The Great Medical Myth

Robert L. Peck

The data given by the AMA and the U.S. Department of Health points to the ineffectiveness of medicine in terms of life expectancy and health.

Medicine is now perceived as the means of extending your life and freeing you from pain. To support this belief, Americans are now spending over fourteen cents out of each dollar and are currently debating spending even more.

It is surprising, however, that no one seems to be asking if they are getting their money’s worth with a longer, more fruitful life and if their fear of pain and suffering is truly being addressed.

It is a very simple matter to check into how long men and women live and compare that to our ancestors. Almanacs have faithfully given the basic statistics year after year concerning the number of deaths per each 100,000 people due to various ailments. If the statistics are tabulated for the years since 1900 a number of very unexpected and certainly not widely publicized facts emerge. (Table 1 shows the death rates for specific diseases while Table 2 shows how many years a person is expected to live from birth as well as beyond age 50.)

1. Death from smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles were dropping steadily long before vaccinations were introduced and long before the miracle drugs (antibiotics) were developed. After their development, the diseases continued to drop at the same rate as before and did not suddenly disappear as might have been predicted. Tuberculosis was dropping long before any treatment was known, and even after the advent of the antibiotics there was no sudden drop in the number of deaths, but rather the steady decline continued as before.
2. If the death rate due to heart failure is studied, you will note a rise in the death rate reaching a peak in the 50’s and then declining slowly afterward. But the current death rate is still almost twice that for 1900 and there is no indication of any changes due to the advent of surgical techniques and powerful drugs. Most health officials attribute the drop off in this death rate to reduced smoking and better exercise, and not to radical medical treatments.
3. Diabetes continues to rise without any indication of the introduction of insulin shots in the gradually ascending death rate curve.
4. Pneumonia dropped continually since 1900 until around 1950 with the wider usage of antibiotics and then started to rise. Medicine claims that the rise is due to the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics, but there is no direct evidence that they helped to reduce the death rates.
5. Recent studies of our really ancient ancestors, the Neanderthal, showed that they were probably in as good of health as we are today with modern medicine (1).
6. Christian Scientists who have long refused medical treatments have lived on the average as long as the rest of us.
7. A newborn child in 1850 had only about half of the life expectancy of an infant born today. This improvement in life span can be seen as steadily improving over the years beginning long before the advent of modern medicine. The increasing of life span is firstly attributed to sanitation including the simple window screen and waste removal, making the garbage and sanitation workers far more important to health than the medical technologists. Later improvement in longevity for everyone is explained with better food, exercise, and education.
8. A man or woman at the age of 50 only lives a few more years longer than did those people in 1850 and this small increase is attributed to a better life style rather than to medicine. (Also note that men did not previously outlive women as commonly stated.)

Table 1
Death rates per 100,000(2)

Table 2
Life Expectancy in years to live

(A male infant born in 1995 can be expected to have 73 years ahead of him, whereas a man of 50 only has 27 more expected years.)

Thus it appears that medicine doesn’t help us live longer. Perhaps instead, medicine makes us healthier? We all know people who have been greatly assisted by medical care. However, we all also know or suspect that medicine has debilitated or killed others that we knew.

Medicine has a name for those ailments or deaths that are caused by medicine, “iatrogenic,” which means “physician originated”. The American Medical Association recently reported (3) that over 10% of the admissions to an Intensive Care Unit were due to medically induced diseases. The percentage of hospital patients acquiring a medically induced illness is given as varying from 2% to as high as 36% across the nation. Of those who acquire an iatrogenic illness, the mortality rate can be as high as 20%. The AMA reported earlier that 20% of patients admitted to a hospital suffered iatrogenic injuries with 14% of these cases being fatal. These numbers add to over 100,000 deaths per year in the US hospitals. That would make iatrogenic disease the fourth ranking cause of death preceded by heart failure, cancer, and stroke.

One number that is given by many physicians is that medicine cannot help 80% of their patients other than by alleviating their symptoms. A recent study by the AMA (4) reported that up to 80% of the patients tested by physicians demonstrated no known physiological or organic cause for their disorders. Most of these types of ailments are labeled as psychosomatic.

The above statistics suggest that roughly out of 100 patients who seek medical assistance, 80 will be unchanged as to the course of the illness, 10 will be made worse, leaving only 10 who will be improved. Of the 10 made worse 2 will die, and of the 10 made better, if the preceding mortality rates are considered, 2 will live that otherwise might have died. This keeps the mortality rates unaffected by the advent of modern super drugs. The net score for medicine is, therefore, no decrease in overall mortality rates as the data indicates, but an improvement in the value of life for some and a decrease in the value of life for others. (It should be noted that these figures are an average of all ailments and some ailments would be expected to have very few iatrogenic complaints, whereas some may have a very high incidence. Similarly, some cases may have little improvement with medicine, whereas some others may have a high improvement rate. This means, of course, that discretion is required, and that patients need to have far more understanding of treatment or require some unbiased advice from someone who is not profiting by their further treatment.)

Concerning pain, almost all of us know of people dying with cancer asking for more painkillers or death. Doctors argue that they cannot administer sufficient pain killers to alleviate severe pain because: 1) it is possible that the patient might recover and then be addicted to the pain killer, 2) the administering of more pain killer may contribute to the death of the patient, 3) if doctors do not follow prescribed drug administration rules, they may be liable for law suits.

Connected with the issue of painkillers is that of the administration of psychoactive or mind altering drugs used to “calm” individuals. These drugs have very serious side effects as reported by the manufacturers, and there are many stories in popular magazines and newspapers about their misuse; however, very little actual data is available. This is no doubt due to the inability to prove whether the side effect is due to iatrogenic or natural causes. Both iatrogenic and natural ailments may result in such things as: loss of motor function, speech impairment, coordination, mental acuity and simple inattention. Any nursing home, for instance, can claim that the immobility and speech impairment of patients is caused by senility and not their medication.

A comparison can be made with our ancestors who could freely purchase any drug they wished without a prescription from the local pharmacy. This, of course, was before the AMA formed the present alliance with Government to bring medicine under control. The argument given for control was that people were buying patent or worthless medicine and could kill themselves by taking the wrong medicine. However, it is doubtful that, even at the worst, the populace could have killed themselves at anywhere near the present rate of about 100,000 dying from drug-induced iatrogenic illnesses in the US. As to modern drugs being superior to the old patent medicines, further questions certainly could be raised. In any case, the money wasted on patent medicines in the past is certainly a small amount compared to the money spent on doubtful modern treatments offered by some physicians and clinics.

In other words, the rise of the powerful and costly Medical-Government complex cannot demonstrate any overall increase in life and comfort compared to the inexpensive, free choice medicine used by our ancestors or even by the medical treatment offered by other cultures and alternative systems.

1) The Krapina Hominids, Republic of Croatia. Reported by: Univ. of Pennsylvania, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
2) National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Dept. Health and Human Services
3) AMA, Archives of Internal Medicine Volume 159 Number 1, January 11, 1999
4) Journal of the AMA, December 21,1994: 1851-57

Comments and questions: webmaster@personaldevcenter.com
Copyright ©1998-1999 Personal Development Center
All rights reserved.