B) To Your Better Health, It is my firm view that all patients have an absolute right to full information about any treatment being proposed: how likely it is to work, how safe it is, and how well proven. They need, in effect, to become medical consumers. We attempt to maintain an even hand when reporting about alternative methods with no evidence of safety or success. My mantra—what works, what doesn’t—applies to new or traditional medicines as well. Im not a doctor bashers. In my view, most doctors are highly competent, extremely hardworking and well intended. Im also emphatically not anti-medicine. If a building falls on any of us tomorrow, we want the best of modern high-tech equipment to put us back together again. And if you get hit by a truck or suffer a heart attack, our advice is: get to a hospital. But when it comes to chronic diseases—arthritis, heart disease, even cancer—medicine is not simply ineffective, but often downright dangerous. Not long ago, the Journal of the American Medicine Association (JAMA), the official organ of the primary organization representing physicians in America, publicly admitted that diseases caused by doctors—that is, illness created by correctly prescribed medication—is the third leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for a quarter of a million deaths per year. To put the magnitude of the problem into perspective, as one study also in JAMA, described it 15 years ago, the death rate from modern medicine in the United States alone is the “equivalent of three jumbo-jet crashes every two days.” If any airline maintained this appalling track record, there would be public outcry, Congressional investigations, and rapid adoption of new laws. But when it comes to modern medicine, there is not even the airing of debate. This has largely to do with the fact that medicine is not simply a conspiracy of faith, but also a conspiracy of silence. In the medical literature, where many modern treatments are subjected to scrutiny and criticism, doctors carry on a private conversation—by doctors for doctors, and in a language that the ordinary person can’t begin to understand. There is more need than ever to make that private conversation public. We hope to be a very noisy voice in that conspiracy of silence. PS: May this information contribute to your good health. Luther Brotherton Pharmacist--(Retired) 713-261-6837 anytime brotherton.lutheriii@gmail
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 17:47:42 +0000
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