What happens when doctors harm patients? (2)

If someone harms us, we have the right to seek legal redress. This happens in most spheres of human activity. No-one has permission, or the right, to harm other people, and get away with it.

• So what happens within the industry that causes the most deaths, year by year?
• What happens within the British NHS, which spends 25% of its budget on compensating harmed patients?

I discussed this in my previous blog, 'What happens when doctors harm patients?' where I discussed how our doctors were struggling to pay their 'indemnity insurance' premiums which were rising rapidly.

In any other industry, such indemnity insurance would be seen as a cost of doing business, that if there was any danger of harming people in the course what was being done, it was right that there should be some protection for those who were harmed.

But this rule does not apply to the conventional medical establishment!

The British government has now agreed to reimburse any prices rises in GP's indemnity insurance for the next few years. 

Let us be clear what this means. The cost of insurance rises when the cost of meeting claims rises. So medical indemnity insurance costs are rising because conventional medicine is harming more people, and the insurance companies are having to pay out more money. So much money that doctors are complaining that the cost of the insurance is now too much for them to pay. And the government responds by stomping up £60 million to pay for the harm doctors are doing to patients!

Postscript 16 April 2017)

It has been reported today, in the Pulse, that "Health minister David Mowat has said that the two-year commitment to reimburse GPs for rises to the cost of indemnity will continue in the future"!

The message to doctors is clear. Do not worry about the harm your pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are doing to patients. Carry on as before. We (the taxpayer) will pick up the cost.

Any other consumer of insurance policies would have another choice. If motor insurance premiums rise, have less accidents! If house and contents insurance premiums rise, ensure there are less claims.

This is not so for the conventional medical industry. Not only does the NHS budget set aside 25% of it budget (over £25 billion) to pay for medical mistakes, it is now going to subsidise doctors so that they can continue harming patients without having to pay the full cost of insurance.

So is indemnity insurance a problem for alternative medical practitioners? NO! Indemnity insurance from homeopaths who are members of the ARH (Alliance of Registered Homeopaths) is just £42 per year. This figure is actually less than it was when the ARH was first established over 15 years ago. And how much does the NHS pay for harm caused to patients by alternative medical practitioners. I would suggest that the figure is close to, if not actually, £0.

So why is this? 

It is because alternative medicine, and homeopathy in particular, does not harm patients. Rather than doing harm alternative therapies abide by the Hippocratic principle of 'First, do no harm'. Patients can be cured of illness and disease without the likelihood of harm or injury.

Homeopathy Works. But there are medical fundamentalists who continue to deny it!

There are two major issues appertaining to our health today, and this blog seeks discuss and answers both.

• How can we protect patients from the damage caused by conventional medicine, a form of medicine that is dominant within the UK's NHS, and most other health services throughout the world.
• With conventional medicine, dominated as it is by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, failing badly, how can we ensure safer and more effective alternative therapies become available to patients?

Yet there are people who continue to deny that these are issues, I call them medical fundamentalists, or homeopathy deniers, people appear to be oblivious both to the harm pharmaceutical drugs cause to patients, or that patients need to have access to medical therapies that do not harm them.

Recently I put out two Twitter messages that have attracted another hostile reaction from these people.

1. "Vaccines blamed for alarming increase in seizures in children. 1 in 20 children under 5 now suffer from epilepsy." The tweet referred to this VacTruth article.
2. "Homeopathy dramatically more effective in preventing, treating Whooping Cough (so why bother with the DPT vaccine?) The tweet referred to this Natural News article.

Normally I ignore these kinds of comments, which I receive on a regular basis. Some of what they say is no more than a series of mantras, repeated ad nauseam. Much of it is mere counter-assertion, without supporting argument. Some of it, as you will see, is abusive. None of it has any content that requires consideration, thought or discussion. They insist that:

• Drugs and vaccines are safe and save lives. 
• Failure to take drugs and vaccines causes death. 
• Alternative therapies do not work.

But occasionally it is important to highlight them, if only to illustrate what these fundamentalists have to say, which is usually less than nothing! Here are just some of the remarks generated from the two tweets mentioned above.

• "And that's bullshit as well. Homeopathy has never cured anything, and anti vaccine lies kill children."
• "... is that just vaccines blamed for it by anti-vaxers, or have some real scientists given an opinion?"
• "LIAR.  Con man. Quack."
• "Scrutton’s Law applies again. Wrong & laughed out of the room. Also, Scopie’s Law re: that site."
• "Erm... because some of us care about what's happening in reality?"
• "And the evidence to support that being a pageful of pathetic anecdotes? Laughable tripe, Steve. As ever."
• "This kind of BS is the reason why pertussis still kills, you babbling cockwomble."
• "Natural News" - enough said."
• "Disclaimer: based on a pre-WW2 anecdote from one individual, and never been repeated, verified or published."

These are not isolated examples, and if you want to see more, I have blogged on what these people have had to say, when their personal attacks have been particularly hostile.

• Militant skepticism and homeopathy. What they have to say.
• "Quack!" Just another personal attack from a homeopathy denialist.
• Homeopathy and Brain Haemorrhage. Why such an abusive skeptical response?
• An angry Homeopathy denialist.

The word 'fundamentalist' is now applied to many groups, mainly religious groups, who refuse to observe, and seek to understand, what is happening in the world, and what people are experiencing in their lives. All such groups oppose any discussion of the issues, and they support old, and outmoded beliefs, and way of life.

Medical fundamentalists demonstrate, by what they say, that they are not scientists, nor do they have any interest in science as they often claim. They have to close their eyes to so much empirical evidence, for instance, that homeopathy has been working for patients for over 220 years, that modern pharmaceutical drugs are harming patients, et el. Indeed, they have to ignore so much that I wrote this blog underlining all their many and varied 'blind' spots. 

• What Homeopathy denialists and skeptics have to deny.

Why do they do it? They are part of the obfuscation the conventional medical establishment places before us.

• They do not want us to know that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are only marginally effective. 
• They do not want us to know that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are damaging us, and causing epidemic levels of chronic disease through 'side effects'.
• They do not want us to know about how inept, and often corrupt, medical science has become, and how it no longer protects patients from harm.

What these medical fundamentalist say can only be understood when it is recognised that conventional, drug based medicine is failing, and that an increasing number of people throughout the world are beginning to understand this. This is generating desperation throughout the entire conventional medical establishment, at all levels. 

Yet medical fundamentalists are not important. They have nothing significant to say, and certainly nothing to say that will convince anyone that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are safe, and that patients do not need alternative therapies, such as homeopathy. Essentially, they are a small group of people, talking mainly amongst themselves.

Whilst the fundamentalists have been making all these remarks, my original tweets have been 'liked' and 'retweeted' many times. This means that more people are receiving the message, and each time the message gets across, more people are able to make an 'informed choice' about their health.

• Do I take this drug or vaccine, because my doctor is recommending that I do?
• Or do I refuse to take it because it might cause me harm?

Only when patients are able to make this kind of informed choice can there be any real patient choice, only then will there be proper health freedom. If you want to join this movement, follow this blog, and follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

Iatrogenic Death - are doctors now the biggest cause of death?

It has long been said that conventional medicine, more usually described as 'medical errors', is one of the biggest causes of disease and death.  Indeed, the statistics are there to prove it, and they are statistics gathered and published by conventional health officials. Yet they only refer to a small proportion of the disease, and the death caused by the conventional medical system.

"Medical Errors: STILL the Third Leading Cause of Death", published on 18th May 2016 on Mercola.com, is a recent attempt to calculate the size of the damage cause by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

Dr Mercola claims that he was the first person to publish the data, back in 2000. He did so after reading an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) stating that the  shocking data made it very clear that doctors were the third leading cause of death in the USA.

Dr. Barbara Starfield, the author of the 2000 JAMA study, showed that a staggering 225,000 Americans die from iatrogenic (doctor induced) causes. Mercola says that her statistics revealed that each year:

• 12,000 die from unnecessary surgery
• 7,000 die from medication errors in hospitals
• 20,000 die from other errors in hospitals
• 80,000 die from hospital-acquired infections
• 106,000 die from the negative side effects of drugs taken as prescribed

These numbers, had as they are, have increased during the last 16 years. Yet it is this latter figure that is probably a severe under-estimate of the real size of iatrogenic death. The reason is that these drug side effect statistics will use information gleaned from death certificates, and these death certificates are written by doctors who are trying to ascertain the cause of death, usually very quickly. It is not that death certificates are necessarily wrong, or that doctors intentionally hide any evidence that pharmaceutical drugs or vaccines have played an important part in causing death. 

It is the denial, rife within the conventional medical circles, that their drugs can cause any problems at all, leave alone that they are often the cause of death.

I have occasionally blogged on these situations before. For instance, a good friend of mine died of Alzheimer's Disease, after she had received a flu vaccination on several consecutive years. Conventional medical science has long denied the evidence linking consecutive flu vaccinations with dementia, with just denials, and little attempt to ascertain whether there is a link or not. So how many older people die of this vaccine alone?

There must be millions of similar examples. Another friend fell and banged her head one evening, and thinking no more of it, went to bed. The next morning she was dead. The doctor's death certificate stated that the cause of death was a brain haemorrhage. It made no mention that she was taking Warfarin, which would have undoubtedly have had some effect on the outcome!

So iatrogenic death, deaths caused by pharmaceutical drugs, are not usually recorded as such. There is no mention of the drugs and vaccines being taken by the patient. It is particularly likely to happen in circumstances where the conventional medical establishment, particularly the pharmaceutical companies, deny that there is any link between their drugs and a condition or a disease.

But it also happens when a patient has an existing disease. The disease may itself be caused by pharmaceutical drugs or vaccines. But the cause of death will usually be given as the existing disease, and not the pharmaceutical drugs the patient has taken to treat the disease. And this is so even when the drugs themselves are known to kill.

 The number of such cases, not just in the USA but throughout the world, must be huge. It almost certainly pushes iatrogenic death to the top of the list of the cause of death.

A Cure for Multiple Sclerosis? Conventional medicine discovers Homeopathy - again!

The headline rings out in the MediCures website. "British researchers may have just found the cure for multiple sclerosis!

Great news, surely? Or is this just another over-hyped 'cure' heralded by conventional medicine. They have done it so many times before, and they never seem to materialise. The article explains further"

          "A new study published in the journal Nature Communications shows that scientists may have discovered a way to stop autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or Type 1 diabetes by retraining the immune system. The study was published by researchers from Bristol University, and shows that the immune system can be taught to stop treating harmless everyday proteins as if they were dangerous invasive diseases.

Ahh! A problem. "We (that is, medical science) can teach the immune system!" That sounds like the typical arrogance of conventional medicine - "we know better than the body", "we can do better than the body", "we can force it back into health by our cleverness". Yet we must read on....

          "In Multiple sclerosis (MS) the immune system attacks the myelin sheaths which protect nerve fibers. These nerves carry messages to and from the brain, and if they are disrupted, it leads to a host of problems such as loss of mobility, vision impairment and fatigue. By synthesizing proteins from the sheaths in a lab and then injecting them into the blood stream at increasing doses, the body begins to learn that they are safe and no longer attacks them."

The name for this type of therapy, apparently, is allergic desensitisation. The article, correctly, says it has been used for treating some allergies. But in fact, what this conventional medical research has stumbled on, as it has done before, is homeopathy.

Homeopathy, at its simplest, is a medical therapy based on the principle of "treating like with like". And this is what this technique clearly does. It does so clumsily, and with too much complexity. But this is, in fact, what it is doing - using something that is causing the problem to resolve the problem. Listen to the description of the study’s author, Dr. Bronwen Burton.

          “The immune system works by recognizing antigens which could cause infection. In allergies the immune system mounts a response to something like pollen or nuts because it wrongly believes they will harm the body. But in autoimmune diseases the immune systems sees little protein fragments in your own tissue as foreign invaders and starts attacking them. What we have found is that by synthesizing those proteins in a soluble form we can desensitize the immune system by giving an escalating dose.”

It would have been nice if the authors had paid tribute to homeopathy, but with the conventional medical establishment in crisis, and wanting to undermine homeopathy whenever it can, this is not surprising. And for the patient it matters little. A cure, is a cure, is a cure. And conventional medicine has so few.

This is my fourth blog about how conventional medicine is now utilising homeopathic principles. The first, "Superbugs. Homeopathy is proven to work - treating like with like" concerned the treatment of Clostridium difficile. The second concerned a new treatment for peanut allergy, "Peanut Allergy Treatment - another success for Homeopathy". The third, "Dust Mite Allergy.  A new conventional treatment - and it's homeopathy?" concerned another allergy treatment.

It seems that conventional medicine has decided that as it cannot beat homeopathy in either its safety or effectiveness in the treatment of illness, it has to join it. Fine. We should all be pleased with a late convert. But it the conventional medical establishment were not always attacking homeopathy, it would quickly learn that the treatment of illness is much simpler than some of the complicated procedures they come up with. Still, it is learning, however slowly!

Big Pharma - a license to kill?

There have been a multitude of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines that have been withdrawn from the market, or banned, through the decades. The conventional medical establishment has presented each one of them to us as being both safe and effective, on the basis that medical science has tested them, and drug regulators have confirmed the 'science' that supports them.

It is on this basis that doctors have prescribed them, and on this basis that patients have taken them.

Yet, one by one, as silently as the mainstream media allows, they have been found to be unsafe, or ineffective, or both. Most have been found to cause serious disease and death. And the process goes on. The vaccines and drugs conventional doctors are giving us today are no safer that the banned drugs Big Pharma is hoping we have forgotten. Proof of this comes regularly.

MIMS has been published since 1959, and describes itself as being "the essential prescribing and clinical reference for general practice". I receive a copy of its regular updates. The most recent, published on 20th July 2016, is not extraordinary in any way, but has reported the following.

• Citalopram: suspected interaction with cocaine
• Anticoagulant linked to rare calicophylaxis risk 

MIMS prides itself itself as "the most up-to-date prescribing references for healthcare professionals", "updated constantly, with hundreds of changes incorporated every month, including the addition of new drugs and formulations and the removal of products that are no longer available". Yet what is notable about all these 'hundreds of reports' is that there is no mechanism, and usually no advice for patients taking the drugs involved to be given the information.

And the MIMS website does, indeed, list the drugs that have been removed that are no longer available.  Each month this is a long list of withdrawn drugs, but no reason for their withdrawal. Some may have been superseded. Some may have been unprofitable. But some will have been withdrawn because they were found to be either ineffective or dangerous.

And this is done with the maximum secrecy possible!

This secrecy is possible because of the vested interests of the conventional medical establishment, and the silence of the mainstream media. The drugs and vaccines offered to patients today are no safer, no more effective than the drugs and vaccines that have been withdrawn or banned over the years.

Yet the situation is worse than this. The medical establishment has created for itself, courtesy of national governments, a 'license to kill'.

An example of this is the immunity granted to pharmaceutical companies against any claims made against them. Many governments have made it difficult for patients who have suffered from vaccine injury and death to sue the drug companies. This is not the case in Japan. Recently, Vaccine Impact reported that 64 women were to sue over the damage caused to them by the HPV vaccine.

          "Unlike the U.S. where people who suffer from vaccine injuries and deaths cannot sue the drug manufacturers who enjoy legal immunity from the harm caused by their products, women in Japan have started taking legal action against the pharmaceutical companies that produce the HPV vaccine, which includes Merck’s Gardasil and Cervarix manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline."

In Britain, Europe, the USA, and elsewhere, we are not likely to read this news as the mainstream media censor any negative news regarding vaccines.

Consider, for a moment, what this means. Drug companies produce drugs and vaccines, and the conventional medical establishment prescribes them to patients as 'safe' and 'effective'. Few of them are. Most of them cause injury, many cause death. Yet the harmed patient has no redress. Many governments have given pharmaceutical companies legal immunity. They can harm us, kill us, and we have no come back.

What else can we buy, what other industry has such immunity? Immunity gives the drug companies permission to give us dangerous drugs, to make enormous profits from them, but there are no consequences for them harming and killing us!

James Bond, 007, was given a 'license to kill' by the British government. This fictional creation used it entirely for good. He only killed bad people in the interests of the greater good. The pharmaceutical industry has been given a 'license to kill', but their motivation is profit, and it operates within a profession that purports  to 'first, do no harm'. But they do harm. They kill lots of innocent people, who accept their drugs and vaccines in good faith.

It is time for the conventional medical establishment to take full responsibility for what they do to sick patients, in the name of health. Just as any other industry does!

Medical Negligence threatens to bankrupt the NHS

On 5th July 2016 a High Court judge approved a settlement payment of £11m from Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS Trust to a mother whose child was born with severe cerebral palsy. Apparently, medical staff at the King George Hospital maternity unit in Essex failed to notice his slowing heartbeat during his mother's labour in 2007.

This was reported on the BBC Today programme this morning (6th July 2016). Interviewing the mother, Sarah Montague stated that last year the NHS set aside £26.1 billion for 'medical negligence', and that this represented one-quarter of the annual NHS budget. The solicitor who represented the mother, and who specialises in medical negligence cases, said that the NHS were making the same mistakes, year in, year out.

These staggering facts and statistics underline the ongoing failure of the conventional medical establishment that dominates the NHS.  

What other industry would budget 25% of it revenue to spend on compensating customers?

It is possible in health only because conventional medical treatment is publicly funded!

Conventional medicine, dominated as it is by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, is not only an expensive failure that threatens to bankrupt the NHS, it is one that harms innocent patients, and destroys families. It is not just a system of medicine that is ineffective, it actually causes harm. And this harm creates more need for health care, and an NHS that is constantly asking for more and more money.

I am writing to my MP today, asking him to provide me with more detailed facts and figures about this situation. I will be relaying these through this blog when I receive them.

So continue to 'watch this page'!

Are patients refusing Statin drugs? Or is the media being silenced?

I have been reporting on the dangers of Statin drugs on this blog for many years. The evidence of the harm they cause is now plentiful, even though doctors continue to tell us they are 'entirely safe', and that 'we should all be taking them'.

• Statins. From wonder drug to killer drug?
• The dangers of Statin drugs.
• Statin drugs. Why are they not banned?
• Statins. Those nice, safe drugs we should all be taking!
• Statin drugs. Now, doctors, are they still entirely safe?
• FDA warning. Satins now cause memory loss.
• Statins. Doctors conflicted about safety?
• Diabetes caused by Statin drugs?
• Is cholesterol harmful? Do we need Statin drugs?

Millions of patients throughout the world are now taking them. They are the most profitable pharmaceutical drug sold today, and arguably the most dangerous to patient health.

But now it has been reported that "hundreds of thousands of patients may have stopped taking statins because of widespread media coverage of controversy over the drugs' risks and benefits." This news was reported in the doctors e-magazine, Pulse, 200,000 patients may have quit statins following negative media coverage, on 29th June 2016.

Note well. Patients have stopped taking statins because of negative media coverage, not because of adverse reactions to the drugs!

According to Pulse, the problem started when NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence), in 2013, put forward plans to extend the use of statins as a preventative measure for 'low-risk' patients, claiming that it would prevent thousands of heart attacks and strokes. It was conventional doctors who resisted this recommendation. And it was this disagreement, within the conventional medical establishment, that attracted press attention. Although the media response was limited, and low key, patients began to ask questions.

So is this good news? Can we expect a more reasoned debate, in which patients are (at long last) given information about the serious side effects caused by statin drugs?

It is certainly good news for the 200,000 patients if they have stopped taking the drug. They will now be avoiding the serious side effects the drug is now known to cause. But could this be part of a counter-attack by the pharmaceutical industry, mirroring what happened when patients began to mistrust, and refuse the MMR vaccine in 2003-2004?

First, the Pulse article serious downplays the risks of statin drug, instead focusing on the media reports. It was these reports that have led patients to worry about the potential side effects of the drugs. The reports had 'dented pubic confidence' and they asked for 'better balanced reporting'.

This position was taken by the original study, published in the BMJ, "Impact of Statin related media coverage on the use of Statins". Its conclusion was as follows:

          "A period of intense public discussion over the risks : benefit balance of statins, covered widely in the media, was followed by a transient rise in the proportion of people who stopped taking statins. This research highlights the potential for widely covered health stories in the lay media to impact on healthcare related behaviour."

So it is not the drugs that are being criticised, it is the reporting of the drug side effects that is the issue! The study found that the 'discontinuation rate' fell after the press reporting, but soon returned to normal. One co-author of the BMJ study was reported in Pulse as saying that the reporting "may have given disproportionate weight to a minority view about possible side effects, denting public confidence in a drug which most scientists and health professionals believe to be a safe and effective option against heart disease for the vast majority of patients."

So it is not the drugs that are a matter of concern, it is the media reporting of the drugs on which attention is being focused on.

This is exactly what happened to the MMR vaccine debate. Evidence of the harm this vaccine caused, particularly its relationship with the epidemic of autism, caused take-up rates to fall dramatically. The response was two-fold. First, buy science to prove to parents that there was no connection. Second, attack the media sufficiently to ensure that they do not report on drug side effects.

The first led to corrupt medical scientists falsifying evidence in order to prove that there was no connection between the vaccine and autism. Then, publicise widely that there is no connection between vaccine and autism.

Second, blackmail the press in order to ensure that they stop publishing any information about anything that might suggest a link between the vaccine and the disease.

In this way, patients continue taking the drugs. And the pharmaceutical companies continue to make their profits.

So can we expect a re-run of the MMR vaccine / Autism cover-up? Do we now have to wait for the pharmaceutical industry to fund research that confirms that statin drugs are, indeed, 'entirely safe'?

And then can we expect the media to climb back into their passive, obsequious acceptance of conventional medical orthodoxy? If so, the first person they will have to silence, is Dr Bill Beeby, deputy chair of the GPC clinical prescribing subcommittee, who Pulse reported as saying that the controversy over the risk and benefit "is far from resolved, with large numbers of clinical trials remaining unpublished concealing much of the negative data surrounding their use", and that "doctors who offer the benefits still lack all of the data to quantify the risks to individual patients".

Such honesty is not required within the conventional medical establishment! The medical career of Dr Andrew Wakefield was ruined because he spoke out about the MMR vaccine / Autism link. And if he is not more careful, Dr Beeby is likely to suffer the same fate!

Information that focuses on the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines should not be made available to patients, not even to doctors if at all possible. If patients are informed about the dangers of conventional medical treatment they might decline it. And according to the conventional medical establishment it is good for us, regardless of any evidence to the contrary! And they have to support the pharmaceutical companies, who live and die by patients meekly accepting treatment we are given.