Most people are well aware that an estimated 45
million Americans currently do not have healthcare, but is the crisis
simply the lack of health insurance or even the cost of health
insurance? Is there a bigger underlying problem at the root of our
healthcare system? Although the U.S. claims to have the most advanced
medicine in the world, government health statistics and peer-reviewed
journals are painting a different picture -- that allopathic medicine
often causes more harm than good.
People in general have always felt they could trust doctors and the
medical profession, but according to the Journal of the American
Medical Association in July 2000, iatrogenic death, also known as death
from physician error or death from medical treatment, was the third
leading cause of death in America and rising, responsible for at least
250,000 deaths per year. Those statistics are considered conservative
by many, as the reported numbers only include in-hospital deaths, not
injury or disability, and do not include external iatrogenic deaths
such as those resulting from nursing home and other private facility
treatments, and adverse effects of prescriptions. One recent study
estimated the total unnecessary deaths from iatrogenic causes at
approximately 800,000 per year at a cost of $282 billion per year,
which would make death from American medicine the leading cause of
death in our country.
Currently, at least 2 out of 3 Americans use medications, 32
million Americans are taking three or more medications daily, and
commercials and advertisements for pharmaceutical drugs have saturated
the marketplace. Although our population is aging, exorbitantly
expensive drugs are being marketed and dispensed to younger and younger
patients, including many children who years ago would never have been
given or needed medication, for everything from ADHD to asthma to
bipolar disease and diabetes. Clearly, the state of health in this
country is not improving even though there are an increasing number of
medications and treatments. Between 2003 and 2010, the number of
prescriptions are expected to increase substantially by 47%. In recent
years, numerous drugs previously deemed safe by the FDA have been
recalled because of their toxicity, after the original drug approvals
were actually funded by the invested pharmaceutical companies
themselves.
According to the media, thanks to advances in U.S. drugs and
medical procedures, Americans are living longer statistically, but they
are living longer sicker, with a lower quality of life, and often
dependent on multiple expensive synthetic medications that do not cure
or address the underlying causes, but only suppress symptoms, often
with a plethora of dangerous side effects to the tune of billions of
dollars for the drug industry. Considering that the U.S. is supposed to
have the most advanced technology in the world and the best health care
system, it is at odds that we spend the most on healthcare, yet are the
most obese and most afflicted with illness outside of the AIDS epidemic
in some third world countries.
Unless you have an acute emergency that requires emergency room
care, being admitted to a hospital environment may also be more
dangerous to your health than staying out. In 2003, epidemiologists
reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that hospital-acquired
infections have risen steadily in recent decades, with blood and tissue
infections known as sepsis almost tripling from 1979 to 2000. Nearly
two million patients in the U.S. get an infection while in the hospital
each year, and of those patients over 90,000 die per year, up
dramatically from just 13,300 in 1992. Statistics show that
approximately 56% of the population has been unnecessarily treated, or
mistreated, by the medical industry.
Additionally, as a result of the overuse of pharmaceutical drugs
and antibiotics in our bodies and environment, our immune systems have
become significantly weakened, allowing antibiotic-resistant strains of
disease-causing bacteria to proliferate, leaving us more susceptible to
further disease. Not surprisingly, incidences of diseases have been
growing at epidemic levels according to the CDC. Now diseases once
thought conquered, such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, malaria, and
childhood ear infections are much harder to successfully treat than
they were decades ago. Drugs do not cure. They only suppress the
symptoms that your body needs to express, while they ignore the
underlying root cause. Side effects of synthetic and chemical drugs,
which even if they are partly derived from nature have been perverted
to make them patentable and profitable, are not healthy or natural, and
usually cause more harm than any perceived benefit of the medication.
Where "physician errors" are concerned, these may not be entirely
the fault of the doctors, as they are forced to operate within the
constraints of their profession or risk losing their license, but
doctors have become pawns and spokesmen for the drug companies, and the
best interest of the patient has become secondary. In the name of
profit, physicians are also under great pressure from hospitals to
service patients as quickly as possible, like an assembly line,
increasing the likelihood of error.
In conclusion, increases in healthcare costs are not just the
result of frivolous law suits, but are primarily the result of a
profit-oriented industry that encourages practices that lead to
unnecessary and harmful procedures being performed, lethal adverse drug
reactions, infections, expensive legitimate lawsuits, in-hospital and
physician errors, antibiotic resistance due to overprescribing of
antibiotics and drugs, and the hundreds of thousands of subsequent
unnecessary deaths and injuries. Many people do not realize that there
are healthier natural options, and anything unnatural or invasive we
are exposed to is likely to cause either immediate or cumulative damage
over time.