to change. Prescribing more drugs and recommending more surgeries means more profits. Getting more drugs approved by the FDA, regardless of their safety, means more money for the pharmaceutical industry. As the healthcare system stands today, physicians and drug companies can't seem to pass up earning loads of money, even if a few hundred thousand people lose their lives in the process. Even in drastic cases of deadly drugs, everyone involved has a scapegoat: Drug companies can blame the FDA for approving their product and the doctors for over-prescribing it, and doctors can blame the patients for wanting it and not properly weighing the risks.
What ultimately arises is a question of ethics. In layman's terms, ethics are the rules or moral guidelines that govern the conduct of people or professions. Some ethics are ingrained from childhood, but some are specifically set forth. For example, nearly all medical schools have their new doctors take a modern form of the Hippocratic Oath. While few versions are identical, none include setting aside proper medical care in favor of money-making practices.
On the research side of the issue, "Death by Medicine" cites an ABC report that says clinical trials funded by pharmaceutical companies show a 90 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective, whereas clinical trials not funded by drug companies show only a 50 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective. "It appears that money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you any 'scientific' result you want," writes Null and his team of researchers.
The government spends upwards of $30 billion a year on homeland security. Such spending seems important. Since 2001, 2,996 people in the United States have died from terrorism – all as a result of the 9/11 attacks. In that same period of time, 490,000 people have died from prescription drugs, not counting the Vioxx scandal. That means that prescription drugs in this country are at least 16,400 percent deadlier than terrorism. Again, those are the conservative numbers. A more realistic number, which would include deaths from over-the-counter drugs, makes drug consumption 32,000 percent deadlier than terrorism. But the scope of "Death by Medicine" is even wider. Conventional medicine, including unnecessary surgeries, bedsores and medical errors, is 104,700 percent deadlier than terrorism. Yet, our government's attention and money is not put into reforming health care.
Couldn't a little chunk of the homeland security money be better spent on overhauling the corrupt U.S. healthcare system, the leading cause of death in America? Couldn't we forfeit the color-coded threat system in favor of stricter guidelines on medical research and prescription drugs? No one is attempting to say that terrorism in the world is not a problem, especially for a high-profile country like the United States. No one is saying that the people who died on 9/11 didn't matter or weren't horribly wronged by the terrorists that day. But there are more dangerous things in the United States being falsely represented as safe and healthy, when, in reality, they are deadly. The corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and in America's healthcare system poses a far greater threat to the health, safety and welfare of Americans today than terrorism.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/009278.html#ixzz1S2KMDa5t
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Now on a personal, passionate quest to wake up as many people as possible to the deception of the pharmaceutical industry, Gwen's research emphasizes her concerns about the increasingly prevalent use of prescription drugs and the deadly effects that these drugs can have. "There is no such thing as a safe drug," said Gwen in a video interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4bY...).
Gwen's astounding admissions in another video interview on Natural News (http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=29359...) dispels the myth that Big Pharma is in the business of healing or helping cure disease -- instead, the industry is out to regulate illness, manage symptoms, and keep people trapped in a lethal cycle of chemical dependency, says Gwen.
In the video, Gwen explains that drugs -- psychiatric drugs in particular -- are meant to encourage people to remain customers of the pharmaceutical industry. After all, if Big Pharma intended to help cure disease, they would be putting themselves out of business.
"I don't want people thinking that I am a conspiracy theorist, because in fact, there is no theory behind what I'm telling you, it's all provable... what I'm saying is provable is, the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want to cure people," said Gwen in the video.
The confessions of a Pharma veteran
The Rx Reformer recently released a book, Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher(http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-D...), which provides considerable insider knowledge of the serious dangers that lie within the game of the pharmaceutical industry and the disinformation that has jeopardized lives. Her book presents many admissions, some deeply personal, of what she discovered and observed throughout her career with Big Pharma, during which she was encouraged to minimize the side effects of the drugs she was selling when speaking to doctors.
Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher is a strikingly candid and much-needed wake-up call about the flawed U.S. health care system, which is -- with good reason -- currently ranked last among 19 industrialized nations worldwide. You can read more about the book on Gwen's site: http://www.gwenolsen.com
As Gwen's book reveals to readers, more than 180,000 people die annually from the effects of legal drugs. "By the time a drug is approved and it hits the general population, we don't even know 50% of the side effects involved," said Gwen. In the same interview, Gwen explains that there is no medical evidence required for psychiatrists who wish to prescribe their patients drugs. This broadens the potential patient population considerably, allowing Big Pharma a lucrative advantage over an increasingly diseased and medicated public.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032971_Gwen_Olsen_Big_Pharma.html#ixzz1S2Mwv5sA
In a new study that should be a wake-up call to anyone who blindly trusts their health to the prescription drug industry, investigators concluded that Merck & Co. Inc., should have identified the deadly cardiovascular risks associated with taking Vioxx four years before the company finally pulled the drug from the market. In fact, Merck apparently stopped selling Vioxx only after the body count linked to the drugs kept piling up and the associated lawsuits became too numerous to ignore.
Merck introduced the drug in May of 1999 and Vioxx quickly became a commercial success, with sales climbing to $2 billion annually. However, it turns out Vioxx raised the risk of cardiovascular problems in users, most notably heart attacks and deaths, soon after a person started taking it. And even going off the drug didn't help much -- the risk of dropping dead from a heart attack stayed high for a year or more.
So how many deaths did Vioxx (a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug known generically as rofecoxib) cause while still on the market? No one knows for sure but Dr. David Graham, a whistleblower who tried to alert the medical community to the dangers of the drug while Merck was still pushing it as a great pain-reliever, testified before the US Senate in 2002 and revealed data indicating 88,000 to 139,000 Americans experienced heart attacks as a side effect from the drug, and 30 to 40% of these died. So preventable deaths caused by Vioxx likely ranged from 27,000 to 55,000.
The evidence points to clear dangers of Vioxx
For the just released study, Joseph Ross, MD, MHS, assistant professor of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, led a team of six investigators who analyzed 30 randomized, placebo-controlled trials of Vioxx that were made available through lawsuits filed against Merck. The researchers published their findings in the November 23 edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine.In all, the trials involving Vioxx enrolled 20,152 individuals and lasted from four weeks to four years. Research subjects who were given Vioxx took doses ranging from 12.5 milligrams to 50 milligrams. The Mount Sinai scientists analyzed the pooled data from these studies and found that safety concerns arose almost four years before Merck finally took the drug off the market.
Dr. Ross and his colleagues discovered that by December of 2000, after 21 of the 30 studies had been completed, there were already strong reasons to believe that patients taking Vioxx were at a greater risk for adverse events or death from cardiovascular conditions or blood clots. Then data collected through June 2001 indicated Vioxx was linked with a huge 35 percent increased risk of a having a cardiovascular event or death.
But the stats were to get even worse. As more data came in, the association with deadly side effects grew much stronger. Finally, by April of 2002, the analysis of all the studies showed a 39 percent increased risk and, as of September 2004, a 43 percent increase of cardiovascular events (usually heart attacks) or death.
"Because the recently enacted FDA Amendments Act requires public disclosure of trial results within the ClinicalTrials.gov database within 12-24 months of study completion, including both efficacy and safety outcomes, clinical trial data should be available to conduct iterative meta-analyses independent of the FDA and manufacturers," Dr. Ross and his research colleagues wrote in their paper. "Physicians and the public deserve to be in a position to make informed choices about risk and benefits [of pharmaceutical products]. And the early disclosure and dissemination of information about potential risk after its recognition must be required."
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/027682_vioxx_heart_attacks.html#ixzz1S2OFvoIy
Doctors kill more people than guns: urban legend or fact?
A popular message circulating the internet claims that "guns don't kill people, doctors do," based on statistics that theoretically show that doctors are responsible for more accidental deaths every year than firearms. Independent research by NaturalNews staff shows that this claim is based on a logical fallacy of comparing apples and oranges, but according to the hard statistics, doctors do indeed kill more people than guns.
The message, which sometimes says that doctors kill more people than guns and traffic accidents combined, has been circulating the internet for years. Like many urban legends that cross the internet, it has a lot of "facts" for its readers, but it is unlike most urban legends in that it quotes a source: "Statistics provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services." The message was even recounted in an article by Nathan Tabor. The letter claims that:
-- There are 700,000 physicians in the United States.
-- There are 120,000 accidental deaths in the United States caused by physicians every year, and the accidental death percentage per physician is 0.171.
-- There are 80 million gun owners in the United States.
-- There are 1,500 accidental deaths from guns every year, regardless of age group, and the accidental death percentage per gun owner is 0.0000188.
This means, the letter points out, that doctors are 9,000 times more deadly than gun owners.
Tabor's reason for pointing out these statistics seems to be the endorsement of second amendment rights, but the stats have turned the heads of many people, regardless of their stance on gun control. The claim has been reprinted across the internet on sites such as Rense.com, and other sites that warn of the dangers of modern medicine. NaturalNews staff members were unable to find DHHS figures that either supported or debunked the urban legend's claims. Such figures are hard to compare anyway, as the internet anti-chain-letter site BreakTheChain.org points out with responses gathered from the public:
-- Most people see doctors when their health is already poor, so that has to be considered a factor in any doctor-related deaths, accidental or otherwise.
-- Some people will never interact with a gun in their lifetime, but very few people will never see a doctor. This means that doctors could be more lethal simply due to a greater chance of public exposure to them.
As you can see, the doubts raised by these factors mean the statistics cannot be fairly compared, however NaturalNews's stance is that conventional medicine is still one of the top causes of death in the United States. Specifically, information obtained by Death by Medicine shows that an estimated 106,000 people die from adverse drug effects -- from properly prescribed drugs -- every year, and approximately 98,000 die annually from some sort of error by medical staff. Compare this to statistics from the Department of Justice and the U.S. Centers for Disease control for the year 2004, which show an estimated 16,137 people were victims of homicide (not just firearm murders) in the United States.
Most people can agree that doctors and guns can both be lethal. But comparing doctor deaths with gun deaths seems odd. For one thing, the intention is different. Doctors are usually trying to save patients, not kill them. Violent criminals who might use guns in committing a crime, however, often do have the intention of causing physical harm. Doctors may be dangerous through their ignorance or incompetence, but they are not actually out to kill anyone.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/021206_gun_control_doctor_errors.html#ixzz1S2QT2fvx
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This treatment, which he named antineoplastons, effectively balances the levels of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes -- the two type of genes involved in cancer growth -- which in turn prevents cancer cells from surviving. To make a long story short, this simple protocol effectively targets all these genes, as well as all forms of cancer, without causing any negative side effects or lost quality of life.
Since its original development, Dr. Burzynski has improved and refined the formula, and has successfully treated many patients with all kinds of cancers, including young children with supposedly "incurable" cancers like childhood brainstem gliomas.
But Dr. Burzynski's success did not go unnoticed by authorities with a different agenda. The Texas Medical Board (Dr. Burzynski's practice is located near Houston) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), both obviously threatened by his work, eventually went after Dr. Burzynski and tried to shut down his office and destroy his reputation. In the end they were unsuccessful, which represents a huge victory for medical freedom, but they put him through hell for over 14 years -- and they continue to deprive him and his work of necessary and rightful funding.
Dr. Burzynski's research has received FDA approval for clinical trials, but he has never been given any research funding
Since 1971, Dr. Burzynski has been trying to get his antineoplastons treatment approved by the FDA, and to this day it has only been granted Phase III FDA clinical trials. And this granting came after years of battling the FDA in court, which brought him before a grand jury at least four different times, and all for absolutely no legitimate reason other than to harass and potentially bankrupt him.
In the documentary, there is a very telling clip of an Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee hearing deliberator delivering the news to then-FDA Commissioner Dr. David A. Kessler that the agency had no case against Dr. Burzynski, that none of the grand juries had found any fault with his work or practice, and that there was no valid indictment. And yet this did not stop the FDA from continuing its harassment of Dr. Burzynski for years to come, that is until the agency's fictitious case against him eventually crumbled to ruin, which paved the way for the reluctant approval of his formula in clinical trials.
Even though Dr. Burzynski finally received approval to administer his treatment in FDA-approved clinical trials -- which, again, is a very significant victory in and of itself -- there are two crucial pieces of information to the case that illustrate the true agenda behind the cancer industry.
First, none of Dr. Burzynski's trials have ever received a dime of federal funding for cancer research. The US National Cancer Institute (NCI) has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to conventional cancer research, which as we all know has been a failure, but none of this money has ever been directed to Dr. Burzynski's work -- in fact, the federal government has prohibited taxpayer money from funding Dr. Burzynski's highly successful research.
Second, cancer patients are only allowed to participate in Dr. Burzynski's trials if they have already gone through conventional cancer treatments that have been deemed unsuccessful. With the exception of a few cases where exemptions were granted, most of Dr. Burzynski's patients have come to him in extremely poor health as a result of the brain-frying, immune system-destroying chemotherapy and radiation treatments to which they were previously summoned -- and yet the success rate of Dr. Burzynski's treatment blows conventional treatments right out of the water.
Burzynski The Movie shatters the illusion that the cancer industry is actually trying to cure cancer
• The proper response to cancer is not to blast the body with toxic chemicals and radiation, but rather to feed it various nutrients and compounds that communicate naturally with genes how to effectively destroy cancer cells on their own.
• The Burzynski treatment is the only cure for "incurable" brainstem gliomas that has been tested in FDA-approved trials -- and it successfully cures up to 50 percent of them, while conventional treatments cure absolutely zero.
• Congressional passage of the "Prescription Drug User Fee Act" in 1992 is the reason why the FDA has become Big Pharma's lapdog. The law basically allows drug companies to purchase approval for drugs from the FDA through drug application user fees, which has stunted any real mainstream progress in discovering a cure for cancer.
• Drug companies spent more than half a billion dollars in 2010 alone purchasing drug approvals from the FDA -- and the average amount spent per conventional cancer drug was nearly $1.5 million (can you see now why there is a huge vested interest in stifling Dr. Burzynski's work?)
• The FDA has already approved more than 25 different cancer drugs that mimic Dr. Burzynski's treatment protocol by targeting the genes responsible for cancer growth -- but none of these drugs are effective because they are synthetic copycats that target only one or two genes, rather than the nearly 100 genes that Dr. Burzynski's treatment targets.
• Most or all of the chemotherapy drugs that doctors prescribe actually cause cancer -- and this "side effect" sits alongside other devastating ones like heart failure, infertility, nerve damage, and kidney damage.
• Many of the FDA's drug approval advisers and committee members also hold positions at major drug companies, which means they are anything but objective in the decisions they make concerning cancer drugs.
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