The Great Medical Myth

Medicine is now perceived as the means of extending your life and freeing you from pain. To support this belief, Americans are now spending over twenty cents out of each dollar and are currently planning to spend even more.

It is surprising, therefore, that no one seems to be asking if they are getting their money’s worth in terms of a longer, more fruitful life. It is also surprising that the data that proves how ineffective modern medicine is in terms of increasing either life expectancy or health is so readily available through the US Government’s Vital Statistics, the U.S. Department of Health as well as the AMA.  Most of the following information is readily available through the yearly almanacs.

The following graph depicts the life expectancy rates for white males of different ages (females and other races differ only slightly) for the years between 1900 and 2002.

The first surprise is that the average 80-year-old person in 1850 could expect to continue to live nearly as long as does an average person today. A 10-year-old, however, is expected to live 16 years longer today than the average 10-year-old did in 1850. The former extremely low life expectancies of the newborn reflects some real abuses⁽¹⁾  to infants in the early years which lowered their survival rate. The following table presents the actual data taken from the Vital Statistics for those who are interested in details. The table includes a calculated life expectancy for a new born which assumes the same natural increase in age. This increase is of course quite interesting since it demonstrates a dominant increase in health with aging that is generally not realized.  

Table 1
Life Expectancy in Years to Live

(A male infant born in 1990 can be expected to have 73 years ahead of him, whereas a man of 60 only has 19 more expected years.)

The next table shows the death rates per 100,000 population for various diseases for the years between 1900 and 2002.

Table 2
Death Rates per 100,000⁽²⁾

Not shown are the death rates from smallpox, cholera, diphtheria and whooping cough which were dropping similar to TB and measles.

The remaining question is, what role did modern medicine play in the above tables and graph? Obviously the diseases claimed to be most responsive to modern antibiotics started dropping long before the drugs appeared on the market. Pneumonia and flu actually show a slight increase after the introduction of antibiotics. The recent decrease in heart disease and cancer are credited to the decrease in tobacco consumption but are also well above their levels of 1900.

The common claim that is heard in advertisements and even within a few scientific statements that life expectancy has increased from 40 years in 1900 to well over 70 today is certainly not good science and can at best be called comparing apples to oranges. The statement that modern medicine or even modern sanitation caused the increase in longevity is certainly unsupported.

Thus it appears that medicine doesn’t help us live longer. Perhaps instead, medicine makes us healthier? We all know people who have been greatly assisted by medical care. However, we all also know or suspect that medicine has debilitated or killed others that we knew.

Medicine has a name for those ailments or deaths that are caused by medicine, iatrogenic, which means “physician originated”. The American Medical Association recently reported ⁽³⁾ that over 10% of the admissions to a Critical Care Unit were due to medically induced diseases. The percentage of hospital patients acquiring a medically induced illness is given as varying from 2% to as high as 36% across the nation. Of those who acquire an iatrogenic illness, the mortality rate can be as high as 20%. The AMA reported earlier that 20% of patients admitted to a hospital suffered iatrogenic injuries with 14% of these cases being fatal. These numbers add to over 100,000 deaths per year in the US hospitals. That would make iatrogenic disease the fourth ranking cause of death preceded by heart failure, cancer, and stroke.

One number given by many physicians is that medicine cannot help 80% of their patients other than by alleviating their symptoms. A recent study by the AMA ⁽⁴⁾ reported that up to 80% of the patients tested by physicians demonstrated no known physiological or organic cause for their disorders. Most of these types of ailments are labeled as psychosomatic.

The above statistics suggest that roughly out of 100 patients who seek medical assistance, 80 will be unchanged as to the course of the illness, 10 will be made worse, leaving only 10 who will be improved. Of the 10 made worse 2 will die, and of the 10 made better, if the preceding mortality rates are considered, 2 will live that otherwise might have died. This keeps the mortality rates unaffected by the advent of modern super drugs. The net score for medicine is, therefore, no decrease in overall mortality rates as the data indicates, but an improvement in the value of life for some and a decrease in the value of life for others. (It should be noted that these figures are an average of all ailments and some ailments would be expected to have very few iatrogenic complaints, whereas some may have a very high incidence. Similarly, some cases may have little improvement with medicine, whereas some others may have a high improvement rate. This means, of course, that discretion is required, and that patients need to have far more understanding of treatment or require some unbiased advice from someone who is not profiting by their further treatment.)

Concerning pain, almost all of us know of people dying with cancer asking for more painkillers or death. Doctors argue that they cannot administer sufficient pain killers to alleviate severe pain because: 1) it is possible that the patient might recover and then be addicted to the pain killer, 2) the administering of more pain killer may contribute to the death of the patient, 3) if doctors do not follow prescribed drug administration rules, they may be liable for law suits.

Connected with the issue of painkillers is that of the administration of psychoactive or mind altering drugs used to “calm” individuals. These drugs have very serious side effects as reported by the manufacturers, and there are many stories in popular magazines and newspapers about their misuse; however, very little actual data is available. This is no doubt due to the inability to prove whether the side effect is due to iatrogenic or natural causes. Both iatrogenic and natural ailments may result in such things as: loss of motor function, speech impairment, coordination, mental acuity and simple inattention. Any nursing home, for instance, can claim that the immobility and speech impairment of patients is caused by senility and not their medication.

A comparison can be made with our ancestors who could freely purchase any drug they wished without a prescription from the local pharmacy. This, of course, was before the AMA formed the present alliance with Government to bring medicine under control. The argument given for control was that people were buying patent or worthless medicine and could kill themselves by taking the wrong medicine. However, it is doubtful that, even at the worst, the populace could have killed themselves at anywhere near the present rate of about 100,000 dying from drug-induced iatrogenic illnesses in the US. As to modern drugs being superior to the old patent medicines, further questions certainly could be raised. In any case, the money wasted on patent medicines in the past is certainly a small amount compared to the money spent on doubtful modern treatments offered by some physicians and clinics.

In other words, the rise of the powerful and costly Medical-Government complex cannot demonstrate any overall increase in life and comfort compared to the inexpensive, free choice medicine used by our ancestors or even by the medical treatment offered by other cultures and alternative systems.

1) Infant Mortality, Ancient and Modern, An Historical Sketch, Holt, L.E., Archives of Pediatrics    30:885-915, 1913

2) National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Dept. Health and Human Services

3) AMA, Archives of Internal Medicine Volume 159 Number 1, January 11, 1999

4) Journal of the AMA, December 21,1994: 1851-57

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