Medical Armageddon
by: Mark Sircus Ac., OMD
Medical News - November 17, 2003
Recently a New York Times editorial mused about testosterone replacement therapy stating, "One wonders whether 'another' medical debacle is in the making." Medical debacles are common occurrences these days, so common that every ten days, in the United States alone, the same number of people die from the effects of prescription drugs as were killed in the September 11th World Trade Center attack.? Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Healthreported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that 250,000 people in the US were dying each year from errors in medication, unnecessary surgery, infections caught in hospitals, and 106,000 per year from non-error, negative effects of drugs.
Research compiled by Gary Null, Ph.D., Carol Dean, M.D., and Martin Feldman, M.D., place the numbers significantly higher. In a paper called Death By Medicine, published by the Nutrition Institute of American, according to a "definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics," over 780,000 Americans die each year as a direct result of conventional medical procedures and/or medications. This compares to the approximately 700,000 Americans who die each year due to heart disease, and the approximately 550,000 who die due to cancer.
At the same time the 8 biggest pharmaceutical manufacturers in the USA increased revenues by 20% in 3Q 2003. This was the largest growth in any quarter since at least 1999. Pfizer, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Abbott Labs, J&J, Wyeth, Eli Lilly and Schering-Plough achieved total sales of $42.5 billion. As sales go up death goes up.
A senior marketing executive at Parke-Davis, which manufactures the seizure medication gabapentin (Neurontin) was quoted during a teleconference as saying to medical liaisons (drug detail personnel) "Neurontin for pain, Neurontin for monotherapy, Neurontin for everything. I don't want to hear that safety crap either." It just so happens that the FDA does not approve Neurontin for any of these purposes yet the company's employees have the receptive ears of medical doctors who are prescribing the drug for unapproved uses. Through the creation of concocted uses for gabapentin Parke-Davis' turned the drug into a "blockbuster." A blockbuster is the Wall Street description for any drug that sold $1 billion per year or more. In 2000, the company reported that gabapentin had earned $1.3 billion. As much as 78 percent of these sales were for uses without evidence that gabapentin was safe and effective. In 2001 a market research firm estimated that gabapentin sales totaled $1.7 billion .
This is just one story of many such stories. People are dying in great numbers. Perhaps it was the physical structure of the World Trade Center that made it so important, not the people who died inside. If we take 106,000 per year from non-error, negative effects of drugs in the states as a 'conservative' base line and project that onto the world population it would not be far fetched to assume more than a half million people a year are dying from 'safe' medication. If we look at overall medically induced death rates, at the number of people who die each year as a direct result of conventional medical procedures and/or medications we are looking in the order of between three to five to even ten million deaths a year. And each year the numbers are getting worse.
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