Although I speak much about 'the failure of conventional medicine' most people continue to point towards surgical operations as a 'success' that proves conventional medicine is not failing. However, this is not so. Or it is so only as long as we want to ignore what has usually proceeded the necessity of surgery. What follows was originally published in a chapter of my e-book on the failure of conventional medicine.
"Surgical operations will always be a necessary part of any modern and effective health service. Great strides have been taken during the last 150 years in surgical skills. Operations are not necessarily ‘dangerous procedures’, and many are necessary, life-saving procedures.
However, the demand for surgery, and the amount of surgery actually undertaken, is far greater than it needs to be. This is allied to a medical system that is incapable of treating illness and diseases safely and effectively. Conventional drugs and vaccines are largely ineffective, they do not cure illness, and in addition they exacerbate it, they cause harm to patients. Conventional medicine is doing this on a regular and consistent basis. The outcome is that medical conditions actually get worse, until patients require more invasive, surgical intervention.
Organ Replacement
The human body comes with a fully-equipped, fully-operational and integrated set of organs that have been carefully honed to support life, and to maintain good health. This changes when patients develop some form of organ disease. If a patient then seeks conventional medicine treatment they will initially receive some form of pharmaceutical medication. Indeed, organ failure and disease is often the direct result of pharmaceutical drug treatment. It is the drugs and vaccines doctors prescribed that causes it. Even common pharmaceutical drugs, such as painkillers and indigestion tablets, sold without a doctor’s prescription, can damage our organs, and they do so more often than we are told!
When conventional drug treatment fails, if the organ continues to deteriorate, or when its function is significantly reduced, the condition can become life threatening. When this happens, conventional medicine will turn to surgery for a remedy. It will eventually seek to replace the diseased organ with another, taken from a donor. The number of organ replacement operations, and the number of organs that can be replaced, has increased rapidly over the last 50 years, as surgical techniques and procedures have made them viable.
The surgeons who do these operations are without doubt brilliant technicians. Yet it should be forgotten that they are used only after pharmaceutical drug treatment has failed to treat the organ successfully, and/or has exacerbated organ failure.
Immunosuppressive drugs
After the operation there is another problem. In order to stop the body rejecting the new organ, the patient has to take more drugs, and take them for the remainder of their lives in order that the new organ is not rejected by the body. These immosuppressive drugs can also have serious disease inducing effects. Their primary objective is interfere with the body’s immune system, which would otherwise reject the new organ.
This interference with the body's immune system leads to the body being unable to do its proper job, to protect itself from a multitude of threats it faces on a daily basis in its environment. So replacing an organ makes us more susceptible to a variety of autoimmune diseases, many now running at epidemic levels, for the rest of our lives.
Limb Replacement
Limb replacement surgery has become commonplace. Indeed it is now often described as ’routine’ surgery. Limb replacement is required for people who have usually suffered some form of arthritic pain for a considerable amount of time. Conventional medicine has no effective treatment for arthritis and related diseases. Painkillers are used to temporarily reduce the pain, but the underlying condition remains.
1. The fitting of this new limb may not be completely successful, and ‘complications’, such as blood loss, infection, wound breakdown, reactions to anaesthetic, and many other unforeseen consequences can happen from the surgery itself.
2. Drugs may have to be used, for example, such as Heparin to avoid deep-vein-thrombosis, for several weeks following the operation. Older people are particularly at risk of complications, and the side effects of the drugs used to reduce this. And of course limb replacement is often done for older people!
3. The new limb may not function properly, or the implanted device can fail, because of faulty design or manufacture, or it may not perform in the way it was designed.
4. As with organ transplantation, immunosuppressive drugs have to be taken following surgery, and antibiotic drug to deal with issues of infection following the operation. The side effects of any drug may be problematical because of a weakened state following the operation.
Yet this is often not the end of the sequence. Conventional medicine rarely addresses the cause of the original condition that has damaged the limbs. The result is that many patients find that a single limb replacement leads to the same pain developing in other limbs, not previously affected. So after time, another limb is affected, again drugs fail to deal with it, and another limb becomes so painful that it, too, has to be surgically replaced.
Surgical Replacement represents Medical Failure
Undoubtedly, many patients benefit from limb and organ replacement surgery, through both the reduction of pain, improved energy and greater mobility. And without doubt they are brilliant technical achievements. But they are not achievements that ultimately improve our health in the longer term. We are all better off with our original limbs and organs, and maintaining them is the best option for every patient.
If the patient had been given safe and effective medical treatment, capable of dealing with the original condition, the need for a limb and organ replacement would not have arisen. So what the surgical replacement of limbs and organs represents is medical failure, not medical success.
