Conventional medicine is dangerous medicine. The magazine "What Doctors Don't Tell You" reported (July 2019) that medical blunders were killing more than 11,000 patients every year - thought to be a conservative figure "with other deaths hidden by conspiracy of silence. It said that NHS officials wanted to reverse this trend "by introducing new measures that encourage all hospital staff to spot risk and errors earlier, and before there's a death".
The Daily Telegraph described what was happening in rather more detail. There was 'a blame culture', but a new strategy, contained in an 82 page document, aimed to save the lives of up to 1,000 patients every year. My rough calculation seems to indicate that this would still leave 10,000 death every year - directly caused by a medical system that doctors insist is 'safe'.
All we ever hear from doctors, politicians, governments and the mainstream media is that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are safe, that they are not one of the main causes of the multiple chronic disease epidemics we are currently experiencing. Doctors may casually admit to a few simple, unimportant drug 'side effects' - but they do not admit that they are causing patient harm, including at least 11,000 death.
Challenging this public image of safety is easy. When doctors say that their drugs and vaccines are safe they just have to be asked for the patient information leaflets that accompany each of them. The harm that they cause is published in their own medical literature. The so-called 'side effects' of these drugs are described in these documents but this will not change public protestations that drugs and vaccines are 'safe'.
Contrasting what doctors are prepared to tell us, and what their medical literature says, is educational!
Yet the safety of conventional medicine is discussed widely amongst doctors, although these discussions are not supposed to involve you or me! The same issues were being discussed over two decades ago. In November 1999, the Institute of Medicine in the USA published a paper, "To err is human. Building a Safer Health System". This is what it said.
"Health care in the United States is not as safe as it should be - and can be. At least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented, according to estimates from two major studies. Even using the lower estimate, preventable medical errors in hospitals exceed attributable deaths to such feared threats as motor-vehicle wrecks, breast cancer, and AIDS."
The paper also admitted that these medical failures were costly.
"Beyond their cost in human lives, preventable medical errors exact other significant tolls. They have been estimated to result in total costs (including the expense of additional care necessitated by the errors, lost income and household productivity, and disability) of between $17 billion and $29 billion per year in hospitals nationwide."
Remember these are 1999 figures! The paper went on to recognise that human errors, which were then described as 'an epidemic', would also lead to a lack of public confidence.
"Errors also are costly in terms of loss of trust in the health care system by patients and diminished satisfaction by both patients and health professionals. Patients who experience a long hospital stay or disability as a result of errors pay with physical and psychological discomfort. Health professionals pay with loss of morale and frustration at not being able to provide the best care possible. Society bears the cost of errors as well, in terms of lost worker productivity, reduced school attendance by children, and lower levels of population health status. "
Now, 20 years on, in July 2019, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has published new research, and published a paper entitled "Prevalence, severity, and nature of preventable patient harm across medical care settings: systematic review and meta-analysis". The Alliance for Natural Health has looked at this document, and concluded this.
"Approximately 1 in 20 patients suffer preventable medical harm ..... Worryingly the study also reveals 1 in 8 cases led to severe harm or death. Analysing data from 70 observational studies, including over 337,000 patients living in developed countries, researchers found nearly a quarter of the cases were directly related to problems with medication or other medical treatments. A related editorial commented on the serious concerns raised regarding the extent of medical harm in health systems, drawing attention to the level of harm that is “totally preventable”. These findings underline the urgent need to change the health systems we rely on to move away from managing disease and all its associated issues to address disease - many of which are wholly preventable.
So during the 20 years between the two reports conventional medicine has failed to make itself any safer, and has not resolved the issue - that it routinely causes patient harm, that this costs considerable sums of money, and each time it increases public dissatisfaction with conventional medicine.
On the basis of these internal discussions, on these two reports, it is not possible for conventional medicine to claim that its medicine is safe, and does cause patient harm.
The Daily Telegraph described what was happening in rather more detail. There was 'a blame culture', but a new strategy, contained in an 82 page document, aimed to save the lives of up to 1,000 patients every year. My rough calculation seems to indicate that this would still leave 10,000 death every year - directly caused by a medical system that doctors insist is 'safe'.
All we ever hear from doctors, politicians, governments and the mainstream media is that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are safe, that they are not one of the main causes of the multiple chronic disease epidemics we are currently experiencing. Doctors may casually admit to a few simple, unimportant drug 'side effects' - but they do not admit that they are causing patient harm, including at least 11,000 death.
Challenging this public image of safety is easy. When doctors say that their drugs and vaccines are safe they just have to be asked for the patient information leaflets that accompany each of them. The harm that they cause is published in their own medical literature. The so-called 'side effects' of these drugs are described in these documents but this will not change public protestations that drugs and vaccines are 'safe'.
Contrasting what doctors are prepared to tell us, and what their medical literature says, is educational!
Yet the safety of conventional medicine is discussed widely amongst doctors, although these discussions are not supposed to involve you or me! The same issues were being discussed over two decades ago. In November 1999, the Institute of Medicine in the USA published a paper, "To err is human. Building a Safer Health System". This is what it said.
"Health care in the United States is not as safe as it should be - and can be. At least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented, according to estimates from two major studies. Even using the lower estimate, preventable medical errors in hospitals exceed attributable deaths to such feared threats as motor-vehicle wrecks, breast cancer, and AIDS."
The paper also admitted that these medical failures were costly.
"Beyond their cost in human lives, preventable medical errors exact other significant tolls. They have been estimated to result in total costs (including the expense of additional care necessitated by the errors, lost income and household productivity, and disability) of between $17 billion and $29 billion per year in hospitals nationwide."
Remember these are 1999 figures! The paper went on to recognise that human errors, which were then described as 'an epidemic', would also lead to a lack of public confidence.
"Errors also are costly in terms of loss of trust in the health care system by patients and diminished satisfaction by both patients and health professionals. Patients who experience a long hospital stay or disability as a result of errors pay with physical and psychological discomfort. Health professionals pay with loss of morale and frustration at not being able to provide the best care possible. Society bears the cost of errors as well, in terms of lost worker productivity, reduced school attendance by children, and lower levels of population health status. "
Now, 20 years on, in July 2019, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has published new research, and published a paper entitled "Prevalence, severity, and nature of preventable patient harm across medical care settings: systematic review and meta-analysis". The Alliance for Natural Health has looked at this document, and concluded this.
"Approximately 1 in 20 patients suffer preventable medical harm ..... Worryingly the study also reveals 1 in 8 cases led to severe harm or death. Analysing data from 70 observational studies, including over 337,000 patients living in developed countries, researchers found nearly a quarter of the cases were directly related to problems with medication or other medical treatments. A related editorial commented on the serious concerns raised regarding the extent of medical harm in health systems, drawing attention to the level of harm that is “totally preventable”. These findings underline the urgent need to change the health systems we rely on to move away from managing disease and all its associated issues to address disease - many of which are wholly preventable.
So during the 20 years between the two reports conventional medicine has failed to make itself any safer, and has not resolved the issue - that it routinely causes patient harm, that this costs considerable sums of money, and each time it increases public dissatisfaction with conventional medicine.
On the basis of these internal discussions, on these two reports, it is not possible for conventional medicine to claim that its medicine is safe, and does cause patient harm.
- Doctors can (and do) claim that these are merely 'errors', or medical 'mistakes'. In truth these are mistakes being made within a system of medicine that is inherently unsafe.
- They can (and do) underestimate the size of the problem because they limit their definition of 'limited patient harm'. In truth the incidence of harm is likely to be very much higher.
- They can (and the two reports do) claim that they can improve the performance of conventional medicine in the future.
But what is clear is that in the last 20 years there has been no progress in making conventional medicine safer - in other words, the epidemics of patient harm, proclaimed in 1999, continues - unabated.
The two reports are public documents, but it is not really the intention of the conventional medical establishment that they should be read by the public, by the patients who are being damaged and killed. Doctors want us to continue believing what they tell us, that conventional medicine is safe. The reports are intended for the conventional medical establishment, or at least those members of it that recognise, or care about the fact, that their system of medicine harms patients, whilst at the same time, in public, claiming that there medicine is safe.
It remains to be seen whether, in the next 20 years, the conventional medical establishment will be allowed privately to discuss the patient harm it causes, whilst in public pretending that their treatments are safe. But it will almost certainly try!