On Conventional Medicine

Primum nihil nocere (above all, do no harm).
Hippocratic physician’s oath

150,000 to 300,000 Americans are injured or killed each year because of medical negligence (i.e., mistreated diseases, surgeries, drug reactions, misprescribed drugs.)
Wall Street Journal, Jan. 13, 1993

About 90% of the patients who visit doctors have conditions that will either improve on their own or that are out of reach of modern medicine's ability to solve.
New England J. of Medicine, Feb 7, 1991

"What you must understand, Mr. Gearin-Tosh, is that we know so little about how the body works."
Sir David Weatherall, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and head of the Institute of Molecular Medicine, to a Stanford University professor who healed himself of one of the most lethal cancers known using natural means.

[S]ometimes there is no substitute for a doctor. Think for a moment of the injuries you might suffer in an automobile accident. No herb or vitamin could help you in the same way that a good doctor can. In terms of surgical technique (the cutting apart and repair of the human body) modern medicine has made remarkable advances. In terms of identifying many of the germs that play a role in causing many diseases and improving sanitation to prevent those diseases, once again modern medicine has made remarkable advances. In terms of burns, trauma, and ER's, modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous. But in terms of treating and preventing most disease, particularly the major scourges of the modern era (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s) modern medicine stands an abject failure. Despite all of the games played with statistics, the numbers are undeniable.
Jon Barron "Why Your Doctors Do You Like They Do"

According to scientific criteria, [Dr. Hamer’s] New Medicine has to be declared as true according to the present state of Science and to the best of our current knowlege. Whereas orthodox (conventional) medicine, scientifically speaking, is an amorphous mush, which cannot even be falsified, let alone verified due to its being based on fundamentally misunderstood (alleged) facts. According to scientific criteria, conventional medicine can only be called a hotchpotch of hypotheses, hence unscientific and to the best of human judgment false.
Prof. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz assessing the scientific validity of Dr. Hamer’s “New Medicine versus conventional medicine

Iatrogenic diseases, generally defined as diseases that result from a physician's action or in response to a drug, are believed to be a major problem in terms of morbidity and hospital expense.
Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dec. 12, 1980

Over a million patients are injured in hospitals each year, and approximately 180,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic injury rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined.
JAMA, July 5, 1995, 274:29-34

As a retired physician, I can honestly say that unless you are in a serious accident, YOUR BEST CHANCE OF LIVING TO A RIPE OLD AGE IS TO AVOID DOCTORS AND HOSPITALS AND LEARN NUTRITION, HERBAL MEDICINE AND OTHER FORMS OF NATURAL MEDICINE. Almost all drugs are toxic and are designed only to treat symptoms and not to cure anyone. Most surgery is unnecessary. In short, our mainstream medical system is hopelessly inept and/or corrupt. THE TREATMENT OF CANCER AND DEGENERATIVE DISEASES IS A NATIONAL SCANDAL. The sooner you learn this, the better off you will be.
Dr. Allan Greenberg on 12/24/2002

Deadly medical mistakes are number one US killer
...The results of seven years of research reviewing thousands of studies conducted by the Nutrition Institute of America show for the first time that medical errors are the number one cause of death and injury in the United States. According to the NIA's report, over 784,000 people die annually due to medical mistakes. Comparatively, the 2001 annual death rate for heart disease was 699,697 and the annual death rate for cancer was 553,251. Over 2.2 million people are injured every year by prescription drugs alone and over 20 million unnecessary prescriptions for Antibiotics are prescribed annually for viral infections.
The report also shows that 7.5 million unnecessary medical and surgical procedures are performed every year and 8.9 million people are needlessly hospitalised annually. Based on the results of NIA's report, it is evident that there is a pressing need for an overhaul of the entire American medical system.
The findings, described as a "revelation" by Martin Feldman, MD, ... are the product of the first comprehensive studies on iatrogenic incidents (those caused by the treatment or drug itself). Never before has any study uncovered such a massive amount of information about the degree and effect of iatrogenesis. Historically, only small individual partial studies have been performed in this area.
Carolyn Dean, MD, a physician and author..., "I was completely shocked, amazed, and dismayed when I first added up all the statistics on medical death and saw how much allopathic medicine has betrayed us."
Full article see http://www.icmedicine.co.uk/journal/nov03/005.htm

Fewer than one-fourth of doctors surveyed routinely ask their patients about their dietary habits.
Natural Health, Sept/Oct 1993

Current research suggests that 36% of physician visits are unnecessary; 36% of hospital admissions are caused by side-effects from other medical treatments; 53% of surgeries are unnecessary; and half of all time spent in hospitals isn't medically indicated.
Let's Live, Feb. 1995

Errors in judgement or technique concerning either the anesthesia or the surgery, or a combination of the two, contribute to close to 50% of the mortality in the operating room.
Dr. Arthur James Mannis

In 1976 in Bogota, Colombia, doctors went on strike during a 52-day period. The death rate went down 35% during that time. In Los Angeles in 1976, doctors went on strike to protest increasing costs of malpractice insurance. The death rate decreased by 18%. When the strike ended, the death rate returned to prestrike proportions. In Israel in 1973, during a month-long strike, the death rate dropped 50%. The last time the death rate had been that low was when there was a doctors's strike 20 years before.
Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

Our figures show approximately four and one half million hospital admissions annually due to the adverse reactions to drugs. Further, the average hospital patient has as much as thirty percent chance, depending how long he is in, of doubling his stay due to adverse drug reactions.
Milton Silverman, M.D. (Professor of Pharmacology, University of California)

If you thumb through a Physician's Desk Reference, which is a very thick volume that details all the thousands and thousands of pharmaceuticals sold and prescribed by MD's, you will find that over and over and over again under the heading, "Mechanism of Action" it reads "UNKNOWN." In other words, MD's do NOT KNOW WHY OR HOW a very great percentage of the pharmaceuticals they prescribe work!
One scarcely ever hears of the client of an MD requesting that his or her doctor tell them how a particular drug the doctor is prescribing works. But somehow, when it comes to things alternative, things non-prescription, everyone wants to know how they work and what the mechanism of action is!
Also, the FDA is completely two-faced when it comes to approving pharmaceuticals versus approving non-pharmaceuticals. As I have already mentioned, the Physician's Desk Reference contains tremendous numbers of pharmaceuticals for which there is NO known mechanism of action---NO ONE can say how they work. But when Dr. ________(can't remember his name) tried to get his bovine cartilage approved by the FDA, the FDA turned him down because he could not provide them with the mechanism of action!
Personally, I do not need to know just how an alternative treatment works, provided I can find people I trust who reliably tell me it works, and provided I know that if it does not work for me, it will not hurt or kill me or my savings account.
Elliot Yudenfriend

Number of physicians in the U.S.: 700,000
Accidental deaths caused by physicians per year: 120,000
Accidental deaths per physician: 0.171
Number of gun owners in the U.S.: 80,000,000
Number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups): 1,500
Accidental deaths per gun owner: 0.0000188
Therefore, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
Taken from the Benton County NewsTribune on November 17, 1999,
contributed by David Icke

The American Medical Association style of medicine (a philosophy I will henceforth call allopathic) has a model that explains the causes of illness. It suggests that anyone who is sick is a victim. Either they were attacked by a "bad" organism--virus, bacteria, yeast, pollen, cancer cell, etc.--or they have a "bad" organ--liver, kidney, gall bladder, even brain. Or, the victim may also have been cursed by "bad" genes. In any case, the cause of the disease is not the person and the person is neither responsible for creating their own complaint nor capable of making it go away without medical intervention. This institutionalized irresponsibility seems useful for both parties to the illness, doctor and patient. The patient is not required to do anything about their complaint except pay (a lot) and obediently follow the instructions of the doctor, submitting unquestioningly to their drugs and surgeries. The physician then acquires a role of being considered vital to the survival of others and thus obtains great status, prestige, authority, and financial remuneration.
Perhaps because the sick person is seen to have been victimized, and it is logically impossible to consider a victimizer as anything but something evil, the physician's cure is often violent, confrontational. Powerful poisons are used to rejigger body chemistry or to arrest the multiplication of disease bacteria or to suppress symptoms; if it is possible to sustain life without them, "bad," poorly-functioning organs are cut out. . . . .
Hygienists usually inform the patient quite clearly and directly that the practitioner has no ability to heal them or cure their condition and that no doctor of any type actually is able to heal. Only the body can heal itself, something it is eager and usually very able to do if only given the chance. One pithy old saying among hygienists goes, "if the body can't heal itself, nothing can heal it." The primary job of the hygienic practitioner is to reeducate the patient by conducting them through their first natural healing process. If this is done well the sick person learns how to get out of their own body's way and permit its native healing power to manifest. Unless later the victim of severe traumatic injury, never again will that person need obscenely expensive medical procedures. Hygienists rarely make six figure incomes from regular, repeat business.
This aspect of hygienic medicine makes it different than almost all the others, even most other holistic methods. Hygiene is the only system that does not interpose the assumed healing power of a doctor between the patient and wellness. When I was younger and less experienced I thought that the main reason traditional medical practice did not stress the body's own healing power and represented the doctor as a necessary intervention was for profit. But after practicing for over twenty years I now understand that the last thing most people want to hear is that their own habits, especially their eating patterns and food choices, are responsible for their disease and that their cure is to only be accomplished through dietary reform, which means unremittingly applied self-discipline.
One of the hardest things to ask of a person is to change a habit. The reason that AMA doctors have most of the patients is they're giving the patients exactly what they want, which is to be allowed to continue in their unconscious irresponsibility.
Isabelle Moser MD in How And When To Be Your Own Doctor.
http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/why_alternatives3.html