Adding 10 Years to active, healthy life. The idea just came to me as I was writing an invitation to you all to come see my latest health offering: The Weight Loss Express (I’m nuts about steam trains and model railroads, as anyone who knows me will tell you).
I suddenly realized (as often happens when I’m in full flow, writing) that what I am essentially offering is something bigger than the topic I’m writing about; not just a weight loss aid, but an extra decade of healthy life.
Of course that may sound cheeky, even arrogant. I have many friends and followers who are already well into their 9th and 10th decades! Yay!
But in principle, it’s true. If you are trim and athletic, forgive me. The message probably has little relevance to you.
Just remember, as I quoted in the email, 93% of Americans do not meet their basic metabolic health markers. They are falling short on one or more: weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, fasting insulin, etc. (similar figures elsewhere in the world, maybe not quite so bad, but still BAD)
The average older citizen is now taking 6 or more medications! It’s like the Alice in Wonderland Red Queen… running and running and running, just to stay level. (don’t write me, I KNOW it’s from Alice Through The Looking Glass, but fewer people are familiar with that book)
OK, you dear friends, are not typical or average. But the figures back me up and also my own experience: I find it very difficult to maintain optimum health, in a society so dedicated to ruining your health in the pursuit of profits.
If you don’t know what the Weight Loss Express is, this may be a good time to go look. It’s here.
Barbara Starfield Was Right All Along
This puts me in mind of another key slogan of mine: If you want to stay healthy and live long, keep away from doctors and hospitals.
Again the figures back me up. You may remember a famous paper put out in 2000 by the late Barbara Starfield, professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
She startled the world with proof that the American Medical system was so bad that doctors and hospitals were the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA, after heart attacks and cancer!1
According to Starfield “the US medical system kills 225,000 Americans a year. 106,000 as a result of FDA-approved medical drugs, and 119,000 as a result of mistreatment and errors in hospitals. Note this important fact: 106,000 deaths were as a result of FDA-approved medical drugs, prescribed correctly. Not even doctor errors!
Professor Barbara Starfield, much missed
Extrapolate the numbers to a decade: that’s 2.25 million deaths.
Well, of course, the wriggling shills and apologists have been all over this since, trying to discredit her findings—using science to attack their enemies, instead of using science to clean up their act, take note.
“Not the third leading cause of death” says Jonathan Jarry MD.2
The “myth” (as Jarry calls it) is a problem with extrapolation, he says. You can’t take a few figures from a few hospitals and generalize that to apply it to all hospitals…
Sorry?
What did you say, Jarry?
THE WHOLE OF SCIENCE is about taking representative samples and then generalizing from that. You don’t need to treat every case on earth of a particular disease to infer a result. You measure the effects on a few hundred or a few thousand cases and then assume that the same percentage response holds good for the rest of human kind! Duh!
Jarry doesn’t deny that medical errors are real. Some people have died or been permanently injured because of errors fostered by a healthcare system that needs to be improved, he admits. Errors in medicine include wrong diagnoses, drug dosage miscalculations, and treatment delays.
But he wants you to think it’s no big deal. The numbers are overestimated. But he wickedly sidesteps the one important incontrovertible study. He doesn’t even mention Barbara Starfield’s paper.
Instead, he’s busy distracting the reader with other papers he wants to criticize. Like the 2000 report called To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System by the Institute of Medicine. The report took two studies, one done in Colorado and Utah and the other in New York, and extrapolated their results to all hospital admissions in the United States, concluding that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans must be dying each year as a result of medical errors.
Picking holes in the IOM report is irrelevant and a deliberate attempt to pull the wool over peoples’ eyes.
But then, in 2012, The British Medical Journal produced another inconvenient report. Lead author Jeanne Lenzer refers to figures from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices: “It [the Institute] calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing ‘serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.'”
The report called medical treatments “one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activity.”3
Interestingly the report was compiled by outside researchers who went into the FDA’s own database of “serious adverse [medical-drug] events.”
Jarry then picks on another report, also published in the BMJ (2016), which he sidelines by stating (falsely) that it is inaccurate to call it a study and dismisses the figures as “a back-of-the-envelope calculation.”
This is plain calumny. The authors of this report were in fact a research fellow, Michael Daniel, and a professor who had developed the operating room checklist, Martin A. Makary, both from the Department of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University.
He peppers in a few other dismissive phrases, such as deaths to which the authors “believed” medical errors had contributed. And it’s “like turning apples into oranges,”
Well, enough of this humbug.
The reason for calling your attention to this controversy is that yet another study was published a few days ago (Jan 2024). Patients are dying (as in being killed) by medical incompetence. The FDA and shills like Jarry will have none of it but repeated published studies, from totally competent sources keep coming to the same conclusion…
The medical industry is dangerous!
Diagnostic errors among hospitalized adults who died or were transferred to the intensive care unit (ICU) were fairly common, a retrospective cohort study suggested.
In a random sample of over 2,400 patients who died or were transferred to the ICU at 29 academic medical centers, 23% experienced a diagnostic error, 17.8% of which were judged to have contributed to temporary harm, permanent harm, or death, reported Andrew Auerbach, MD, MPH, of the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues in a paper for JAMA Internal Medicine.4
Put another way, 77% of doctor mistakes led directly to harm or death.
“The main takeaways for us were the incidence of errors, which was higher than we expected, as were the harms,” Auerbach told MedPage Today in an email.
That’s why I say to you: stay away from hospitals and doctors. You’re at risk if you follow their advice!
To Your Good Health and Longevity,
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor
References:
- Barbara Starfield, “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?” JAMA 2000 284: 483-485
- https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health/medical-error-not-third-leading-cause-death
- BMJ June 7, 2012 (BMJ 2012:344:e3989
- Auerbach AD, Lee TM, Hubbard CC, et al. Diagnostic Errors in Hospitalized Adults Who Died or Were Transferred to Intensive Care. JAMA Intern Med. Published online January 08, 2024. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.7347
