By Gurli Bagnall, 19 June, 2006

A recent article on the dangers of complementary and alternative medicine prompts me to point out that conventional medicine can be equally dangerous. As an example,  my own history is (briefly) as follows.

Fourteen years of repeated misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatment, resulted in ME.  (Diagnosed in 1991.)

Heart failure (a common complication of ME)  was diagnosed in 2004.

Diuretics were prescribed for the heart failure, and they caused a common adverse reaction  - diabetes.

I take diabetes as an example of adverse reactions to certain drugs for Vera Hassner Sharav of ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP) http://www.ahrp.org/cms/  recently drew the public¹s attention to an article published in the New York Times.   It concerned diabetes induced by psychiatric drugs in epidemic proportions.

Part of Sharav¹s intoduction to the article states:

³A front page report in The New York Times describes a psychotropic drug-induced catastrophe that has befallen patients who obeyed their psychiatrists, and swallowed the antipsychotic drugs prescribed by psychiatrists who insisted the drugs were for the patients own good.

The truth, however, is inescapable-the cover-up no longer sustainable as thousands of patients with drug-induced diabetes come out of the shadows.
Clozapine (Clozaril) and its far more widely prescribed first-cousins, olanzapine (Zyprexa), risperidone (Risperdal), quetiapine (Seroquel) and ziprasidone (Geodon)-are inducing a debilitating, lethal disease--diabetes. The New York Times reports "Studies have indicated that dozens of these patients died from diabetes-related complications."

³To his credit, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, Chairman of psychiatry at Columbia UniversityŠ has acknowledged the drugs' lethal effects:

³ŒIt's bad enough that these people have mental illness, and then they take treatments and they bring on diabetes.  Sort of a cruel irony in this is that all of the drugs do it to some degree, but the ones that have the most effect cause the most weight gain and metabolic side effects. There's increasing discomfort that these are driving up deaths and lowering quality of life.¹²   http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/health/12diabetes.html

(Psychiatric drugs are frequently prescribed inappropriately. A trusting ME patient is a sitting duck.)

Adverse reactions are not confined to diabetes.  They are far reaching as Gary Null, PhD et al point out in their document: Death by Medicine.

³The most stunning statistic however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine, is an astounding 783,936 per year.  It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US.² http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_awsi_death_01.htm

This ties in with a report published in the British Medical Journal.

³Industrial action by doctors in Israel seems to be good for their patients' health. Death rates have dropped considerably in most of the country since physicians in public hospitals implemented a programme of sanctions three months ago, according to a survey of burial societies.²
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/320/7249/1561

It is difficult to compile accurate statistics on preventable medical error for many incidents, if not most, are unreported.  Currents statistics come from hospital records only.  One can hardly wonder at the mounting anger towards those who expect our trust, our respect and our compliance.

Statistics regarding alternative/complementary remedies have not been compiled. It has been said that that is because adverse effects are so few. Certainly, if they were many, the main body of the medical profession would never let us forget it.