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But how many were killed by terrorists?
http://www.mercola.com/ (Source)Have heard many negative reports on complementary medicine, and thought this might put things in prospectiveAndrew K FletcherDoctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the USA, Causing 250,000 Deaths Every Year This article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is the best article I have ever seen written in the published literature documenting the tragedy of the traditional medical paradigm. This information is a followup of the Institute of Medicine report which hit the papers in December of last year, but the data was hard to reference as it was not in peer-reviewed journal. Now it is published in JAMA which is the most widely circulated medical periodical in the world. The author is Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and she desribes how the US health care system may contribute to poor health.ALL THESE ARE DEATHS PER YEAR:12,000 -- unnecessary surgery 8 7,000 -- medication errors in hospitals 9 20,000 -- other errors in hospitals 10 80,000 -- infections in hospitals 10 106,000 -- non-error, negative effects of drugs 2 These total to 250,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes!!What does the word iatrogenic mean? This term is defined as induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially of a complication of treatment.Dr. Starfield offers several warnings in interpreting these numbers: First, most of the data are derived from studies in hospitalized patients. Second, these estimates are for deaths only and do not include negative effects that are associated with disability or discomfort. Third, the estimates of death due to error are lower than those in the IOM report.1 If the higher estimates are used, the deaths due to iatrogenic causes would range from 230,000 to 284,000. In any case, 225,000 deaths per year constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from heart disease and cancer. Even if these figures are overestimated, there is a wide margin between these numbers of deaths and the next leading cause of death (cerebrovascular disease).Another analysis concluded that between 4% and 18% of consecutive patients experience negative effects in outpatient settings,with:116 million extra physician visits 77 million extra prescriptions 17 million emergency department visits 8 million hospitalizations 3 million long-term admissions 199,000 additional deaths $77 billion in extra costs The high cost of the health care system is considered to be a deficit, but seems to be tolerated under the assumption that better health results from more expensive care.
I always get suspicious when statistics like this are thrown around without context.It's easy to say "look at all these people that doctors kill!", but what you really need to ask is "how many of them would have died anyway?" Doctors treat sick people, and sick people tend to die. The idea behind seeing a doctor is not to guarantee good health and survival, but to improve your odds of having those things.Of course, not all (or even most - i don't know the numbers) of the people who die from medical mistakes would have otherwise been done in by their illnesses. But that's hardly an indictment against the medical profession as a whole. Any time you elect to have surgery or take drugs, you're taking a risk, and it probably isn't possible to eliminate mistakes entirely. You shouldn't recoil in horror when you see large numbers of medicical treatment-related deaths; that's to be expected regardless of the quality of the medical profession, given the size of the population of a country such as the United States. It isn't sensible to say "these numbers are too high, they need to be lower!" without first establishing what, exactly, an acceptably low number of medical fatalities would be. This is necessary because the number will never be zero.