Hazards of "Modern" Medicine

Latorgenic illness—disease produced as a result of medical treatment—is now recognized as a health hazard of global proportions. MEDLINE (the computerized medical research database of the United States National Library of Medicine) includes over 7,000 articles, reports, and scientific research papers since 1966 that show a substantial number of patients suffer treatment-caused disorders and adverse drug reactions. These harmful effects, which can be serious and even lethal, are associated with every facet of modern medicine including drugs, other medical therapies, diagnostic procedures, and surgery.

Massive Detrimental Effects
Detrimental effects have become so extensive as to prompt the use of the term “iatroepidemic”. Reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Lucien Leape of Harvard School of Public Health, has calculated that “180,000 people die in the U.S. each year partly as a result of iatrogenic injury, the equivalent of three jumbo-jet crashes every two days”. The journal of the American Medical Association points out that injury from medical treatment in the U.S. “dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined”.

An Economic Drain
Medication-caused disorders produce a substantial economic drain. For example, the Archives of Internal Medicine reported a cost to the U.S. economy of $76 billion in 1995. This amount is nearly twice that spent on diabetes treatment and near the amount for cardiovascular disease.

Hazardous Hospital Environment
The hospital environment is especially conducive to medical hazards. Studies including those conducted at Harvard Medical School show that as many as 36 per cent of patients admitted to hospitals suffered iatrogenic injury with up to 25% of those being serious or fatal. Up to half of these injuries were related to the use of medication.

The results of an analysis of cardiac arrests at a teaching hospital found that 64 per cent were preventable. Inappropriate use of drugs was the leading cause.

Every medication, including those that are sold over the counter without a prescription, has an associated side effect.

Poisonous Drugs

Many drugs have side effects serious enough to cause a secondary disease warranting its own intensive therapy. An example is Parkinsonism caused by the neurological side effects of anti-depressants or anti-psychotic medication. A Harvard Medical School study showed that drugs were the real cause of the original symptoms in 37 per cent of elderly patients who were treated for Parkinson’s disease.

Unnecessary Surgery Epidemic
A U.S. Congress Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations into Unnecessary Surgery found that in one year, there were approximately two million unnecessary operations responsible for more than 12,000 deaths, with an approximate cost wastage of $10 billion.

Injurious Technologies.....
36 per cent of iatrogenic problems in intensive care units were associated with equipment malfunction.

Unreliable Medical Care
The editor of the British Medical Journal revealed that only 15 per cent of all medical therapies have a scientific basis or have been demonstrated to be effective. An example is the formerly common use of irradiation for enlargement of the thymus in infancy, a condition now recognized to be normal. This treatment has recently been shown to cause cancer in later life in those who received it.

Pushing Poisonous Drugs

Pharmaceutical marketing also puts great pressure on physicians to use new products. The medical journal Hospital Practice pointed out that pharmaceutical company competition “leads to very aggressive promotion and inundation of the physician with data supporting the use of each new drug”. Such marketing may dilute opposing scientific information that is not as well publicized. Ultimately drugs may be withdrawn, but only after substantial harm has been done. For example, benoxaprofen, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent (NSAID) was introduced and heavily marketed in 1982, but then withdrawn after cases of fatal liver toxicity were reported in Great Britain.

Developing countries, which have less stringent controls and means of surveillance, have had special problems with irrational drug marketing by multinational and indigenous pharmaceutical companies that have been carefully documented. These practices have been reviewed in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology by several authors.

Urgent Need For New Knowledge

Physicians and patients have come to accept medical hazards as a necessary price to pay for modern diagnosis and therapy even though they may be seriously debilitating or lethal. The same is true with medical errors. Studies have shown errors to be so pervasive that mistakes are considered to be an inevitable part of the medical system, giving rise to the term ”necessary fallibility”. The deplorable acceptance of disease or medical error as a consequence of treatment reflects a deviation from the most primary principle of medical ethics— primun non nocere—above all do no harm. The wealth of data documenting the serious nature and extent of the hazards associated with modern medicine has made clear that fundamental deficiencies exist in the current medical approach and that new knowledge is urgently needed to effectively address this problem.

For a detailed report on “the Hazards of Modern Medicine” which includes the references from which this data was compiled please contact Opnet International at (868) 657-2682