The Gigantic Engine that Couldn't

Besides being the author of Half Light, I’ve been dealing with cancer for over four years. There are a lot of emotional opinions about cancer and its treatment, and I’ve heard them all. But I wanted facts, so I began researching. This series of blog posts is meant to provide solid information for people grappling with their own choices. Please don’t be convinced of anything without doing your own research and deciding what works best for you!

Biggest and Best?
The United States has the most costly medical system in the world (1) at over $2.24 trillion per year (2), approximately $7427 per person. It is logical to assume that our system is therefore the best. You get what you pay for, right?
• The U.S. health care system is ranked 37th in the world – behind Costa Rica, Columbia and Dominica.(3)
• The U.S. infant mortality ranking is 29th in the world, down from 12th in 1960.(4)
• The US death rate from lung cancer in the 1990s was nearly twice that of Japan – yet the smoking rate during the same period was twice as high in Japan as in the US.(5)

Cures that Kill
The current health care debate in the US proceeds from the assumption that lack of access to health care is the primary problem: if only everyone can get “approved” treatment for their health problems, we’ll be a much healthier nation. Unfortunately, the research tells a somewhat different story.

• The healing profession is causing more deaths than any condition it tries to treat. Independent researchers place medical treatment ahead of heart disease and cancer as the cause of over 780,000 deaths per year in the US alone.(6)

• Radical surgery for prostate cancer makes no difference in rates of survival. A 23-year clinical study of prostate cancer victims concluded that survival rates were the same for those who had surgery and those who didn’t.(7)

• Unreliable early detection protocols for breast cancer have led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary and disfiguring treatments in the past 30 years. Supposed to increase survival rates through early detection and treatment, the use of routine mammograms in the US beginning in the 1980s has led to an increase in partial and complete mastectomies, radiation treatments, and chemotherapy. Both mammograms and biopsies are difficult to interpret for early-stage conditions. Experts now estimate that only thirty percent of breast irregularities treated with mastectomies, radiation and chemotherapy had the potential to become cancerous.(8)

• Standard vaccines recommended for children and adults may not be safe. Vaccinations have been an accepted weapon in the medical arsenal for many years. The current federal recommendation is for 69 doses of 16 vaccines from birth to age 18. But no studies have ever been conducted to evaluate the long-term effects of these vaccinations. There is mounting evidence that vaccines are associated with the huge increase in the incidence of autism as well as a host of other health problems.(9)

• Historically, vaccinations have had little effect on infectious disease mortality.(10) In nearly all cases, serious infectious diseases had been largely eliminated before the introduction of vaccines. In England and Wales, for example, death rates from pertussis (whooping cough) and measles had declined by over 99% prior to the introduction of vaccines in the 1950s. Scarlett fever showed a similar decline in mortality rates without the use of vaccinations.(11)

Next time, we’ll take a brief look at the pharmacological industry.

(1)World Health Organization statistics.
(2)US Census Bureau, National Health Expenditures, 2008.
(3)World Health Organization statistics.
(4)World Health Organization statistics.
(5)Van der Griendt, Kees, Smokers Prevalence vs. Lung Cancer Rates, 1999.
(6)Null, G, PhD, Dean C, MD, ND, et al, Death By Medicine, 2003.
(7)Iverson, P. et al., Radical Prostatectomy versus Expectant Treatment for Early Carcinoma of the Prostate, Scan. J. Urol. Neprhol. 1995.
(8)Prone to Error: Earliest Steps to Find Cancer, New York Times, July 19, 2010.
(9)National Vaccine Information Center.
(10) See for example United States Disease Death Rates, compiled from Vital Statistics of the United States at http://www.healthsentinel.com/joomla/...
(11) Data from Record of Mortality in England and Wales, Office of National Statistics, 1997, compiled in Bystrianyk, R., Historic Data Shows Vaccines Not Key in Declines in Death from Disease, 2009, http://www.healthsentinel.com/joomla/...