Reported by JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) in the year 2000
Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States.
- 12,000 — unnecessary surgery
- 7,000 — medication errors in hospitals
- 20,000 — other errors in hospitals
- 80,000 — infections in hospitals
- 106,000 –non-error, negative effects of drugs
That equals 225,000.
BUT.
Does that include deaths caused by prescription drug abuse?
We can add 14,600 deaths from prescription abuse a year as of 2008.
More than 12 million people reported using prescription painkillers non-medically in 2010, that is, using them without a prescription or for the feeling they cause. How are they getting them??
An updated article written in 2012 with factual information can be read here.
The numbers are astounding. It is well worth your while to be informed.
I don’t want to talk about what is wrong or who is to blame. That would take more energy than I have. And I don’t know.
This is what I know from my own experience:
My health was greatly compromised by prescription medicine and the counsel of my doctors.
Proper diet, vitamins, minerals and herbs restored my health to a level I could not have imagined by a licensed doctor who was disillusioned by traditional medicine and moved to a more natural approach for healing.
The professionals that advocate all this chaos are the same people who distrust vitamin and herbal supplements. You know what? There is not one documented death related to supplement consumption. There are over 60 billion doses taken. A year.
My mind gets really confused about all this stuff. It doesn’t make sense that we, as a culture, aren’t understanding. It is not in our best interest to plead ignorant here. We lose. I am not saying there isn’t a place for traditional medicine. I had a surgery last year and could not have survived, perhaps, if not for traditional medicine. But something is wrong.
I don’t know where it all went wrong. Do you? But the point is that we have to become our own best advocate.
We must do our research and make informed decisions. We should not let a stranger make these decisions for us and then take it at face value.
We must be responsible for preventing the need for medicine, and surgeries. Most of us are born healthy.
I just looked up “traditional medicine” and it said,
“the health practices, approaches, knowledge and beliefs incorporating plant, animal and mineral-based medicines, spiritual therapies, manual techniques and exercises, applied singularly or in combination to treat, diagnose and prevent illnesses or maintain well-being.”
How did the term”traditional medicine” jump the tracks? Medical doctors who don’t use the practices stated above get to enjoy that label now. I’m thinkin’ “traditional” does not mean over use of chemical drugs and poor decisions made on the behalf of patients. Not sure what you would call that. Science fiction, maybe?
The day that really burned my mittens was the day my ob/gyn, who I had gone to see for 18 years, made fun of me in a big way, cause I went to a “quack” as he put it. The “quack” he spoke of healed me with diet and supplements from 30 years of bad medicine. There were no prescriptions used. No surgeries. IN THE SAME BREATH, this said ob/gyn gave me a prescription for Prozac when I told him that I got irritable 1 day a month. My mouth visibly fell open. “Something is terribly wrong with this picture,” I said to myself.
One by one, we can make a difference. We can take responsibility for ourselves. Make good decisions. Make informed decisions. Bottom line, we are treating ourselves like we have a couple of self duplicates stuffed in the closet for future use. We don’t.
I am off my high horse now. I dislike being negative, but, man alive, it is vital that we get smart on ourselves.
Hope it snows soon.
God bless,
Karen
The Shieling 
I think you’re very right. So much emphasis on fixing something after it’s broken, and with traditional stuff that can end up doing so much other stuff to a body. I know that’s how I’ve thought, there will be a pill to fix me if something breaks, but I’m getting to an age where things give just a hint of getting a bit more persnickety and that’s changing my mind set big time!!! I don’t want to break! Breaking does not look fun!
My mother-in-law beat pancreatic cancer. She almost died however because of her reactions to all the medications they were putting her on. The surgeon figured it out and changed the orders. Didn’t matter, the nurses kept giving her narcotics which she had a bad reaction to. I had to call at every shift to remind them. Then when she got out of the hospital and home, her family doctor gave her more narcotics and she had to go back into the hospital. We had to physically remove all the narcotic based drugs from her house and it took hours on rxlist to even figure out which drugs were narcotic based. You have to take charge of your health but it sure is hard when you are battling all the people you have to deal with to handle your health. Good luck to us all.
Julie