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