Modern Health Care System found to be the Leading Cause of Death in USA

Until recently the third leading cause of death in the US was correctly prescribed medical therapies. But the latest studies show something more ominous. While the US has the world’s best healthcare system for trauma and injury, our blind faith in drugs, surgery, and procedures for chronic disease may be unfounded. Our conventional medical system is, in fact, the LEADING cause of death in this country. Not heart disease, not cancer--doctors. In all fairness, doctors themselves are not to blame for all of this. The entire modern health care system, however, is responsible for allowing, even promulgating, so many unnecessary procedures, drugs and mishaps. This illustrates precisely why the system is so desperately in need of change, and why facilitating this change is going to be our challenge in the future. Our purpose here is to help turn the tide and stay healthy in spite of our present sickness care industrial complex. So if you want to not become a statistic use what you learn here from this newsletter to enable yourself to not need a hospital and only go to your doctor to take your annual exam and find out how healthy you really are.


Notice in the tables below that the main causes of death are adverse drug reactions, bedsores and malnutrition. Good nutrition can easily prevent the last two of those causes of death. All we have to do is readjust our nutritional mindset and teach people what they need to eat to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year just from those two causes.


The information below is actually incomplete as the World Health Organization last year attributed 1.5 million American deaths to a combination of correctly and incorrectly prescribed medications and therapies.


In our next issue we will learn things to help us turn the corner from illness to health.


Here is the combined research before the WHO report if you think perhaps I am exaggerating:


By Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD
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
ANNUAL PHYSICAL AND ECONOMIC COST OF MEDICAL INTERVENTION
Condition Deaths Cost Author
Adverse Drug Reactions 106,000 $12 billion Lazarou1 Suh49
Medical error 98,000 $2 billion IOM6
Bedsores 115,000 $55 billion Xakellis7 Barczak8
Infection 88,000 $5 billion Weinstein9 MMWR10
Malnutrition 108,800 -------- Nurses Coalition11
Outpatients 199,000 $77 billion Starfield12 Weingart112
Unnecessary Procedures 37,136 $122 billion HCUP3,13
Surgery-Related 32,000 $9 billion AHRQ85
TOTAL 783,936 $282 billion


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.
Condition Deaths Cost Author
ADR/med error 420,000 $200 billion Leape 199714
TOTAL 999,936