Thomas Bridgeland wrote:
> Enough already!

Outside of paleo for weight loss, I would think a good number of people turn
to it expecting health benefits, too. It should be appropriate to discuss
the major failings of the orthodox routes in order to understand the need to
go in other directions. Indeed, I would bet that is how a number of people
found their way into paleo.

William Schnell wrote:
> A bit looser,
> 2- One who prescribes poison(s) as medicine. Practically all drugs
> prescribed by M.D.s, others.

Amen.

Here is a little information on what those drugs do to people
after they are prescribed:


* ADVERSE DRUG REACTIONS KILL 100,000+ AMERICANS: According to a report
published in a recent journal of the American Medical Association, more than
100,000 Americans are killed every year by prescription and over-the-counter
medicines, and a further 2.1 million are seriously injured. The report found
that such reactions (which do not include prescribing errors or drug abuse)
rank at least sixth among causes of death in the United States - behind
heart disease, cancer, lung disease, strokes and accidents. Researchers at
the University of Toronto estimated that an average of 106,000 deaths occur
annually at US hospitals due to bad reactions to drugs. "Serious adverse
drug reactions are frequent... more so than generally recognised," the
researchers noted. (Source: CNN via Internet website)

* DRUG REACTION IS WORLD'S FOURTH MAJOR KILLER: An alarming finding by
Canadian researchers is that adverse drug reactions cause more than 100,000
deaths in the US every year - which makes them the fourth biggest killer,
after heart disease, cancer and stroke. These figures could be far worse if
administrative errors, overdose and "possible" reactions were also included,
the researchers point out. "The figures are much higher than expected and
suggest that adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are considerably under-reported,"
says Bruce Pomeranz, head of the University of Toronto research team. Around
76 per cent of the ADRs were caused by highly toxic drugs, while others may
have been caused by inadequate monitoring of therapies and doses. The
Toronto researchers are confident that these figures would be similar in
every other developed country. In the UK, Charles Medawar of the
drug-monitoring group Social Audit said up to 5 per cent of all hospital
admissions are caused by drug reactions. Once there, 15 per cent of
inpatients have their stay prolonged by a drug reaction, half of which could
be avoided, he said. (Source:WDDTY Magazine Jun 98 Vol 9 No.3)

* Another trade publication, American Medical News, stated that 28 percent
of people admitted to hospitals are there because they have suffered an
adverse reaction to prescribed drugs.

* MEDICAL error is the third most frequent cause of death in Britain after
cancer and heart disease, killing up to 40,000 people a year - about four
times more than die from all other types of accident. Provisional research
figures on hospital mistakes show that a further 280,000 people suffer from
non-fatal drug-prescribing errors, overdoses and infections. The victims
spend an average of six extra days recovering in hospital, at an annual cost
of £730m in England alone.

The report drew on studies that examined the records of 30,195 patients and
found a 3.7% error rate. Of those injured, 14% died. Researchers concluded
that 70% of the errors - and 155,000 deaths - were avoidable.
http://www.mercola.com/1999/archive/doctor_error_mistake_kills_patients.htm

* LEAD PARAGRAPH - Medical errors are killing tens of thousands of Americans
each year and harming countless more, so it has been a salutary trend that
many medical, academic and business groups have been developing ways to
reduce the dangers. But now a survey of practicing physicians has revealed
disheartening evidence that the doctors themselves may be the biggest
obstacle to effective reform.

Three years ago the Institute of Medicine estimated that 44,000 to 98,000
patients die each year because of medical mistakes -- more than are killed
annually by automobile accidents. The numbers seemed so staggering that many
medical practitioners thought them inflated. But the survey of physicians,
published in The New England Journal of Medicine last week, has offered
corroborating evidence that, whatever the number of deaths might be, there
are an awful lot of medical mistakes causing an awful lot of damage.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50A1FFD39590C7B8DDDAB0994DA4
04482

* It's true! A Harvard University Medical Practice Study in 1990 estimated
that Medical Malpractice kills more than 95,000 people every year
www.lanset.com/koba/baddoctors.pdf

* A medical report in 1998 estimated that adverse reactions to prescription
drugs are killing about 106,000 Americans each year -- roughly three times
as many as are killed by automobiles.[1] This makes prescription drugs the
fourth leading killer in the U.S., after heart disease, cancer, and stroke.
The report included only drugs that were given properly and under normal
circumstances, excluding drugs that were administered in error or taken in
attempted suicides. (When errors of administration are included, the death
toll may be as high as 140,000 per year.[2] Such errors include prescribing
the wrong drug or the wrong dosage; giving medications to the wrong person;
giving medications to the right person but in the wrong quantities or the
wrong frequencies, and so forth.)

According to the 1998 report, which analyzed the data from 39 separate
studies conducted over the last 32 years in U.S. hospitals, 3.2 out of every
1000 (or 3200 per million) hospital patients die from adverse reactions to
prescription drugs. Of the 106,000 people killed each year by prescription
drugs in the U.S., 41% (43,000) were admitted to the hospital because of an
adverse drug reaction; the other 59% (63,000 people) were hospitalized for
some other cause but developed a fatal reaction to prescription drugs they
received while hospitalized. In the U.S. in 1994, there were 33,125,492
hospital admissions.
http://consumerlawpage.com/article/drugs_that_kill.shtml

* ... But the trust, founded in 1973 to provide information about cancer
prevention, said it would not change its views.

Founder Victor Fallas said: "Studies have been made comparing cancer
patients who have been treated by surgery with patients who were left
untreated; survival was the same whether the patients were treated or not.

"No such studies have been carried out with chemotherapy and marginal
studies which have been carried out comparing different cytoxic [cancer
killing] agents have only shown a life extension of three to four months."

Mr Fallas told BBC News Online: "These views are perhaps revolutionary, but
it will open up discussion." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1371697.stm

* The first major alert of this conflict of interest was raised on May 12,
2001 when a study by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, a bioethicist and breast
oncologist with degrees from Harvard and Oxford who currently works at the
National Institutes of Health, was presented at a meeting of the American
Society of Clinical Oncology in San Francisco. According to the study's
abstract, "One-third of [cancer] patients receive chemotherapy at the end of
life, even if cancer is not responding." The study's authors reviewed
records of almost 8,000 patients in Massachusetts. The abstract reports that
"researchers concluded that responsive and unresponsive cancers were treated
equally often with chemotherapy at the end of life. 'While use of the
chemotherapy in responsive cancers is understandable and may shrink the
tumor and offer palliation, providing chemotherapy to patients with
unresponsive cancers is hard to justify,' says Emanuel. 'Providing
chemotherapy at the same rate to tumors that are not chemotherapy-responsive
as to those that are chemotherapy-responsive strongly suggests overuse of
chemotherapy at the end of life.'"

Emanuel's study did not mention a potential economic incentive - the
oncologists' selling the drugs - as a cause of the overuse of chemotherapy.
But an article published January 26, 2003 in the New York Times, "Drug Sales
Bring Huge Profits, and Scrutiny, to Cancer Doctors," delved into the issue.
According to the Times, "At a time when overall spending on prescription
drugs is soaring, cancer specialists are pocketing hundreds of millions of
dollars each year by selling drugs to patients - a practice that almost no
other doctors follow. The cancer specialists can make huge sums - often the
majority of their practice revenue - from the difference between what they
pay for the drugs and what they charge insurers and government programs."
http://www.naturalhealthvillage.com/newsletter/1mar03/chemo.htm

* Standard chemotherapy provides only modest improvements in survival for
patients with the most advanced cases of lung cancer -- a two-month median
improvement in survival over patients who are not treated.

...Panel members concluded Iressa, made by AstraZeneca, has some ability to
shrink tumors and is likely to be of some benefit to patients who take it.
The benefits, however, are modest: Tumors shrink, but patient survival is
not improved.

 (USA TODAY) http://www.personalmd.com/news/n0926092953.shtml


* It is routine in medical practice for a person diagnosed with cancer to be
recommended chemotherapy. What most people don't know is that for most
cancers, chemotherapy is ineffective. Although 30% of patients with solid
tumors respond to aggressive combination chemotherapy, the vast majority are
resistant. Thus, although combination chemotherapy sometimes cures acute
cases of leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, high-grade lymphomas, and testicular
cancer, therapy for most solid tumors is administered with a palliative
intent. The problem with this approach is that the person lives two months
longer but is in misery because of the side effects from the chemotherapy
including hair loss, mouth sores, weakness, depression, poor appetite and ap
athy. The curability of traditional chemotherapy for most cancers is almost
zero. http://www.iptcancer.com/beating_cancer_and_chemotherapy.htm