There’s nothing more dangerous than doctors, hospitals, and the medical industry
Far worse than war, guns, crime, or car accidents — combined
If someone is killed in a terrorist attack, it’s headline news. If another person dies at the hands of police, it’ll be the top story for weeks. But when was the last time you saw breaking news about a deadly medical error? It’s at least the third leading cause of death in the U.S. but it’s so common that it rarely (if ever) warrants notice. Then, of course, there’s also the whole cover-up aspect of it all. We’re never supposed to question the infallible men and women in white coats, right?
Twelve years ago this month, I appeared on a panel at the Left Forum. The ostensible topic was animal rights but the conversations covered far more ground than that. Seated to my left on the panel was none other than Gary Null (photo above).
Back before the internet, I used to listen to Null on WBAI radio here in New York City. His eclectic show’s primary focus was on what might be called holistic health. Null never stopped questioning mainstream/corporate medicine and science. He’d regularly remind listeners about iatrogenic medicine.
That day on the panel, he loved my presentation but still tried to trip me up in front of the crowd during the Q&A. While talking about the environmental causes of cancer, he turned me and asked if I knew the top* cause of death in the U.S. Without skipping a beat, I replied, “iatrogenic harm.”
Gary’s jaw hung open for a beat before he recovered and continued his monologue. I felt pretty good at that moment but also never forgot the importance of the point: There’s nothing more dangerous than doctors, hospitals, and the medical industry.
(*Null contributed to the definitive research on this topic and I will attempt to clarify the numbers as best as I can below.)
Gary Null was one of the first public figures to sound the trumpets about iatrogenic deaths but, fortunately, there are others. For example, Michael J. Saks and Stephan Landsman, authors of Closing Death’s Door: Legal Innovations to End the Epidemic of Healthcare Harm (Oxford University Press, 2021) explain:
The causes of harm vary widely: slips of the scalpel, lapses like mixing up lab results, faulty decision-making, inadequate training, evasion of known safety practices, miscommunication, equipment failures, and many more. The ease with which medical errors can occur is striking. To perform a bronchoscopy to remove a sunflower seed that went down a 2-year-old’s airway instead of his esophagus, a doctor in New Mexico inadvertently sedated the boy with an adult dose of morphine, which caused him to stop breathing and led to severe permanent brain damage. A lab in New York state mislabeled a tissue sample, causing a woman who did not have breast cancer to get a double mastectomy while cancer kept growing inside the woman who had the disease. Surgeons still sometimes get left and right confused, and it’s not uncommon for patients to get the wrong medication or the wrong dose, as happened to Boston Globe health reporter Betsy Lehman, who died from an overdose of chemotherapy drugs that were miscalculated.
Even the mainstream media admits that “medical errors” is the third leading cause of death and injury in the U.S. with the general figure being 250,000 lives lost per year. However, the British Medical Journal puts that number at 440,000.
But medical errors are only one component of the problem. Even when the “correct” treatment is given, it can cause countless injuries and death. And if you get any funny ideas about reporting these “healthcare heroes” for negligence, keep in mind that hospital medical records typically do not list incidents of doctor-induced harm or death.
“Death by Medicine” is a 2001 report by Gary Null, Ph.D.; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, Ph.D. It explains: “As few as 5 percent and no more than 20 percent of iatrogenic acts are ever reported. This implies that if medical errors were completely and accurately reported, we would have an annual iatrogenic death toll much higher than 783,936.”
A more recent estimate — factoring in adverse drug reactions, medically acquired bedsores, death caused by surgery, unnecessary procedures, and more — is 999,936 Americans per year killed by doctors and other medical “professionals.”
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