Death by Medicine

I submitted an article detailing the effectiveness of St. John's Wort with West Nile Virus to a PR website where reporters research information for broadcast/publication. We got almost 88,000 hits, but no one wanted to disseminate the information. I spoke to one reporter with a newspaper in the Inland Empire. We're still waiting to see if she will publish anything. Whole Life Times was also possibly interested. When my publicist called NBC, the response was informative. The call screener was immediately interested. He wanted to know what the substance was, where he could obtain it, and how much he should take. However, the next person up the chain, the actual producer for all their medical programming (who also was interested and who takes herbs herself), told her that she was sorry, but Dr. Bruce Hensel, the medical director, wouldn't let anything on the air that wasn't AMA approved.

You can draw your own conclusions. Mine is that there are some people who would rather see others die than put out information that is not flattering to the medical community. And, this ties right in the next item I'd like to share.

In March of this year, Dr. Gary Null published an article entitled "Death by Medicine" on his web site regarding life extension. As pointed out in the introduction, the authors note: "Never before have the complete statistics on the multiple causes of iatrogenesis been combined in one paper. Medical science amasses tens of thousands of papers annually - each on a tiny fragment of the whole picture. … Each specialty, each division of medicine keeps their own records and data on morbidity and mortality like pieces of a puzzle. But the numbers and statistics were always hiding in plain sight. We have now completed the painstaking work of reviewing thousands of studies. Finally putting the puzzle together, we came up with some disturbing answers."

  • "The total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year."
  • "The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million."
  • "Richard Besser, of the CDC, in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics."
  • The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million."
  • "The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million."
  • "It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States." (See statistics below to confirm this statement.)

Finally, the authors are especially concerned that "(a)s few as 5% and only up to 20% of iatrogenic acts are ever reported." That's frightening, considering how large the numbers are, even with this poor reporting record.

The following table is from the CDC web site which gives the numbers for 2001, the last year for which statistics have been compiled:

Deaths - Leading Causes
(Data are for US in 2001)
Heart Disease: 700,142
Cancer: 553,768
Stroke: 163,538
Chronic Lower Respiratory Diseases: 123,013
Accidents (unintentional Injuries): 101,537
Diabetes: 71,372
Influenza/Pneumonia: 62,034
Alzheimer's Disease: 53,852
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis: 39,480
Septicemia: 32,238

Compare this to the 783,936 deaths caused by conventional medicine, as stated in Dr. Null's article.

Yet, no one has considered this information newsworthy. I haven't heard about it on any of the major news outlets, have you? Don't you think it's important? Particularly, in light of the on-going debate in this country about health care and health care costs.

If you would like a copy of the entire article (it runs 31 pages), please send RFHC a self-addressed, manila envelope, with extra postage ($1.52), and we will be happy to send you a copy. I printed it out and formatted all the tables so that is easily read. There are 152 references, so the media's lack of interest certainly isn't due to lack of documentation.

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