The first study of injury and illness created by the medical profession was published by Dr. Lucian L. Leape in 1994 in the Journal of American Medical Association. He compiled information from a number of sources on iatrogenic* injuries. Here’s a summary of some of the information he included in his report:

Steel: Reported in 1981 that 36% of hospitalizations suffered iatrogenic injuries with a 25% fatality rate.

Bedell: Reported in 1991 that 64% of acute heart attacks in one hospital were preventable and mostly due to adverse drug reactions.

Leape and Brennan: In New York State, in 1984, there was a 4% iatrogenic injury rate for patients with a 14% fatality rate.

Leape also calculated the rate of error in an intensive care unit.

He found that each patient studied had an average of 178 “activities” (staff/procedure/medical interactions)per day, of which 1.7 were errors, which means a 1% failure rate.

To put this failure rate into perspective, a similar failure rate in other industries would mean that the U.S. Postal Service would lose 16,000 pieces of mail every hour; in banking, 32,000 bank checks would deducted from the wrong account every hour. But these medical errors are generally ignored by the media except for a few of the most extreme examples.

One’s best bet? Intelligent use of alternative healthcare to stay healthy!

SOURCE: DEATH BY MEDICINE, Dr. Gary Null, Ph.D., Dr. Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D., Martin Feldman, M.D., Debora Rasio, M.D., Dorothy Smith, Ph.D., page . *Iatrogenic: Induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures.