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Doctor-Caused Disease By Monte Kline
One of the most common causes of
disease (if not the most common cause) is conventional medical
doctors! Sad, but too often true. The medical term coined to describe
this problem is iatrogenic disease, from the Greek "iatros"
meaning physician and "genesis" meaning origin. Thus
we have doctor-caused disease.
Specifically, iatrogenic disease is defined as:
Any adverse reaction, either major
or minor, to a medical or surgical treatment.
The late Robert Mendelsohn, M.D.,
while Chairman of the Medical Licensing Committee for the State
of Illinois and Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine and
Community Health at the University of Illinois School of Medicine,
wrote:
. . . the greatest danger to your
health is the doctor who practices Modern Medicine. I believe
that Modern Medicine's treatments for disease are seldom effective,
and that they're often more dangerous than the diseases they're
designed to treat . . . I believe that more than 90% of Modern
Medicine could disappear from the face of the earth-doctors, hospital,
drugs, and equipment-and the effect on our health would be immediate
and beneficial.
DOCTORS ON STRIKE
Whenever medical doctors go on strike,
a most interesting phenomenon occurs - death rates go down! In
1976 in Bogota, Columbia medical doctors went on strike for 52
days, with only emergency care available. The death rate dropped
by 35%. In 1976 in Los Angeles County a similar doctors' strike
resulted in an 18% drop in mortality. As soon as the strike was
over, the death rate went back to normal. A 50% decrease in mortality
occurred in Israel in 1973 when there was a one month doctor's
strike!
HEALTH CARE CUTBACKS
Since the early 1980's we've heard
a lot about the impact of "managed care" and health
care cutbacks. Medical doctors and political liberals are screaming
that people are dying for lack of services. Actually, just the
opposite is true. Since the "downsizing" of conventional
medical services in the 1980's, life expectancy has made a massive
jump both in the U. S. and Canada. No drug therapy and surgical
technique can be shown to have statistically increased the general
life expectancy. No generation has had its life expectancy increased
significantly since medical doctors began using chemical treatments.
Researchers John and Sonja McKinlay found that medical intervention
only accounted for 1 - 3.5% of the increase in the average lifespan
in the U. S. since 1900.
DANGEROUS DRUGS
Alternative cancer treatment authority,
Dr. Ralph Moss, notes that a 1999 article in The Journal of The
American Medical Association stated that prescription drugs kill
over 100,000 people per year in U. S. hospitals. The F.D.A. noted
that back in 1978 1.5 million Americans were hospitalized as a
result of taking medical drugs. One in seven hospital beds is
taken up by patients suffering from adverse drug reactions. The
General Accounting Office stated that 51.5% of all drugs introduced
between 1976 and 1985 had to be relabelled because of serious
adverse reactions found after the marketing of these drugs - reactions
like heart, liver or kidney failure, birth defects, blood disorders,
respiratory arrest, seizures, and blindness.
DRUG COMPANY BRIBERY
Most people are not aware that drugs
companies spend thousands of dollars per year on each medical
doctor "selling" them on using their particular products.
Drug companies hire "detail men" to visit physicians'
offices and give them drug samples. These salesmen, who are not
doctors and have no medical or pharmacological training, tell
your medical doctor what drugs to use for what problems. Drug
companies start this process early by offering medical students
gifts, free trips to "conferences," and free "educational
material," which translated means propaganda on that drug
company's products. In Australia drug companies spend an average
of $10,000 per year per physician marketing their products. The
result of all of this is a massive overprescribing of drugs.
The drug companies don't stop with
just practicing M.D.s, though, but also direct major dollars toward
hospitals, medical schools and supposedly "independent"
research institutes. Medical schools, for example, are given grants
for clinical trials, pharmaceutical research, or even buildings.
These companies have sought to gain massive influence over medical
teaching institutions by spreading their money around. Dr. Alan
Levin, Adjunct Associate Professor of Immunology and Dermatology
at the University of California states:
Pharmaceutical companies, by enlisting
the aid of influential academic physicians, have gained control
of the practice of medicine in the United States. They now set
the standards of practice by hiring investigators to perform studies
which establish the efficacy of their products or impugn that
of their competitors. . .
HAZARDS OF HOSPITALIZATION
Hospitals are a hotbed of iatrogenic
disease. Every year two million people are admitted to hospitals
with one health problem and end up with another health problem!
According to Dr. Mendelsohn these doctor-caused illnesses kill
as many as 20,000 people annually. A study in the Southern Medical
Journal reported that one in five patients admitted to a university
hospital acquires an iatrogenic disease, and one in thirty of
these lead to death. Of these iatrogenic deaths, half are complications
of drug therapy and 10% result from improper diagnostic procedures.
Another study of 815 consecutive patients in a university hospital
over an eight month period found that 36% had a disease caused
by their doctor - in 2% of the cases the iatrogenic disease was
believed to be a cause of the patient's death.
If you project that figure out, assuming
2% of all hospital patients die from an iatrogenic disease, you
get 700,000 hospital/doctor-caused deaths per year - one third
of all deaths!
HOSPITAL INFECTIONS
In the 1840's Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis
directed a teaching hospital in Vienna, where 75% of the women
giving birth were dying of puerperal fever. He observed that doctors
went from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies without washing
their hands. Dr. Semmelweis made the "radical" policy
change of requiring doctors to wash their hands before delivery
a baby. An amazing thing happened - the mortality rate drop fifteen-fold.
Unfortunately, his arrogant colleagues couldn't see the connection,
so they dismissed him and ostracized him. The rejection ultimately
drove Semmelweis to death in an insane asylum - another great
moment in the history of iatrogenic disease.
But doctors are enlightened nowadays
about sanitation, aren't they? A 1981 study of washing habits
in intensive care units found that only 28% of the doctors washed
between patients in a teaching hospital and only 14% washed in
the private hospital! Dr. Mendelsohn noted:
. . . the sanitary practices of the
medical personnel are often abominable and the hospital itself
is probably the most germ-laden facility in town.
Your chances of getting an infection
in the hospital are one in 20 with 15,000 people dying annually
from hospital-acquired infections.
SURGERY
Dr. Arthur Mannix, Jr. declared in
an article in the New York State Journal of Medicine:
Errors in judgment or technique concerning
either the anesthesia or the surgery, or a combination of the
two, contribute to close to 50% of the deaths in the operating
room.
I think what that translates to is
that disease is only responsible for 50% of the deaths on the
operating table, while doctors are responsible for the other 50%
of deaths.
The McCarthy-Widmer study in the New England Journal of Medicine
noted the following:
1. 20% of all surgery is unnecessary.
2. This unnecessary surgery costs consumers over $3 billion per
year.
3. There are 2.4 million unnecessary operations annually.
4. This unnecessary surgery results in 12,000 unnecessary deaths
each year.
Another study showed that when a
second specialist was consulted, 18% of the time he disagreed
with doing the surgery.
Hysterectomies are the most common operation today with nearly
one million done per year. In six New York hospitals 43% of their
hysterectomies were found on review to have been unjustified.
Women with abnormal bleeding from the uterus or heavy menstrual
blood flow were given the operation though other treatments or
none at all would probably have worked as well.
PROTECTING YOURSELF FROM
DOCTORS
"Doctors in general should be
treated with about the same degree of trust as used car salesmen."
- Robert Mendelsohn, M.D.
1. Caveat emptor - "Let the
buyer beware." Don't assume your doctor knows everything,
or that he or she necessarily knows what's best for you. Use your
doctor like your lawyer or CPA - someone to give you counsel with
you making the final decision.
2. Don't panic with sickness - Sickness
is an opportunity to learn about your body's needs and to seek
God's direction. Remember the story of King Asa in the Old Testament
who died because he only sought the physicians instead of first
seeking the Lord for his illness (II Chron. 16:12).
3. Avoid treating symptoms - There
would be little iatrogenic disease if people were not so intent
on treating symptoms. Instead you must get down to root causes,
which usually means lifesytle change.
4. Don't "quick fix" pain
- Get over the idea that pain is something that has to be immediately
eliminated at any cost. That view encourages a lot of symptom
treatment and resulting drug iatrogenesis. Pain is a warning that
something's wrong. Again, seek to fix the underlying cause and
that will fix the pain.
5. Seek appropriate health care services
- The old saying says: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
Don't expect anything but a prescription drug for symptoms when
you go to a medical doctor. If you want to deal with underlying
causes, go to the appropriate natural medicine doctor. Of course,
if you have an emergency situation or some type of acute problem,
conventional medicine is best equipped to deal with that.
6. Stimulate natural healing, don't
sabotage it - Symptom treatments, like the frequent use of antibiotics,
destroy your natural immunity, and thus open the door for more
iatrogenic problems. Focus on detoxifying, correcting nutrient
deficiencies, allergic desensitizing, and exercise to free up
your body to heal itself.
