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Tuesday 26 July 2016

Iatrogenic Death - are doctors now the biggest cause of death?

It has long been said that conventional medicine, more usually described as 'medical errors', is one of the biggest causes of disease and death.  Indeed, the statistics are there to prove it, and they are statistics gathered and published by conventional health officials. Yet they only refer to a small proportion of the disease, and the death caused by the conventional medical system.

"Medical Errors: STILL the Third Leading Cause of Death", published on 18th May 2016 on Mercola.com, is a recent attempt to calculate the size of the damage cause by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

Dr Mercola claims that he was the first person to publish the data, back in 2000. He did so after reading an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) stating that the  shocking data made it very clear that doctors were the third leading cause of death in the USA.

Dr. Barbara Starfield, the author of the 2000 JAMA study, showed that a staggering 225,000 Americans die from iatrogenic (doctor induced) causes. Mercola says that her statistics revealed that each year:
  • 12,000 die from unnecessary surgery
  • 7,000 die from medication errors in hospitals
  • 20,000 die from other errors in hospitals
  • 80,000 die from hospital-acquired infections
  • 106,000 die from the negative side effects of drugs taken as prescribed

These numbers, had as they are, have increased during the last 16 years. Yet it is this latter figure that is probably a severe under-estimate of the real size of iatrogenic death. The reason is that these drug side effect statistics will use information gleaned from death certificates, and these death certificates are written by doctors who are trying to ascertain the cause of death, usually very quickly. It is not that death certificates are necessarily wrong, or that doctors intentionally hide any evidence that pharmaceutical drugs or vaccines have played an important part in causing death. 

It is the denial, rife within the conventional medical circles, that their drugs can cause any problems at all, leave alone that they are often the cause of death.

I have occasionally blogged on these situations before. For instance, a good friend of mine died of Alzheimer's Disease, after she had received a flu vaccination on several consecutive years. Conventional medical science has long denied the evidence linking consecutive flu vaccinations with dementia, with just denials, and little attempt to ascertain whether there is a link or not. So how many older people die of this vaccine alone?

There must be millions of similar examples. Another friend fell and banged her head one evening, and thinking no more of it, went to bed. The next morning she was dead. The doctor's death certificate stated that the cause of death was a brain haemorrhage. It made no mention that she was taking Warfarin, which would have undoubtedly have had some effect on the outcome!

So iatrogenic death, deaths caused by pharmaceutical drugs, are not usually recorded as such. There is no mention of the drugs and vaccines being taken by the patient. It is particularly likely to happen in circumstances where the conventional medical establishment, particularly the pharmaceutical companies, deny that there is any link between their drugs and a condition or a disease.

But it also happens when a patient has an existing disease. The disease may itself be caused by pharmaceutical drugs or vaccines. But the cause of death will usually be given as the existing disease, and not the pharmaceutical drugs the patient has taken to treat the disease. And this is so even when the drugs themselves are known to kill.

 The number of such cases, not just in the USA but throughout the world, must be huge. It almost certainly pushes iatrogenic death to the top of the list of the cause of death.