The difficulty with it all has multiple parts:
1. Some alternative therapies are pretty much useless. Some are actually dangerous. Some are life-saving. Almost nobody is truly an expert on all of them. So you end up having to do your own research, which generally takes a lot of time and energy.
2. Plenty of allopathic treatments work, but have unpleasant side effects. Also, spending time in hospitals is a good way to pick up a dangerous infection, and/or slow your healing process by eating hospital food.
3. There are plenty of people on both sides of the debate acting partially or entirely out of the profit motive. Therefore, their motivation to tell the whole truth is minimal.
And nobody tells you this stuff. It's a damn hassle having to figure it all out.
Yay, America. Land of the Free.
Cherimoya_kid,
You have given no information whatsoever except your opinion which is overgeneralized, basically silly.
I know lots of people who have been cured by various alternative therapies. I also know way too many people who have died or been incapacitated by Allopathic methods. Both sides of the fence (and there is definitely a fence) are loosey-goosey as I said.
Deaths resulting from overmedication, errors in prescriptions, invasive testing procedures, surgeries, and hospitalizations (for instance, someone catches an infection while being hospitalized, and dies) are commonplace.
There was a study done in US hospitals in 1998, published in the JAMA indicates that over 100,000 Americans die from harmful reactions to medications. The deaths are not due to mistakes by doctors in prescribing drugs or by patients in using them. Rather, drug reactions occur because virtually all medications can have bad side effects in some people, even when taken in proper doses.
"We want to increase awareness that drugs have a toxic component" said Dr. Bruce Pomeranz, an author of the study and a professor of neuroscience at the University of Toronto. "It's not rare".
'Harrison's Principles Of Internal Medicine' mentions that a more severe "side" effect from drug-induced diseases - death - "in hospitalised patients varies from 2% to 12%" Note that each hospitalized person is given an average of 10 different drugs.
Mistakes in dosage may also contribute to drug iatogenesis. Null and colleagues cite a 2002 study showing that "20%" of hospital medications for patients had dosage mistakes. Nearly 40% of these errors were considered potentially harmful to the patient. In a typical 300-patient hospital the number per day were 40.
Simply put, the fourth leading cause of death in America, after cancer, heart disease and stroke, is reactions to "safe" over-the-counter drugs and "properly" prescribed prescription medicine.
Hospital infections - 1986 Colbin reported "the most rapidly spreading epidemic of the 20th century" citing "over 2 million infections a year" in American hospitals, that resulted in "60 to 80 thousand deaths". Data analyzed on July 23, 2002 by the Chicago Tribune from patient databases, court cases, 5810 hospitals and 75 federal and state agencies, found "103,000 cases of death due to hospital infections, 75% of which were preventable.
Colbin writes that an "estimated 2.5 million operations a year are performed without real medical need, resulting in some 12 thousand needless deaths" Statistics complied by Null and associates give comparative numbers 25 years apart for unnecessary surgeries.
- 1974: 2.4 million unnecessary surgeries performed annually resulting in 11,900 deaths.
- 2001: 7.5 million unnecessary surgical procedures resulting in 37,136 deaths.
Null et al. wrote "the total number of [yearly] iatrogenic deaths--- is 783,936. The conditions involved, - all occurring in hospitals, include adverse drug reactions, medical error (unspecified), bedsores, infection, malnutrition, useless procedures, and surgery related.
"We could have an even higher death rate by using [another statistician's differently calculated] 1997 medical and drug error rate of 3 million." The authors conclude, "it is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States"
A lot of what was mentioned here is quoted from Dr. Nenah Sylver, PhD's book "The Rife Handbook of Frequency Therapy and Holistic Health" There was quotes embedded from studies done and article(s) from JAMA.
I highly recommend her book as it is one of the better of the many that exposes the soft underbelly of the AMA and medical practice in general in the US and various other countries. She gives an excellent history of how medicine evolved from ancient times in the east and west. Also she explains the evolution of the American Medical Association (AMA) 'union' (my addition to the title)
I have to guess that it must be worse in Europe as it is much easier to get into medical schools there. Some of my friends/relatives have gotten into medical schools there who could not get into Canadian medicals schools.
You have to go to third world countries (such as where GS lives) to get certain medical treatments because the FDA and FDA inspired allopathic medical community has managed to shut down their competitors.
Very few allopathic medical treatments work. They set you up for addictions generally.
The trouble is that the allopathic medical union has a lip-lock on government regulations so nobody else can regulate anything.
If you want to understand the state of health care in the US you have to study how it got to be the way it is. This requires reading history books.
I was blown away by reading a book written by an American surgeon, that told of how the WHO contacted him to study why so many people died from surgery in the world. The numbers were stunning, in first world countries. These ego-maniac surgeons were so conceited, arrogant and stupid that they refused even the simplest thing to be used by surgeons. A checklist. As a pilot this blew me away. These clowns refuse(d) to use a checklist to verify prior to during and post operations that things were/are being done correctly.
Basically these clowns (all doctors) get out of medical school and they have a Carte Blanche for the rest of their lives to work with no further testing or recertification.
Geezus even a welder has to be recertified periodically. Pilots annually.
Reminds me of a saying we learned at school, practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent.
As the cop used to say on that TV show so long ago...
"Just the facts Ma'am ('cherimoya_kid', Tyler),
just the facts"
