This page consists of factoids about common but overlooked situations in many of our lives. Hopefully, they will provide you with an "AHA!" moment.
In the U.S., visits to practitioners of alternative medicine exceed visits to conventional physicians by over 200 million visits per year and are almost entirely paid for out-of-pocket by patients.
Source: “Trends in Alternative Medicine Use in the United States, 1990-1997.” JAMA, 280 (1998):1569-75.
51 percent of all prescription drugs approved by the FDA are found to cause “serious adverse side effects” after they are approved for safety and enter the marketplace.
Source: Moore TJ, et al. “Time to act on drug safety.” Journal of the American Medical Association, May 20, 1998; 279 (19): 1571-1573.
[Note: This is an admission being made by the leading conventional medical association in its own journal. Yet conventional physicians continue to blithely prescribe drugs at every turn, and the FDA continues to arrogantly claim it ought to have greater authority to regulate nutritional supplements. - LT]
Americans 65 years or older ingest an average of 15 or more medications per day (prescription and over-the-counter combined). Typically, only 1 or 2 of these drugs are actually prescribed for their original health problem; the others are used to minimize negative side effects caused by the initial drugs and the interactions of all the other drugs they are using.
Source: Lessons From the Miracle Doctors by Jon Barron
1-in-5 patients are completely misdiagnosed by their physician. Thats 20% people!
20% of all medications prescribed in hospitals are inappropriate.
75% of physicians fail to inform their patients about the potentially toxic side effects of the drugs they prescribed (in many cases because the doctors themselves are unaware of them).
(Source: www.BottomLineSecrets.com/bigblackbook)
The blood cholesterol theory of heart disease is grossly exaggerated. The truth is that “blood cholesterol is only weakly associated with heart disease and between 1945 and 1995 not a single study presented evidence that reducing cholesterol blood levels would lower overall death rate” while several studies showed that certain medications for lowering blood cholesterol levels actually increased overall death rates.
Source: Heart Frauds: Uncovering the Biggest Health Scam in History by Charles T. McGee, M.D. (HealthWise Books, 2001)
The United States annually spends more on health care (over $1 trillion/year) than the combined Gross National Product (GNP) of 124 other nations. Yet the U.S. still has the highest rates per capita of heart disease, diabetes, and prostate, breast and colorectal cancers of any country in the world.
Americans 65 years or older ingest an average of 15 or more medications per day (prescription and over-the-counter combined). Typically, only 1 or 2 of these drugs are actually prescribed for their original health problem; the others are used to minimize negative side effects caused by the initial drugs and the interactions of all the other drugs they are using.
Source: Lessons From the Miracle Doctors by Jon Barron
“Since the 1940s, American agriculture has released about 30 billion pounds of pesticides into the environment … Americans use about 2 billion pounds of pesticides each year … About 850 million pounds of this are used in some way to produce food. As a result, everyone is the U.S. has some trace level of pesticides in their body fat, and everyone is routinely exposed to pesticide residues in food.”
“The pesticide regulatory system presumes that all pesticides on the market are safe until proven unsafe. Meanwhile we are the guinea pigs.”
Source: Extracts of testimony of Richard Wiles, then Director of Agricultural Pollution Prevention of the Environmental Working Group, given to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on October 1993. (Today, fourteen years later, the figures Wiles cited have significantly increased.)
Due to biochemical individuality, the amounts of specific nutrients required for health can vary by as much as 700 percent from person to person.
Source: The American Holistic Medical Association Guide to Holistic Health by Larry Trivieri, Jr.
Cancer risks among people drinking chlorinated water is 93% higher than among people whose water does not contain chlorine.
Source: U.S. Council Of Environmental Quality
In 2002, Americans filled 3,340,000,000 outpatient prescriptions-twelve prescriptions for every man, women, and child in America.
Despite a cold economy in which most industries have seen purchases drop, U.S. drug purchases increased substantially in 2002, reaching $219 billion. Overall drug purchases (all sources) grew 12% 2002, 18% in 2001, and 15% in 2000 (based on wholesale acquisition costs).
Source: Prescription Drug Use in America: The Startling Numbers and Their Implications by Jay S. Cohen, M.D. This article is available at http://www.MedicationSense.com and I highly recommend it.
Each year in the United States:
12,000 people die from unnecessary surgery;
7,000 people die from medication errors in hospitals;
20,000 people die from other hospital error;
80,000 die from infections contracted in hospitals; and
106,000 deaths from properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs.
In other words, an estimated 225,000 deaths are caused by U.S. health-care system annually.
Source: These figures come from Dr. Barbara Starfield, of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, and were recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
More than half of the dangerous side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs are only detected after they’ve been on the market for seven years or more. Can you spell G-U-I-N-E-A P-I-G ?
Source: A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (cited by Jonathan Conn, author of Politics, Pro/fits and Pharma. For more information, see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/prescription/politics).
More than half of the advisors to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies that have an interest in FDA decisions. CONFLICT OF INTEREST
(Source: Cauchon D. "FDA advisers tied to industry." USA Today. September 25, 2000:01A.)
Since 1954 in the US, the administration of a class of about 20 psychiatric drugs called neuroleptics--Thorazine, Haldol, Mellaril, Stelazine, Prolixin, and others--has caused one million cases of motor brain damage.
(Source: Jon Rappoport - www.nomorefakenews.com, citing Toxic Psychiatry by Peter Breggin, Ph.D.)
"It has been estimated that only 10-20% of all procedures currently used in medical practice have been shown to be efficacious by controlled trial."
(Source: Summary statement of the report "Assessing the Efficacy and Safety of Medical Technologies," prepared and researched by the U.S. Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment. See US Dept. of Commerce Document, PB-286929, dated September 1978.)
More than 90% of drugs only work in 30-50% of people, according to a statement made last week to the press by Allen Roses, vice president of the pharmaceutical multinational GlaxoSmithKline.
180,000 people die each year partly as a result of iatrogenic (caused by medical treatment) injury. The equivalent of three jumbo jet crashes every 2 days. 20% of all patients admitted to a university hospital suffered iatrogenic injury. 36 % of those admitted to a teaching hospital suffered an iatrogenic event, of which 25% were serious or life threatening. 64 % of cardiac arrests at a teaching hospital were preventable. Most were due to use of medications.
Leape LL, "Error in Medicine." Journal of the American Medical Assn. Dec. 21, 1994; 272(23): 1851-7
"Only about 15% of all medical interventions are supported by scientific evidence. This is partly because only 1% of the articles written in medical journals are scientifically sound."
D. Eddy, M.D., Ph.D. (Smith R, "Where is the wisdom?" Br. Med. J. 1991; 303(6806):798-9)
Therapeutic drug use (not illicit drug use) each year: kills as many as 198,815 people; puts 8.8 million people in hospitals; accounts for 28% of all hospital admissions; and costs as much as $182 billion dollars.
(American Medical News. Jan 15, 1996, p.11)
Despite an annual health care costs estimated at $1.5 trillion, the most money spent on health care by any nation, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) 36 countries rank higher than the United States in terms of effective health care systems.
Source: “World Health Report 2000” World Health Organization.
Throughout the 1930s, chemotherapy was considered quackery by the American medical establishment.
To this day, "chemotherapy has surprisingly meager proof to justify its widespread use."
“The development of the chemotherapy drug Taxol, which brings Bristol-Meyers Squibb nearly $1 billion a year in revenues, was funded with public dollars by the National Cancer Institute... The NCI then assigned it at no cost to the company, which sells it at twenty times the cost of manufacturing.”
Source: When Healing Becomes a Crime by Kenny Ausubel
"[A]side from [a few treatments], many of the medicines and treatments dispensed by physicians after Hippocrates tended to heighten the death rate rather than lower it."
- Issac Assimov, Guide to Science, 1972
The average American spends 90% of each day indoors, breathing air that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can be as much as 100 times more polluted than outdoor air.