The discovery of antibiotics in the 1930s fundamentally transformed the way physicians care for patients, shifting their approach from a focus on diagnoses without means to intervene into a treatment-focused approach that saves lives. Now, nearly 70 years later, we’ve reached a critical point in treating infectious diseases: new drugs are not being developed at anywhere near the pace necessary to keep ahead of the natural ability of bacteria to evolve and defend themselves against antibiotics. The result is that some of our most powerful drugs are becoming useless.

Antimicrobial resistance is recognized as one of the greatest threats to human health worldwide.

www.cdc.gov

Scientists around the world have provided strong evidence that antibiotic use in food-producing animals can have a negative impact on public health through the following sequence of events...

CONCLUSION: As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required...

Learn How to Prevent and Beat Cancer

Retrieved from - mercola.com

Over a ten-year period, a woman can receive as much radiation exposure (5 rads) from routine mammograms as a Japanese woman one mile from the epicenter of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

See Alternatives to Mammograms

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Understanding Spirit-Mind-Body Connection

Reference - www.bravewell.org

Today, these breakthroughs in our understanding of the mind-body connection have translated into effective therapies to support patients' journeys through illnesses and trauma. Virtually every major medical center now has a stress management or mind-body clinic, and such practices as meditation, yoga, and group support are woven into the medical treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other serious illnesses. Moreover, the understanding of the mind-body relationship has now expanded to embrace the spiritual dimension of healing as well.

Effective Weight Loss

www.fda.gov

FDA has identified an emerging trend where over-the-counter products, frequently represented as dietary supplements, contain hidden active ingredients that could be harmful. Consumers may unknowingly take products laced with varying quantities of approved prescription drug ingredients, controlled substances, and untested and unstudied pharmaceutically active ingredients. These deceptive products can harm you! Hidden ingredients are increasingly becoming a problem in products promoted for weight loss.

Prescription drug use has become more prevalent than ever – with 34% of American adults taking at least one prescription drug, and 11.5% taking three or more prescribed medications.

In a rapid response society, prescription medication has become the ultimate quick fix, from stressed out students cramming for exams, to ambitious professionals looking for an edge, to recovering soldiers returning from battle. And despite the death toll and the recurring headlines of Hollywood stars getting themselves into trouble, the rates of prescription drug abuse and addiction continue to steadily grow.

Narcotic pain relievers now cause or contribute to nearly 3 OUT OF 4 prescription drug overdoses and about 15,500 DEATHS [annually].

…Prescription drugs come in many forms and serve a variety of purposes. Pain relief medication may be prescribed following traumatic injury or surgical procedure. Sleep medications can be used to induce sleep or keep a person awake.

Addiction often occurs when the potency and/or frequency of dosages are being used beyond their recommended instruction. For this reason, an individual may become addicted to a prescribed substance whether or not it was legally obtained.

Addiction can also be caused by the body's tolerance for the medication increasing. When this change in the body’s central nervous system occurs, an increase in dosage of the substance will be required to meet the intended needs. In some cases, a physician may deem the change in prescription dosage to be necessary and make the adjustment. If a patient is denied the change in prescription however, he or she will often deviate from instruction.

In cases of prescription drug abuse by unintended parties, addiction can occur during a process of substitution of one drug for another. Many of the elements and effects of prescription medications mimic those of illegal narcotics…

www.healthyohioprogram.org

• In 2007, unintentional drug poisoning became the leading cause of injury death in Ohio, surpassing motor vehicle crashes for the first time on record. This trend continued in 2010. 

• From 1999 to 2011, Ohio’s death rate due to unintentional drug poisonings increased 440 percent, and the increase in deaths has been driven largely by prescription drug overdoses.

• In Ohio, there were 327 fatal unintentional drug overdoses in 1999 growing to 1,765 annual deaths in 2011.

• On average approximately five people died each day in Ohio due to drug overdose.  

Treating and Healing with Holistic, Alternative Methods

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Drug Companies Fined

campaignfortruth.com - Death by Medicine

By Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, PhD                                                                 

Periodically, the FDA fines a drug manufacturer when its abuses are too glaring and impossible to cover up. In May 2002, the Washington Post reported that Schering-Plough Corp., the maker of Claritin®, was to pay a $500 million fine to the FDA for quality-control problems at four of its factories ⁷⁹. The indictment came after the Public Citizen Health Research Group, led by Dr. Sidney Wolfe, called for a criminal investigation of Schering-Plough, charging that the company distributed albuterol asthma inhalers even though it knew the units were missing the active ingredient.

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Unnecessary Surgical Procedures

In 1974, 2.4 million unnecessary surgeries were performed, resulting in 11,900 deaths at a cost of $3.9 billion. ^{80, 81}

In 2001, 7.5 million unnecessary surgical procedures were performed, resulting in 37,136 deaths at a cost of $122 billion (using 1974 dollars). ^9,10

According to the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 22 in 2001 the 50 most common medical and surgical procedures were performed approximately 41.8 million times in the US. Using the 1974 House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations’ figure of 17.6% as the percentage of unnecessary surgical procedures, and extrapolating from the death rate in 1974, produces nearly 7.5 million (7,489,718) unnecessary procedures and a death rate of 37,136, at a cost of $122 billion (using 1974 dollars). In 1974, 2.4 million unnecessary surgeries were performed, resulting in 11,900 deaths at a cost of $3.9 billion. ^{80, 81}

Surgical Errors Finally Reported

An October 2003 JAMA study from the US government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) documented 32,000 mostly surgery-related deaths costing $9 billion and accounting for 2.4 million extra hospital days in 2000.⁹²

Data from 20% of the nation’s hospitals were analyzed for 18 different surgical complications, including post-operative infections, foreign objects left in wounds, surgical wounds reopening, and post-operative bleeding.

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Unnecessary Hospitalization

The HCUP database indicates that the total number of patient discharges from US hospitals in 2001 was 37,187,641,22 meaning that almost 9 million people were exposed to unnecessary medical intervention in hospitals and therefore represent almost 9 million potential iatrogenic episodes.^1-4

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Unnecessary Cesarean Sections

In 2001, cesarean section was still the most common OB-GYN surgical procedure. Approximately 4 million births occur annually, with 24% (960,000) delivered by cesarean section. In the Netherlands, only 8% of births are delivered by cesarean section. This suggests 640,000 unnecessary cesarean sections—entailing three to four times higher mortality and 20 times greater morbidity than vaginal delivery¹⁰⁸—are performed annually in the US.

The US cesarean rate rose from just 4.5% in 1965 to 24.1% in 1986. Sakala contends that an “uncontrolled pandemic of medically unnecessary cesarean births is occurring.”¹⁰⁹ VanHam reported a cesarean section postpartum hemorrhage rate of 7%, a hematoma formation rate of 3.5%, a urinary tract infection rate of 3%, and a combined postoperative morbidity rate of 35.7% in a high-risk population undergoing cesarean section.¹¹⁰

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Unnecessary X-Rays

In present-day medicine, coronary angiography is an invasive surgical procedure that involves snaking a tube through a blood vessel in the groin up to the heart. To obtain useful information, x-rays are taken almost continuously, with minimum dosages ranging from 460 to 1,580 mrem. The minimum radiation from a routine chest x-ray is 2 mrem. X-ray radiation accumulates in the body, and ionizing radiation used in x-ray procedures has been shown to cause gene mutation.

The health impact of this high level of radiation is unknown, and often obscured in statistical jargon such as, “The risk for lifetime fatal cancer due to radiation exposure is estimated to be 4 in 1 million per 1,000 mrem.   

Dr. Gofman provides strong evidence that medical technology—specifically x-rays, CT scans, and mammography and fluoroscopy devices—are a contributing factor to 75% of new cancers...

Learn the Risks, Precautions and Treatments

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Medical Ethics and Conflict of Interest in Scientific Medicine

Jonathan Quick, Director of essential drugs and medicines policy for the World Health Organization (WHO), wrote in a recent WHO bulletin: “If clinical trials become a commercial venture in which self-interest overrules public interest and desire overrules science, then the social contract which allows research on human subjects in return for medical advances is broken.” ³³

As former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell struggled to bring greater attention to the problem of commercializing scientific research. In her outgoing editorial entitled “Is Academic Medicine for Sale?” Angell wrote that growing conflicts of interest are tainting science and called for stronger restrictions on pharmaceutical stock ownership and other financial incentives for researchers: ³⁴

“When the boundaries between industry and academic medicine become as blurred as they are now,” Angell wrote, “The business goals of industry influence the mission of medical schools in multiple ways.” She did not discount the benefits of research but said a Faustian bargain now existed between medical schools and the pharmaceutical industry.

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Nursing Home Care

One way to measure the moral and ethical fiber of a society is by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. In some cultures, elderly people live out their lives in extended family settings that enable them to continue participating in family and community affairs. American nursing homes, where millions of our elders go to live out their final days, represent the pinnacle of social isolation and medical abuse.

Deaths caused by malnutrition, dehydration, and physical restraints, however, are rarely recorded on death certificates. Several studies reveal that nearly half of the listed causes of death on death certificates for elderly people with chronic or multi-system disease are inaccurate.¹³⁴ Although one in five people dies in nursing homes, an autopsy is performed in less than 1% of these deaths.¹³⁵

In 1990, Congress mandated an exhaustive study of nurse-to-patient ratios in nursing homes. The study was finally begun in 1998 and took four years to complete. A spokesperson for the National Citizens’ Coalition for Nursing Home Reform commented on the study: “They compiled two reports of three volumes, each thoroughly documenting the number of hours of care residents must receive from nurses and nursing assistants to avoid painful, even dangerous, conditions such as bedsores and infections. Yet it took the Department of Health and Human Services and Secretary Tommy Thompson only four months to dismiss the report as ‘insufficient.’” Although preventable with proper nursing care, bedsores occur three times more commonly in nursing homes than in acute care or veterans hospitals.

Because many nursing home patients suffer from chronic debilitating conditions, their assumed cause of death often is unquestioned by physicians. Some studies show that as many as 50% of deaths due to restraints, falls, suicide, homicide, and choking in nursing homes may be covered up.^{124, 125} It is possible that many nursing home deaths are instead attributed to heart disease. In fact, researchers have found that heart disease may be over-represented in the general population as a cause of death on death certificates by 8-24%. In the elderly, the over-reporting of heart disease as a cause of death is as much as twofold.

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Over Medicating Seniors

According to the study, the average senior receives 25 prescriptions each year. Among those 6.3 million seniors, a total of 7.9 million medication alerts were triggered: less than half that number, 3.4 million, was detected in 1999. the general population as a cause of death on death certificates by 8-24%. In the elderly, the over-reporting of heart disease as a cause of death is as much as twofold.

About 2.2 million of those alerts indicated excessive dosages unsuitable for seniors, and about 2.4 million alerts indicated clinically inappropriate drugs for the elderly. Reuters interviewed Kasey Thompson, director of the Center on Patient Safety at the American Society of Health System Pharmacists, who noted: “There are serious and systemic problems with poor continuity of care in the United States.” He says this study represents “the tip of the iceberg” of a national problem.

In a study of 818 residents of residential care facilities for the elderly, 94% were receiving at least one medication at the time of the interview. The average intake of medications was five per resident; the authors noted that many of these drugs were given without a documented diagnosis justifying their use.

Seniors and groups like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) have accepted allopathic medicine’s overriding assumption that aging and dying in America must be accompanied by drugs in nursing homes and eventual hospitalization.¹⁴⁰ Seniors are given the choice of either high-cost patented drugs or low-cost generic drugs. Drug companies attempt to keep the most expensive drugs on the shelves and suppress access to generic drugs, despite facing stiff fines of hundreds of millions of dollars levied by the federal government.^{141, 142} In 2001, some of the world’s largest drug companies were fined a record $871 million for conspiring to increase the price of vitamins.¹⁴³

Ironically, studies also indicate under use of proper pain medication for patients who need it. One study evaluated pain management in a group of 13,625 cancer patients, aged 65 and over, living in nursing homes. While almost 30% of the patients reported pain, more than 25% received no pain-relief medication, 16% received a mild analgesic drug, 32% received a moderate analgesic drug, and 26% received adequate pain-relieving morphine. The authors concluded that older patients and minority patients were more likely to have their pain untreated.

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Summary

The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was perhaps the US government's last honest agency that critically reviewed the state of the nation's health care system. The purpose of the OTA was to provide Congress with objective and authoritative analysis of complex scientific and technical issues. In its final critical report, the OTA concluded:

“There are no mechanisms in place to limit dissemination of technologies, regardless of their clinical value.” Shortly after the OTA released a report that exposed how entrenched financial interests manipulate health care practice in the United States, Congress disbanded the OTA.

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"The transponders were the cause of the tumors," said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.

Leading cancer specialists reviewed the research for The Associated Press and, while cautioning that animal test results do not necessarily apply to humans, said the findings troubled them. Some said they would not allow family members to receive implants, and all urged further research before the glass-encased transponders are widely implanted in people.

To date, about 2,000 of the so-called radio frequency identification, or RFID, devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip Corp. The company, which sees a target market of 45 million Americans for its medical monitoring chips, insists the devices are safe, as does its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, of Delray Beach, Fla.

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