Hans posted:"It's so easy to slander others if you don't bother to check your facts."........................................... .................................................. ....
Here are the facts:
The total number of iatrogenic 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.
"An analysis by Wald & Shojan [2001] found that only 1.5% of all adverse events result in an incident report, and only 6% of adverse drug events are identified properly....The Psychiatric Times noted that the AMA is strongly opposed to mandatory reporting of medical errors...Dr Jay Cohen, who has extensively researched adverse drug reactions (ADR), commented that because only 5% of ADRs are being reported, there are in reality, 5 million medications reactions each year."
In 2001, there were 7.5 million unnecessary surgical procedures, resulting in 37,136 deaths at a cost of $122 billion (using 174 US dollars)
The OTA concluded: “There are no mechanisms in place to limit dissemination of technologies regardless of their clinical value.” Shortly after the release of this report, the OTA was disbanded.
In 1983, 809,000 cesarean sections (21% of live births) were performed in the US, making it the nation's most common obstetric-gynecologic (OB/GYN) surgical procedure. The second most common OB/GYN operation was hysterectomy (673,000), followed by diagnostic dilation and curettage of the uterus (632,000). In 1983, OB/GYN procedures represented 23% of all surgery completed in the US.
In 2001, cesarean section is still the most common OB/GYN surgical procedure. Approximately 4 million births occur annually, with 24% (960,000) delivered by cesarean section. In the Netherlands, only 8% of births are delivered by cesarean section. This suggests 640,000 unnecessary cesarean sections—entailing three to four times higher mortality and 20 times greater morbidity than vaginal delivery—are performed annually in the US.
The US cesarean rate rose from just 4.5% in 1965 to 24.1% in 1986. Sakala contends that an “uncontrolled pandemic of medically unnecessary cesarean births is occurring.”(106) VanHam reported a cesarean section postpartum hemorrhage rate of 7%, a hematoma formation rate of 3.5%, a urinary tract infection rate of 3%, and a combined postoperative morbidity rate of 35.7% in a high-risk population undergoing cesarean section.
Results of the “Million Women Study” on HRT and breast cancer in the UK were published in medical journal
The Lancet in August 2003. According to lead author Prof. Valerie Beral, director of the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit: "We estimate that over the past decade, use of HRT by UK women aged 50-64 has resulted in an extra 20,000 breast cancers, estrogen-progestagen (combination) therapy accounting for 15,000 of these.” We were unable to find statistics on breast cancer, stroke, uterine cancer, or heart disease caused by HRT used by American women. Because the US population is roughly six times that of the UK, it is possible that 120,000 cases of breast cancer have been caused by HRT in the past decade.
Death by Medicine----Carolyn Dean, MD, ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Gary Null, PhD, Debora Rasio, MD (2003/4)