Poisonous Drugs
- Says Doctor Sepp (Josef) Hasslberger
July 30, 2004
Modern Medicine has abandoned its prime
purpose and is contravening the basic prescription of Hippocrates'oath:
primum non nocere - first, do no harm. This is what Barry M. Charles,
MD, suggests after studying findings from more than 10.000 articles, reports
and scientific research published in the medical literature.
It is a serious charge to make, but it is not made lightly. Charles
documents his findings with articles from the scientific literature and from
major press sources. If these findings are astonishing, they should not be
to anyone who is familiar with what proponents of alternative medicine have
been saying for decades. There are plenty of examples of damage from modern
medicine, which we tend to put aside in disbelief.
Just think about mercury in vaccines, internal bleeding caused by your daily
aspirin, mind altering fluoridated compounds in medicines, hormone
replacement therapy turning out to be more of a danger than a cure, toxic
aspartame for diabetics, foods that make us sick, AIDS and cancer still
without a cure after throwing billions at research, while basic things such
as nutrition and enzymes are neglected.
Laws are made to "protect consumers" - not from the dangers of medicine but
paradoxically to further restrict access to basic life necessities such as
nutrients and natural substances that promote health, while medicine kills
hundreds of thousands every year. It does not seem quite right...
Modern medicine is a killing machine, and Barry M. Charles does not mince
words. Thanks to Tamara Theresa of
MayDay
for forwarding this article.
Hazards of Modern Medicine
An Overview Based on a Selection of Findings from the More than 10,000
Articles, Reports, and Scientific Research Studies in the Medical Literature
By Barry M. Charles, MD
'We should make people aware to the uncertainties of medicine. Not
everybody will be cured and in some cases disasters will occur. That's
reality. Medical practice, by necessity, always will be based on trail and
error.'
--The American Medical Association's Roy Schwarz, MD
Group Vice-President of Scientific Education and Practice Standards
Iatrogenic illness -- disease produced as a result of medical treatment --
is now recognized as a health hazard of global proportions. MEDLINE (the
computerised medical research database of the United States National Library
of Medicine) includes over 7,000 articles, reports, and scientific research
papers since 1966 that show a substantial number of patients suffer
treatment-caused disorders and adverse drug reactions. These harmful
effects, which can be serious and even lethal, are associated with every
facet of modern medicine including drugs, other medical therapies,
diagnostic procedures, and surgery.
Massive Detrimental Effects
Detrimental effects have become so extensive as to prompt the use of the
term iatroepidemic. Reporting in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, Dr. Lucien Leape of Harvard School of Public Health, has
calculated that 180,000 people die in the U.S. each year partly as a result
of iatrogenic injury, the equivalent of three jumbo-jet crashes every two
days. In another issue, the Journal of the American Medical Association
points out that injury from medical treatment in the U.S. dwarfs the annual
automobile accident mortality of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than
all other accidents combined'.
An Economic Drain
Medication-caused disorders produce a substantial economic drain. For
example, the Archives of Internal Medicine reported a cost to the U.S.
economy of $76 billion in 1995. This amount is nearly twice that spent on
diabetes treatment and near the amount for cardiovascular disease5.
Iatrogenic disease can be due to many factors. These include: errors in
prescribing or administering drugs and other treatments; accidents;
inappropriate use of diagnostic or therapeutic measures; and the intrinsic
potential for harm and side effects associated with medications, surgery,
and other procedures.
Hazardous Hospital Environment
The hospital environment is especially conducive to medical hazards. Studies
including those conducted at Harvard Medical School show that as many as 36
per cent of patients admitted to hospitals suffered iatrogenic injury with
up to 25 per cent of those being serious or fatal. Up to half of these
injuries were related to the use of medication.
The results of an analysis of cardiac arrests at a teaching hospital found
that 64 per cent were preventable. Inappropriate use of drugs was the
leading cause.
In addition to treatment-caused disorders, hospitals foster life-threatening
nosocomial infections involving rare or drug-resistant micro-organisms,
which are often difficult to treat.
Fifteen per cent of hospital days are devoted to the treatment of drug side
effects. Every medication, including those that are sold over the counter
without a prescription, has an associated side effect. Commonly used drugs
have been found to affect every system. Frequent reactions include skin
rashes, nausea, headaches, dizziness, lethargy, diarrhea, and gastric
bleeding in a significant number of people. More severe reactions that can
be fatal or severely debilitating include deafness, depression, abnormal
heart rhythms, angina, bronchospasm, electrolyte disturbances, immune system
dysfunction, serious blood disorders such as aplastic anaemia, liver or
kidney toxicity, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, or anaphylactic shock. These
occur in a statistically significant proportion of the population. Despite
what is known about adverse drug effects, Dr. David Kessler, Chief of the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration, believes that only one per cent of all
serious drug reactions are reported.
Public Health in Jeopardy
The problem escalates to public health proportions when large numbers
receive a treatment and experience its attendant side effect. The New
England Journal of Medicine makes this point in discussing the link between
breast cancer and menopausal hormone replacement therapy: because of the
high incidence of breast cancer even a slight increase in risk will yield a
substantial increase in the number of cancers. The scale of use causes drugs
which are considered safe to end up producing significant damage. In this
regard, the widely used non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs cause over
3,300 deaths per year and 41,000 hospitalisations.
Poisonous Drugs
Many drugs have side effects serious enough to cause a secondary disease
warranting its own intensive therapy. An example is Parkinsonism caused by
the neurological side effects of anti-depressants or anti-psychotic
medication. A Harvard Medical School study showed that drugs were the real
cause of the original symptoms in 37 per cent of elderly patients who were
treated for Parkinson's disease. L-dopa, the medication used in treating
these patients has its own severe side effects, that often require the use
of additional drugs to control. Other examples of new diseases caused by
medications include collagen vascular disease produced by blood pressure
medications, and Cushing's syndrome produced by prolonged cortico-steroid
use. The New England Journal of Medicine has published several studies
linking cancer chemotherapy to the later appearance of new malignancies.
Many drugs are classified as teratogens and cause birth defects when taken
during pregnancy. Others can cause diseases in offspring in later life.
Unfortunately, these effects may not become apparent until many thousands of
women have taken a drug which had been enthusiastically introduced and
promoted, the classic example being the tragic epidemic of birth defects in
Europe due to thalidomide, or cancer in the children of mothers who took
diethylstilbestrol.
Overuse of antibiotics has produced resistant strains of formerly
susceptible micro-organisms. Serious concern has been voiced about the
potential for epidemics which cannot be effectively contained due to drug
resistance. An example of this is the emergence of tuberculosis that is
resistant to presently available drugs.
Unnecessary Surgery Epidemic
Studies also show substantial inappropriate and overuse of surgery, and
continued use of outmoded operations. A U.S. Congress Subcommittee on
Oversight and Investigations into Unnecessary Surgery found that in one
year, there were approximately two million unnecessary operations,
responsible for more than 12,000 deaths, with an approximate cost wastage of
$10 billion.
Injurious Technologies
Dependency on high technology both in diagnosis and treatment has been shown
to be a source of injury with machine failure or misapplication of
technology. For example, 36 per cent of iatrogenic problems in intensive
care units were associated with equipment malfunction.
Unreliable Medical Care
In addition, medical care is often based on much less scientific evidence
than assumed and undergoes radical reversals. The editor of the British
Medical Journal revealed that only 15 per cent of all medical therapies have
a scientific basis or have been demonstrated to be effective. Yet patients
remain vulnerable. An example is the formerly common use of irradiation for
enlargement of the thymus in infancy, a condition now recognized to be
normal. This treatment has recently been shown to cause cancer in later life
in those who received it.
Pushing Poisonous Drugs
Pharmaceutical marketing also puts great pressure on physicians to use new
products. The medical journal Hospital Practice pointed out that
pharmaceutical company competition 'leads to very aggressive promotion and
inundation of the physician with data supporting the use of each new drug'.
Such marketing may dilute opposing scientific information that is not as
well publicised. Ultimately drugs may be withdrawn, but only after
substantial harm has been done. For example, benoxaprofen, a non-steroidal
anti-inflammatory agent (NSAID) was introduced and heavily marketed in 1982,
but then withdrawn after cases of fatal liver toxicity were reported in
Great Britain. Zomepirac sodium was also 'aggressively marketed as a safe
analgesic', but withdrawn after a year and numerous reports of fatal
anaphylaxis. The cardiac drugs flecainide and encainide, heavily promoted to
control abnormal heart rhythms, were then withdrawn years later after
scientific studies showed they caused fatal arrythmias and that those
treated with them were two-and-one-half times as likely to die as were those
taking a placebo.
Developing countries, which have less stringent controls and means of
surveillance, have had special problems with irrational drug marketing by
multinational and indigenous pharmaceutical companies that have been
carefully documented. These practices have been reviewed in the Journal of
Clinical Epidemiology by several authors including Dr. Philip Lee, the
United States Assistant Secretary of Health. According to Dr. Lee and his
colleagues, unjustified claims of efficacy or safety continue to
proliferate. In addition to side effects, the high cost of pharmaceuticals
are a significant hazard to the economy of developing countries.
Urgent Need for New Knowledge
Physicians and patients have come to accept medical hazards as a necessary
price to pay for modern diagnosis and therapy even though they may be
seriously debilitating or lethal. The same is true with medical errors.
Studies have shown errors to be so pervasive that mistakes are considered to
be an inevitable part of the medical system, giving rise to the term
'necessary fallibility. The deplorable acceptance of disease or medical
error as a consequence of treatment reflects a deviation from the most
primary principle of medical ethics -- primum non nocere -- 'Above all do no
harm.' The wealth of data documenting the serious nature and extent of the
hazards associated with modern medicine has made clear that fundamental
deficiencies exist in the current medical approach and that new knowledge is
urgently needed to effectively address this problem.
