| T O P I C R E V I E W |
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Posted - 11/24/2005 : 09:01:16
Drugs and Doctors May be the Leading Cause of Death in U.S.
By Joseph Mercola, D.O.
SEE: http://www.mercola.com/2003/jan/15/doctors_drugs.htm. |
| 13 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| drziggles |
Posted - 11/28/2005 : 16:28:17
As someone from the dreaded "medical establishment", I feel that I have to put my two cents in on this topic. I agree that when it comes to TMS and its equivalents, the current medical standard of care is way off base, and causes more far more harm than good with its focus on structural abnormalities and surgery as a cure-all.
That being said, I think that most doctors genuinely feel they are doing the right thing in the way they care for patients, rather than the cynical view that it is all for the $. I think that surgeons, by their nature, have the drive to "fix things", and that they think that "fixing" someones spine is doing just that. Medicine is a very conservative field, and it is very difficult to fight decades of tradition and assumed wisdom, evidence be damned!
Consider this: data that go against usual medical "standard of care", even gleaned from very well performed, randomized studies take 5-10 years before they change most physicians' treatment habits! There are still people that walk out of a hospital after a heart attack without being given a beta-blocker or even an aspirin--and this is almost a decade or more since efficacy has been proved.
Now, take something like TMS, which has exactly zero hard data behind it, beyond "negative" data regarding the INefficacy of the standard treatments for back pain. You can imagine that this is not something that will take the medical community by storm.
Making things worse is the current U.S. health care system, which only pays for DOING SOMETHING, (read: prescribe a medication, or even better, perform a costly, labor-intensive test, injection, or surgical procedure) not for making an accurate diagnosis or speaking to a patient about their problems; there is a huge disincentive to use TMS techniques, which most doctors wouldn't have a clue about in the first place.
Then, add the media and public focus on progress achieved in laboratory/ genetic-based science (some well-deserved, others not so much) which has fueled the expectation, or even demand for a "cure" for everything, based on the latest in modern testing and well-advertised medications, no matter whether appropriate or not in a given case. Next, an overall increase in laziness and short-attention-span of most Americans, and the accompanying desire for a "quick fix" or "magic pill" for everything, from depression to headaches to limp sexual organs, and you can see where this whole thing is heading.
Sorry for the long post, but I feel that despite the misguidedness of the medical standard of care on back pain (among other things), this is not intentional on anyone's part, but is rather a confluence of social and scientific trends, all conspiring against the acceptance and general use of a psychologically based system like TMS.
Trust me, there are many medical/surgical problems for which "modern medicine" has made great advances, with new and effective treatments for problems like epilepsy, myasthenia gravis, and multiple sclerosis, just to name a few in my field of neurology alone. If you have a medical problem, please find a good doctor, who is well-trained and up-to-date on current therapies, and who is a good, genuine human being, and work with them. They do exist! |
| PeterW |
Posted - 11/28/2005 : 11:15:07
Very well said Kajsa!
IMHO there is good, bad, ugly and occasionally brilliant to be found in both mainstram and alternative medicine circles. In most other aspects of our world too. The danger lies in when folks allow themselves to see things in absolutes and get evangelical about the 'light' they have seen, or more often the product they're trying to sell.
For whatever it's worth Mercola's archives is where I first heard of Sarno. In a very positive light too. But no, I'd never go for Mercola's coconut bars or other gems such as a supplement called 'homeostatic soil organisms'.  |
| Michael D |
Posted - 11/28/2005 : 10:59:53
A different perspective. I have friends with titanium cages surrounding their fused vertibrae. Their lives were ruined by back surgeons.
From the Doctor’s Guide (2001)
Hubert L. Rosomoff, MD, called a moratorium on back surgeries when he realized that, after two weeks of rehabilitation, his back patients no longer required surgery. He said this approach can avoid the majority of surgeries.
"Following this kind of concept you can eliminate 99 percent of the surgical cases.
Here is some outright failure stats.
25,000-50,000 failed back surgery syndrome cases each year
Overall failure rate 30 percent (fusion), 37.3 percent (non-fusion)
Re-operation rate 6.9 percent overall at two-year follow-up
11.9 percent (fusion), 10.2 percent (non-fusion) at four-year follow-up
Re-hospitalization 22.4 percent (fusion), 18.3 percent (non-fusion)
From the Chicago Sun Times
One of the most common surgeries for back and neck pain is a spinal fusion, in which two or more vertebrae are welded into one solid bone. There were 325,000 fusions in 2003, a 26 percent increase over 1999
From the Burton report
Multi-level rigid instrumented stabilizations may cost as much as $80 thousand … Most spine-related medical meetings today are "feeding frenzies" for pedicle screw manufacturers and the recently introduced artificial disc prostheses.
Another article I read said there were over 1 million back surgeries in the US alone last year. Add to that hip, knee, shoulder replacement, carpal tunnel surgery etc and you have an epidemic.
It’s amazing how ignorant doctors can be when they are making millions on ineffective procedures
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| JohnD |
Posted - 11/27/2005 : 21:59:11
Good point Kajsa.
I also would like to point out that most doctors do have good intentions and are doing the best they can with the information they have access to.
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| wrldtrv |
Posted - 11/27/2005 : 21:12:42
Agreed. Perspective is everything. |
| Kajsa |
Posted - 11/27/2005 : 08:29:29
I think it is important that we do not become paranoid! There are a lot of conditions that actually needs
mainstream medicine - it plays a good and important role.
And a lot of conditions when alternative medicine isn´t very effective.
Most of our doctors are not evil - they actually save a lot of lives - help people.
Mainstream medicine is poor though - when it comes to help people with psychosomatic problems, pain
etc.
Please - lets keep some perspective here.
When we start to talk like "we have seen the light and everybody else
is in the dark - and it is our mission to enlighten them"..I get bad vibes.
Kajsa
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| n/a |
Posted - 11/27/2005 : 08:13:21
Yeah, Dr. Weil has his own line of vitamins and minerals and they are not cheap either. I remember talking to one TMS doctor who did not like Dr. Weil at all as he felt he was all over the place. Look at his answer on Chiropractic adjustment: http://www.drweil.com/u/QA/QA137870/
See also this this answer he gives on Sciatica treatment: http://www.drweil.com/u/QA/QA82116/
How can he write this after having written that excellent chapter on Dr. Sarno in his book Spontaneous Healing? |
| JohnD |
Posted - 11/26/2005 : 17:25:39
Mainstream medicine has sadly taken a turn for the worse in the last 50-60 years. I know that Dr Andrew Weil (the doc whos book titled "spontaneous healing" originally introduced me to Sarno's work) is doing alot of research on how integrative medicine, is safer and cheaper than the way medicine is practiced today. |
| Michael D |
Posted - 11/25/2005 : 16:37:28
TMSer Beware. Dr. Mercola diagnosed me with fibromyalgia. His answer at the time was to put me on the Macrobiotic Diet (beans, rice, seaweed, miso, mostly). My weight dropped to 140 lbs from a healthy 180. I'm 6' tall. It was miserable. He was on it too but went off of it because he couldn't keep weight on and never bothered to give me a call. While I agree with him about doctors being hazardous to your health, I believe that he isn't much better. If you look on his site you will see that he promotes Tapping or EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and he sells the DVD for only $60. This method postulates that the emotional memory is retained in your muscles and that doing a certain tapping method on specific spots on the body will release these emotions. He has his special diets and hundreds of foods on the do not touch list, He has "specially trained" people he calls Psychotherapists.
From his website
(meet the Practitioners)
Psychotherapists
Julie Schiffman, M.S.W., is trained in a variety of therapies including EFT, ART, TBM in using a holistic approach to healing.
Marcie Shumaker, M.S.W., is an experienced social worker who uses EFT and her intuitive gifts to understand a patient's core issues.
Jody Stevens, M.A., uses a wide variety of techniques involving bioenergy systems to help quickly resolve psychoemotional issues
Here is his fee schedule
Initial Doctor Visit $225
Follow-Up Doctor Visits $119 per visit (the program has 10 follow up visits)
Metabolic Typing Questionnaire (online) with consultation $179
Lab Tests: MPT, Insulin, Vitamin D, C-Reactive Protein, Short Thyroid Panel (STP), Ferritin, Fatty Acid Test, Adrenal Stress Index (ASI), Urinalysis $843
He is so busy that you cannot even speak to a live person at his office to become a new patient or ask a question. You have to voice mail or the recommended method is to fill out forms and then they check your insurance before they will consider you. Hmmm.
His answer for TMS would be lots of expensive tests, Tapping, his diet, his dentist, his coconut bars, his so called Psychotherapists, his book, dvd etc. Can you say ring the cash register.
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| n/a |
Posted - 11/25/2005 : 13:28:04
Yup, that is preety much it John. Tear everyone elase done and then say "only I have the cure." Good way to make money.
If you really want to find out how deadly mainstream
medicine is, you should click into this site:
Death by Medicine
Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD -- November 2003
http://www.garynull.com/documents/iatrogenic/deathbymedicine/deathbymedicine1.htm
and now, these mobsters are going after our children with their addictive drugs. See:
Child antidepressant use increases
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051124/hl_nm/child_antidepressant_dc
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| JohnD |
Posted - 11/25/2005 : 07:52:19
.....so buy this software along with my book for 5 installments of $14.99 and you'll be healthy forever!
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| n/a |
Posted - 11/25/2005 : 07:06:20
Here is the link again along with the full text. Remember, this is not about your individual case, but looks at overall trends. You may have had good luck, but not your healing or recovery depends mostly on what YOU do and not waht doctors do. Doctors do not heal, they are not healers. You heal yourself. The real doctor is inside of you. It is a secret the medical establishment/ mafia do not like to broadcast. They want to keep you dependent on their narcotics and snake-oil tratments while lining their pockets with your hard earned cash. It is rather depressing. I think the medical establishment / mafia should apologize to us. Doctors - except for a few notbale exceptions, like Dr. Sarno - have less respect in my eyes than people who torture others for a living. Many of them, as you will see below, are getting away with murder. We need to remove the halo from these frauds and expose them for what they are. Read on...
Drugs and Doctors May be the Leading Cause of Death in U.S.
http://www.mercola.com/2003/jan/15/doctors_drugs.htm
By Joseph Mercola, D.O.
At one time, the main title of my Web site read:
Doctors are the Third leading Cause of Death
Many of you reading this have read or seen this in many places other than my Web site. This article, available on my home page, was widely circulated on the Internet and was one of the reasons why my Web site was initially popular. What you may not realize is that I am the one who made this analysis and popularized it. The original study was published by Dr. Starfield, a full professor of public health at the most prestigious hospital in the United States, Johns Hopkins. Her study never had the headline in it, but instead listed the published research documenting the various causes of deaths that doctors contributed to. I simply added them all up and compared them to cardiovascular diseases and cancer and came up with the above headline, which was widely circulated on the Internet.
Interestingly, when I contacted Dr. Starfield by e-mail she disagreed with the headline I had come up with. She did not feel that doctors were the third leading cause of death, but thought they were the number one cause of death because of their failure to inform their patients about the truth of health. Now this might be a bit too harsh as even if people understand health truth they have freedom of choice and can choose to use sugar, soda and drugs (legal and illegal) to compromise their health and longevity.
However, JAMA actually published a study a year earlier that could support that doctors may be the leading cause of death in the United States.
This finding is more of a speculation though, so below I have provided some other studies to support this assertion.
In 1994, an estimated 2,216,000 (1,721,000 to 2,711,000) hospitalized patients had serious adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and 106,000 (76,000 to 137,000) had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death.
Fatal ADRs accounted for 0.32 percent (95 percent confidence interval (CI), 0.23 percent to 0.41 percent) of hospitalized patients.
JAMA April 15, 1998;279(15):1200-5
BMC Nephrol. December 22, 2003
Medication-related problems (MRP) continue to occur at a high rate in ambulatory hemodialysis (HD) patients.
Medication-dosing problems (33.5 percent), adverse drug reactions (20.7 percent), and an indication that was not currently being treated (13.5 percent) were the most common MRP.
5,373 medication orders were reviewed and a MRP was identified every 15.2 medication exposures.
Nurs Times. December 9-15, 2003;99(49):24-5.
In 2002, 16,176 adverse drug reaction reports were received, of which 67 percent related to reactions categorized as 'serious.'
Pharm World Sci. December, 2003;25(6):264-8.
Medication administration errors (MAEs) were observed in two departments of a hospital for 20 days.
The medication administration error rate was 14.9 percent. Dose errors were the most frequent (41 percent) errors, followed by wrong time (26 percent) and wrong rate errors. Ten percent of errors were estimated as potentially life-threatening, 26 percent potentially significant and 64 percent potentially minor.
Serious and Fatal Drug Reactions in US Hospitals
Drug-related morbidity and mortality have been estimated to cost more that $136 billion a year in United States. These estimates are higher than the total cost of cardiovascular care or diabetes care in the United States. A major component of these costs is adverse drug reactions (ADE).
Am J Med August 1, 2000;109(2):122-30
About 0.05 percent of all hospital admissions were certainly or probably drug-related.
Incidence figures based on death certificates only may seriously underestimate the true incidence of fatal adverse drug reactions.
Eur J Clin Pharmacol October, 2002;58(7):479-82
In one study of 200 patients, ADRs may have contributed to the deaths of two (one percent) patients.
J Clin Pharm Ther October, 2000;25(5):355-61
In a survey of over 28,000 patients, ADRs were considered to be the cause of 3.4 percent of hospital admissions. Of these, 187 ADRs were coded as severe. Gastrointestinal complaints (19 percent) represented the most common events, followed by metabolic and hemorrhagic complications (nine percent). The drugs most frequently responsible for these ADRs were diuretics, calcium channel blockers, nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs and digoxin.
J Am Geriatr Soc December, 2002;50(12):1962-8
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Dr. Mercola's Comment
As health reporter Nick Regush said last year:
"There is no way to be nice about this. There is no point in raising false hopes. There is no treatment or vaccine in sight. There is no miracle breakthrough on the horizon.
Medicine, as we know it, is dying. It's entering a terminal phase.
What began as an acute illness reached the chronic stage about a decade ago and progression toward death has been remarkably swift and well beyond anything one could have predicted.
The disease is caused by conflict of interest, tainted research, greed for big bucks, pretentious doctors and scientists, lying, cheating, invasion by the morally bankrupt marketing automatons of the drug industry, derelict politicians and federal and state regulators - all seasoned with huge doses of self-importance and foul odor."
Currently, the United States spends about 1.5 trillion dollars for healthcare, and the projections are that it will double in less than 10 years.
The sad tragedy is that we are spending all of this money on disease management focused on drugs and surgery, and our return on this investment is profoundly poor. More and more people do not have the energy they need to get through the day while millions of others are suffering with painful crippling diseases because they have violated basic health principles.
Often, negative health and lifestyle choices are made because of a lack of knowledge, and it's my passion to increase the public's awareness of the health tragedies facing the nation. I will give you, the consumer, the tools to become a major force for good health and to alleviate disease and suffering.
At Mercola.com, we have been steadily working to introduce innovative software that will accelerate this process, but finishing the manuscript of my book pushed the project back a bit. The beta version will be released shortly and I hope to have the full version out very soon.
The software will help all of us to transform the system together.
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| n/a |
Posted - 11/25/2005 : 01:28:59
The link didn't work for me, Peter and I couldn't find the article when I Googled his name either.
I think we need to be careful of him, however. He has a major agenda - ie: products and services to sell.
Because I couldn't read his article, it's perhaps unfair of me to comment, but the idea that drugs and doctors may be a leading cause of death concerns me. I'm pretty sure that I owe my life to the skill of doctors.
I'll look again for the article because, as I said, I can't really comment on it until I read it.
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