The orthodox “health industry” is claiming that wellness is a bad idea. Why? It eats into their profits, of course!
So their platform is that all aspects of self-care, alternatives to drugs and surgery, diet and nutrition are bad, could kill the patients (as if) and is morally, even legally, wrong. Besides, it’s “not scientific”.
“Wellness companies use the same strategies as evidence-based medicine, they claim, to sell tests for diseases that don’t exist and treatments that don’t work, recommended by individuals who aren’t qualified.” So says a rant by a couple of apologists, Andrea Love, PhD, and Katie Suleta, DHSc, MPH, MS, writing for MedPage Today.
No mention in this publication of the fact that MILLIONS of patients are being killed by the clumsy, pseudo-scientific orthodox medicine approach that they are boasting of.
Of course the medical profession peddles diseases that don’t exist and treatments that don’t work, but that’s OK. Forget the fact that outcomes are deplorable. It’s business as usual, fighting down the competitors!
We all remain conscious of the startling paper in 2000 published by the late Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, which revealed that doctors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US! (after cancer and heart disease).
These deaths consist of:
• 12,000 – unnecessary surgeries
• 7,000 – medication errors in hospitals
• 20,000 – other errors in hospitals
• 80,000 – infections acquired in hospitals
• 106,000 – non-error, negative effects of drugs
The last figure needs some explanation. She is saying that over 100,000 patients a year are dying of medications correctly prescribed, at the correct dose (in other words, not errors) but still proved fatal.*
That’s a total of 250,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes! Iatrogenic is a Greek word which means “caused by doctors”.1
I don’t know if you consider that a quarter of a million deaths per year is a lot, in a population of around 300 million. But it ought to be zero, or very close. 250,000 a year is equivalent to a million people killed by doctors every four years, in just one country.
Gary Null et al. gives a far higher number but we’ll stick with Starfield. See Gary’s piece here.
Now Starfield only calculated deaths. What about permanent injury or damage? Frederick van Pelt, a doctor who works for The Chartis Group, a health care consultancy, said another element of harm that is often overlooked is the number of severe patient injuries resulting from medical error.
“‘Some estimates would put this number at 40 times the death rate,’ van Pelt said.”
*Actually, according to Starfield, who prepared the report for The Journal of the American Medical Association, doctors are actually the number one killer, because they do not inform patients properly of the hazards of the procedures they offer (why would they? The patient might have second thoughts and that would lose income for the doctor!)
But That’s Not All Of It!
It’s not just about errors of judgement and treatments. Misdiagnosis resulting in (of course) inappropriate and potentially harmful treatments is also rampant. A recent groundbreaking study published in BMJ Quality & Safety (2024) that found approximately 795,000 Americans suffer permanent disability or death annually due to diagnostic errors.2
Cancer blunders seem exceptionally likely. In 2012 The National Cancer Institute convened an expert panel which determined that MILLIONS of individuals may have been wrongly diagnosed with “cancer” of the breast, prostate, thyroid, and lung, when in fact their conditions were likely harmless, and should have been termed “indolent or benign growths of epithelial origin.”
Importantly, no radical change occurred in the conventional practice of cancer diagnosis, prevention, or treatment. Nothing improved. The harvesting of human suffering continued as before.
This is overdiagnosis to raise funds (not to help patients).
Along with overdiagnosis is the problem of overtreatment. When non-threatening abnormalities are labeled as “cancer,” women often undergo aggressive treatments that can cause significant harm with no real benefit. Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy are not without serious dangers, never mind side-effect.
Yet these are handed out as if there was not, and could not be, any complications. Mastectomy can be very hurtful. If it’s not necessarily then it becomes a major criminal assault, as in indictable offence in my view.
Then there are the numerous multiple hormone treatments, messing about with a woman’s sacred physiology, all in pursuit of profits, not better health.
The scale is just mind boggling. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine some years ago estimated that over a 30-year period, 1.3 million U.S. women were over-diagnosed and overtreated for breast cancer.3
If you do the math, that’s 70,000 women a year receiving unnecessary treatment. Most appallingly, that includes an estimated 20,000-25,000 women undergoing needless mastectomies or lumpectomies annually.4 A quarter of a million breast “amputations” per decade. Makes me shudder.
Yet orthodox apologists and the goons they defend dare to criticize alternative healers who, in a way, are protecting patients from the full onslaught of this greed and industrialized medicine. There are days when I wake up ashamed of my beloved profession!
UK surgeon Ian Paterson who was jailed for 20 years for numerous unnecessary mastectomies, apparently for motives of profit
Sanctimonious Hypocrisy
The article in MedPage Today that got me fired up states that: “For all the credentialed and trained healthcare experts operating within the confines of evidence-based healthcare, there are practitioners in the wellness world operating in parallel without training or education. For every medication that’s undergone clinical trials for safety and efficacy, multiple supplements haven’t, yet claim to treat the same symptoms. For every preventive health recommendation, there is a detox or enema claiming to accomplish the same goal.
“The wellness industry is blurring the lines of what healthcare is, and it’s confusing patients and providers alike.”5
What utter hogwash. Medication that’s undergone “clinical trials” for safety and efficacy? Do they mean mRNA vaccines? Giving Hep B vaccines to babies the moment they are born (a treatment for homosexuals and prostitutes)? Vioxx? SSRIs and mass shootings? Aspirin that has been shown to be worthless against heart attacks and actually INCREASES deaths due to cerebral bleeding? Yet it’s been recommended for dacades.
Tests that have been “scientifically validated and assess real problems”? Do they mean the fake COVID tests that even the developer said cannot be used to establish the presence of a disease? Mammograms? PET scans to diagnose Alzheimer’s? Annual Pap smears? All these have been described a WORTHLESS by honest doctors (but of course they raise money for the poor impoverished practitioners!)
Finally, the boast that “You prescribe and recommend science-based treatments that will help to stabilize or cure your patient’s condition(s).”
It’s self-congratulatory baloney. You only have to look at Barbara Starfield’s figures to realize that all is not well, far from it, with this “evidence-based” fantasy.
“As a provider,” the authors simper and smirk, “Your guidance should be informed by rigorous scientific research. You expect performance to be better than a placebo. You expect to see peer-reviewed papers and results from clinical trials. The wellness market does not operate under these constraints or adhere to safety standards. Under the guise of “prevention” and “root cause treatment,” unsupported and potentially dangerous claims can be made without evidence.
Obviously prevention and treating root causes, not whack-a-mole symptom suppression gives them a bad headache!
Apparently we are the crooks and they are pure as driven snow. They never do anything that is not worthy and we have the basest motives of greed and stupidity! Our actions are “nefarious”, they say. I mean, c’mon, who wrote this pantomime script!
To your safety in health!
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor
References:
- Journal American Medical Association 2000 Jul 26;284(4):483-5
- Newman-Toker DE, et al. BMJ Qual Saf 2024;33:109-120
- Bleyer A, Welch HG. Effect of three decades of screening mammography on breast-cancer incidence. N Engl J Med. 2012;367(21):1998-2005
- Esserman L, Shieh Y, Thompson I. Rethinking screening for breast cancer and prostate cancer. JAMA. 2009;302(15):1685-1692
- https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/111745
