Emergency & trauma medical care saves lives. As do operations for life threatening accidents and illnesses. However, the treatment of chronic disease by conventional medicine has an appalling record. The stats in the link I posted previously speak for themselves.
Physicians are taught a great deal about the diagnosis and treatment of disease symptoms with drugs, so they have become pharmalogically trained. Unfortunately for their patients they learn virtually nothing about health. This is the shameful irony of our so-called ‘health care’ system. And those who dare question the system, especially those within the medical profession, and those who offer an alternative, especially natural health providers, feel the full weight of the trillion dollar Big Pharma industry - and their cronies - upon their necks.
However, if we did as a society revert to a healthier lifestyle, including holistic non-toxic forms of treatment for the ever-increasing chronic diseases plaguing the developed world, not only would our general health improve dramatically but also unnecessary deaths would plummet.
I highly recommend this book it to everyone, but especially to those interested in medicine;
The Truth About the Drug Companies:
How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
In this book, her most recent, Marcia Angell explores pharmaceutical research, deplores the rapidly expanding involvement (and distortion of truth) of Big Pharma, and implores us all (physicians, patients, politicians) to do something about it.
The dust-jacket blurb asserts that Angell, "during her two decades at The New England Journal of Medicine had a front-row seat on the growing corruption of the pharmaceutical industry."
Since leaving the Journal, she's gone behind the curtains of Big Pharma, Big University, and Big Faculty. Drawing on her own work and on her thoughtful analysis of research, company financial statements, and investigative reports into drug development and marketing, Angell writes with the unambiguous and unyielding style that Journal readers came to expect and trust.
"The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion) [in 2002]. Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself." -- Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/other/interviews/angell.html
The book review below, taken from the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, clearly reveals just how corrupt the pharmaceutical and health care industries have become. The book's author, Marcia Angell, M.D., is a former editor in chief of the highly respected Journal. She is currently a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her book, The Truth About the Drug Companies, provides yet another eye-opening example of how greed has taken over many facets of business and government, and offers empowering ideas on what we can do about it.
