WHY MEDICINE FAILS

opinion by Marjorie Rhodes

Let's not confuse healthcare with the current state of mainstream medical treatment

Numbered references appear at the end of this article.

Knives, killings, animal mutilations, drugs, theft, rivalry! What does this describe? Teenage gangs of hoodlums? Well, sometimes. But it also describes mainstream medical practice. It would seem then that teenage gangs and American medicine share common ground. Is it any wonder then that medical malpractice is the leading cause of death in the US, when you look closely at statistics? (see www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed.htm)

Most malpractice goes unreported. One reason is that no doctor or hospital ever lists malpractice on death certificates as the cause of death. The cause listed is most likely to be given as "cardiac arrest." So "cardiac arrest" then is often a handy euphemism for medical malpractice. But don't we all experience cardiac arrest when we're dead? Cardiac arrest is the outcome, the effect but not necessarily the cause of death.

A second reason malpractice deaths are underreported is that death does not always follow malpractice instantaneously; e.g. if a doctor fails to see the cancer in an x-ray image, and the patient dies a year or two later as a consequence, that's not likely to go into the records as death by malpractice.

Similarly, when a patient dies at home from a wrongfully prescribed drug, it will often never be recorded as a malpractice-caused death.

Another reason malpractice goes underreported is that many injuries are blamed on the victims: the victims are told that it is somehow their fault. Negligent doctors don't hesitate to transfer blame to their victims if they think they can get away with it; and they often do get away with it.

Many instances of malpractice are covered up by medical boards: the "code of silence" or "conspiracy of silence" as this is known in medical and legal jargon. The self-policing of doctors should be abolished. As long as the medical industry buries its mistakes, there is little hope for better health care.

In addition to deaths, how many victims have their lives ruined by permanent malpractice-related injuries? Not all malpractice victims die of their injuries, though many probably wish that they had.

Myths about lawsuits
Contrary to popular opinion, most malpractice victims, and surviving family members, don't sue. Suing is costly, time consuming, and risky for victims. It takes years for cases to go to court; and the odds of a jury settlement are slim.

Even when lawyers take cases on a contingency basis, there are still other costs to be paid by victims, who are not always in a position to afford these.

How many friends, family members and co-workers do you know have sued for malpractice? And more importantly, how many of them won their cases? Yet many of your friends, family members and co-workers can recount their bad experiences with doctors and hospitals.

Furthermore, lawyers generally only accept cases where evidence is overwhelming and where the settlement has the potential of being large. Considering how selective lawyers tend to be, if a case reaches court, it's likely to be a very solid case. Even then, most victims are denied justice through our legal system.

Causes of malpractice
To heal means to make whole, but is it the objective of a surgeon to make whole? Most surgery would be avoided, were it not for medical industry's profit motive. So it stands to reason that many malpractice-related deaths would be avoided were it not for this same motive.

In times when doctors have gone on strike, deaths rates have dropped dramatically. (1,2)

Not unrelated to the profit motive are medical fad-surgeries. Women and children are especially vulnerable to medical fads. Tonsillectomies used to be routinely performed on children, who had little chance of defending their bodies.

According to Dr. Stephen T. Chang, "In Taoism, cutting out a gland is viewed as a crime, since doing so would throw the entire body out of balance and open a Pandora's box of health problems. Furthermore, cutting out a part of the body when it is inflamed is like removing a fire detector because one does not like to hear it ring every time there is a fire. The tonsils, the front line of defense for our bodies, are just such a warning system." (3)

Hysterectomies are another profit-motivated fad-surgery. The HERS Foundation (Hysterectomy Educational Resources & Services) is a non- profit organization that refers women to doctors who do not go hog-wild mutilating women's bodies.

Women who have been told that they need their female organs out should be relieved to know that 98% of women referred by HERS, keep their organs intact. This means that almost all hysterectomies are performed for hospital and doctor profits.

HERS also has found that over 99% of women who have had this mutilating operation were not informed of the consequences. And the damage is irreversible (for more information see www.hersfoundation.com).

Many other industries are intertwined with the profit-driven nature of the medical industry, taking advantage of society's most vulnerable people in order to peddle their wares. This includes, of course, the drug industry, the insurance industry, and a whole host of industries that manufacture medical machinery and anything else that enables them to cash-in on human misery.

Professional jealousy also kills. Attempts to block health modalities such as Chinese medicine, Naturopathy and other modalities limit patients' range of choices, and keep patients from making informed decisions. The AMA, drug companies and insurance companies are all guilty here.

The propaganda machine is another set-back to decent health care in the US. The insurance industry and HMOs would have us believe that Canadians (with their national healthcare) wait weeks to see a doctor, and may die while waiting. Guess what? US citizens sometimes have to wait weeks to see doctors and may die while waiting. Other citizens die for lack of affordable treatment.

Most US citizens have either no medical insurance or limited medical insurance. How often have you heard complaints that a person's insurance doesn't cover what they need? And the choice of doctors in the US is often tightly controlled by the insurance companies and the HMOs. How many deaths has this lack of choice and lack of coverage caused us?

Solutions
Negligent drivers have their licenses revoked. Why then is it so difficult to revoke the licenses of bad doctors?

Doctors who have had lawsuits filed against them should be required to inform patients of this if the patient requests this information; however, since many patients would feel uncomfortable asking for this data, there should be a website where this information is posted and kept up to date.

With the exception of people being rushed to trauma centers, doctors and hospitals should be required to tell patients in writing what non- surgical options are available. There is no excuse for doctors not to know.

Surgery is an assault on the body. Knifing patients unnecessarily for money is no less a crime than assaulting people on the streets for money. How about a "three strikes you're out" for doctors?

Finally, doctors need to be trained to provide more humane services How can any industry be regarded as benign whose practitioners torture animals as part of their training (vivisection), mutilate their patients, take kick-backs from the drug companies for peddling drugs, and jealously lobby politicians and insurance companies to keep out the competition?

References

1. Laski, Keith Alan: The Great Billion Dollar Medical Swindle (from book jacket) "When doctors in Southern California went on strike, when they stopped seeing patients, when they stopped doing elective surgery, why did the death rate fall like a shot?"

2. Mendelsohn, Robert S.: Confessions of a Medical Heretic (p.114) "In 1976 in Bogota, Columbia, there was a fifty-two-day period in which doctors disappeared altogether except for emergency care. . . . The death rate went down thirty-five percent. . . . An eighteen percent drop in the death rate occurred in Los Angeles county in 1976 when doctors there went on strike to protest soaring malpractice insurance premiums. . . . When the strike ended and the medical machines started grinding again, the death rate went right back up to where it had been before the strike."

3. Chang, Dr. Stephen T.: The Complete System of Self-Healing, Tao Publishing, San Francisco CA 1986