According to a definitive review and close reading of medical peer reviewed journals and government health statistics in 2001, by Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD, ND, Martin Feldman MD, Deborah Rasio MD, and Dorothy Smith PhD:
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 at a cost of $282 billion or higher depending on which statistics one uses.”
http://www.angelfire.com/az/sthurston/Leading_Cause_of_Death_in_the_US.html
In 2003, health care spending in the United States reached $1.6 trillion, which was 14 percent the GNP. And this doesn’t even include the effects of stress, insufficient exercise, excessive dead caloric intake, highly processed and denatured foods grown in denatured, chemically damaged soil, or exposure to tens of thousands of environmental toxins.
This informative study also revealed that in 2015, the Institute of Medicine (renamed National Academy of Medicine) reported that an estimated 230,000 to 284,000 iatrogenic deaths occur annually. Undoubtedly, these figures are actually much higher since only 5 to 20 percent of iatrogenic acts are ever reported. There is little doubt that iatrogenesis is now the leading cause of death in the Western world, most of which are preventable.
So why doesn’t the media and government report or act on this iatrogenesis pandemic? Why the silence in the media and from medical regulators? Why only a fear mongering media blitz 24/7 on COVID19? Perhaps, because politicians have been ‘bought’ and over 70 percent of media revenue comes from big pharma?
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST & CORRUPTION
When medical professionals, producers of medical devices, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and the media have vested interests in promoting drugs or vaccines (with no liability) as the panacea for each new disease; or treating deficiencies as diseases (i.e. medicalization of life), corruption becomes rife, medical care costs soar, patients are harmed, and economies and lives are destroyed! This also produces social harm and a sick society that is overly dependent on institutional care. Additionally, the knowledge of many long-time, safer, cost effective cultural methods of dealing with disease, suffering, and death are denigrated or censored. Clearly, a sickness care system is unsustainable.
In the first iatrogenic study in 1994, Dr. Lucian L. Leape’s JAMA paper, “Error in Medicine” uncovered evidence that the opposite was happening in medicine to the Hippocrates oath: “First Do No Harm.” Among the findings were Schimmel’s report in 1964 that 20 percent of hospital patients suffered iatrogenic injury with a 20 percent fatality rate.
Also, Steel’s report In 1981 that showed a 36 percent of hospitalized patients experienced iatrogenesis with a 25 percent fatality rate; and adverse drug reactions were involved in 50 percent of the injuries. Bedell reported that 64 percent of acute heart attacks in one hospital were preventable and mostly due to adverse drug reactions. Leape also cited several autopsy studies with rates as high as 35 to 40 percent of missed diagnoses causing death.