According to several studies, including those done by the CDC and many others reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, prescription drugs are one of the leading killers in the United States.
It's a little hard to get a handle on just how many accidental deaths are caused by prescription drugs because the most reliable sources never combine into one study all of the ways prescription drugs kill people.
For example, in April 2008 the CDC testified to congress that 22,400 people died by unintentional prescription drug overdoses in 2005, and that exceeded murder by about 5,000 deaths.
But as high as 22,400 deaths sounds, it doesn't include the number of deaths caused by adverse reactions from prescription drugs.
One study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association puts that number at 106,000 deaths per year. The same study reports that more than two million people are hospitalized each year because of unexpected reactions to drugs prescribed by doctors.
If you add the 22,400 deaths from accidental overdoses to the 106,000 people who die from adverse reactions to prescription drugs, the total is 128,400 accidental deaths a year from prescription drugs. But, this 128,400 still doesn't include tens of thousands more that die in American hospitals from errors made by doctors and nurses giving the wrong drug to patients.
However, using the 128,400 estimated deaths reported by these studies, the number of Americans killed accidentally by prescription drugs is more than three times the number of people killed in automobile accidents each year, 25 times the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war, 43 times the number of Americans that died on 9/11, and it keeps on happening every year.
For obvious reasons, including doctors' professional reputations and increased costs of liability insurance, it's widely accepted that doctors don't report all the deaths caused by prescription drugs. Many experts conclude the number of deaths caused by prescription drugs is likely to be more than twice as high as reported. That would put the number of accidental deaths caused by prescription drugs at more than 250,000 deaths per year.
The reason for the huge number of deaths is that a large number of prescription drugs are poisons designed to block the body's ability to cause a symptom by interfering with the normal biological functions of the body.
A few tiny prescription pills can knock you stone dead, and that's exactly what these pills do to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans every single day.
When your doctor hands you a prescription, does he ever mention that you were gambling with your life when you swallowed the pills he prescribes?
On top of the 128,400 reported deaths caused each year by prescription drugs shortly after the drugs are taken, are the slow deaths and diseases experienced by millions more Americans caused by taking Symptom Masking Maintenance Drugs for long periods of time.
Symptom Masking Maintenance Drugs
Imagine driving down the road in your car. You don't know it but a tiny hole has worn into a hose, a hole that's causing a very slow leak of the fluid that keeps the engine in your car cool. Over the last five thousand miles, just enough coolant has leaked out to cause your engine to overheat a little.
The small hole in the hose is your car's first underlying problem. The second underlying problem is the engine over-heating a little. Suddenly a red light appears on your dashboard. The red light is a symptom.
You continue on your way home and park your car for the night. On your way to work the next day, the red light comes on again. A week goes by and you begin to be annoyed by the red light on the dashboard so you take a piece of masking tape and put it over the red light.
You pride yourself with the brilliant display of ingenuity of eliminating the aggravating red light.
But a week later, while sitting in traffic your engine burns up and smoke starts rolling out from under the hood. Your car is dead.
Sound ridiculous? Well, this example pretty much sums up the practice of prescribing symptom masking maintenance drugs.
Only the symptom masking drugs are worse because the poisons they contain cause new underlying problems.
Any drug that's taken week after week, month after month, year after year with no attempt to find a different solution to the underlying medical problem is a maintenance drug. Maintenance drugs are pills taken every day for 365 days a year, at some other frequent interval, or when a recurring aggravating symptom occurs.
Your health depends upon making sure the drugs prescribed by your doctor to be taken on a daily basis for months or years at a time are not just covering up symptoms as is unfortunately the case with many drugs doctors prescribe.
Drugs that mask symptoms don't do anything to solve the underlying problem your body is facing. Since they don't do anything to solve the problem, the problem will most often get worse and you'll eventually have to take drugs that are more powerful or add more pills to those you already take.
The same way that covering up the red warning light on your dash board will cause your car to die, using pills to mask symptoms year after year often leads to more severe disease and death.
It's important to know what a symptom is.
Common symptoms are pain, swelling, rashes, fever, fatigue, head-aches, dizziness, light-headedness, hot flashes, sleeplessness, anxiety, tingling in your fingers or toes, blood in the urine, and stiffness in the joints.
Symptoms are unwanted conditions and experiences that cause you to run to the doctor. Symptoms are annoying, painful, or ugly conditions.
But you have to understand that these annoying, painful or ugly symptoms are not really the problem you have. These are only symptoms that let you know right away that the body is faced with a problem. Every annoying or painful condition is a symptom that has an underlying problem.
The underlying problem that is causing the annoying, painful or ugly symptoms, the challenge the body is facing are things such as; a nutritional deficiency, an infection caused by bacteria or virus, excessive consumption of any one of thousands of chemicals added to food, an allergy, eating too many carbohydrates(sugar), too much vegetable oil, or too much sugar, exposure to a toxin in your environment, excessive caffeine, a damaged organ, stress, exposure to a pesticide, drinking too much alcohol, a food ingredient such as MSG or Aspartame, a combination of many of the above or any one of thousands of other problems that are making it difficult for the body to work properly, problems that cause symptoms. When the body is facing one or a combination of these underlying problems, they result in symptoms that let you know there's a problem.
Again, although symptoms are painful, annoying or unsightly, they're only symptoms, they're not the cause of the problem.
The way to restore your health is to determine what causes the symptom, to determine the underlying problem, then to remove or fix the underlying problem so the body is no longer challenged. When the problem is solved, the symptom will automatically disappear and continued medication isn't necessary.
But most maintenance drugs prescribed by doctors only cover up or mask the symptom. As soon as you stop taking the drug, the symptoms reappear.
There's usually no attempt to fix the underlying problem. Many times the doctor won't even try to learn what the underlying problem is. The doctor just knows what pill to prescribe that makes the symptom go away. But since the underlying problem hasn't been addressed, the symptom may return requiring a stronger pill, or an altogether different symptom may appear causing the doctor to prescribe a second medication designed to stop the new symptom.
Most drugs that cover up symptoms are powerful poisons that cause the body to react in ways that stop the symptom. Because they're poisons, they not only don't do anything to fix the underlying problem, they actually harm the body, as any toxin will. And because the underlying problem continues, you must continue to take the drug indefinitely. That's the intent of maintenance drugs that mask symptoms, to keep you taking them forever. They're a money making racket.
An indication that a maintenance drug may be a toxic substance is that it has a long list of harmful side affects. Other indications that a drug may be a toxin is that it's a controlled substance or the quantity of the active ingredient necessary to make a sudden or dramatic impact on the body is less than 100 milligrams.
How can a poison help the body? It can't. Poisonous drugs only trigger responses in the body that eliminate symptoms. Poisons don't cure. Think about it.
Antibiotics are an exception. These drugs attack bacteria that cause infection. But they're not maintenance drugs either. Doctors prescribe antibiotics for short-term use. They're not designed to be taken for 365 days a year, year after year.
Some prescription drugs also provide substances that the body normally produces but which are not being produced in sufficient quantities to avoid symptoms. While these drugs may be used as maintenance drugs and taken 365 days a year, they really aren't toxins. But in many cases, instead of taking this type of drug, the body can produce sufficient quantities of the needed substance if it's given all the nutrients it needs, and the things that are making it difficult for the body to produce them are eliminated from the diet or environment.
When you take a poisonous maintenance drug that masks a symptom, when you take a drug that makes the symptom go away but doesn't remove the underlying cause of the symptom, your body faces two problems.
The first problem your body faces is the underlying problem that caused the annoying or painful symptom that first caused you to go to the doctor. You really don't know what the underlying problem is because no one tried to find out what it is. Remember, the drug didn't eliminate the underlying problem; it just stopped the symptom by using a poison that caused the body to react in a way that made it impossible for the symptom to continue. The second problem is elimination of the toxin in the drug you're now taking to stop the first symptom.
Because the body is now facing a new problem that weakens it, the body will eventually send another signal to tell you that the poison in the drug is making it hard for it to cope. The signal will be another symptom such as a soreness, a weakness, swelling, aching, headaches, blurred vision, loss of balance, burning when you urinate, rashes, fever, any of hundreds of symptoms to let you know there is a new underlying problem with which it needs help. The new underlying problem is the powerful poison in the drug you're taking that's designed to cover up the original symptom.
When your doctor learns of the new symptom, even though your new symptom may be listed as one of the dozens of side effects of the first symptom masking drug your taking, he will often give you a second drug that stops the side affect of the first drug.
The new toxic drug will stimulate a reaction in the body that counteracts the body's reaction and the new symptom will be gone.
Then the body will have three underlying problems;
1) the problem that caused the first symptom which hasn't been determined yet,
2) coping with the toxin in the first symptom masking drug, and
3) coping with the toxin in the second symptom masking drug that's designed to mask the side affect of the first symptom masking drug
Now that you're body is fighting two toxic drugs in addition to the original challenge that hasn't yet been identified, your body is weaker and facing more challenges. In time, your body will send yet another signal, another symptom telling you that it's not coping, or the first symptom will come back and be worse than it was when you first went to the doctor.
And, I think you know what your friendly doctor will prescribe when you tell him of this new symptom. Right, another patented toxic maintenance drug that triggers a response in the body that covers the new symptom but which further weakens the body because the immune system must now eliminate the poisons from a third toxic pill.
Maintenance drugs don't solve the body's difficulties. They add to the body's difficulties. But they sure do make huge profits for the pharmaceutical industry. Once you begin taking expensive little pills every day, once you begin to take expensive toxic drugs designed to mask symptoms, the body will become weaker and weaker and your doctor will keep shuffling back and forth between different toxic pills trying to match them with your changing symptoms. And for 365 days a year for the rest of your life, you'll be taking little toxic pills, pills that cost pennies to manufacture but which sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars each year.
This is one of the best moneymaking rackets ever devised. In a 2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, it was determined that 44 percent of Americans were taking at least one prescription drug and that 17 percent were taking three or more prescription drugs. Moreover, large portions of these drugs are paid for from the taxes you and I pay that are then funneled back to the pharmaceutical companies through Medicare, Medicaid and other federal drug programs. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars!
Don't let your doctor convince you of the need to take toxic maintenance drugs to mask symptoms. Hire a doctor who will help you determine the underlying problem. Work with your doctor to find out what's causing your body to experience pain, fatigue, swelling, dizziness, headache, or whatever annoying symptom you have.
A doctor's efforts to determine the underlying problem will include blood tests for levels of toxins, nutrients, antibodies, and many other indicators. The doctor will discuss your diet, any stressors such as toxins that may exist in your work place or at home, the history of different diseases experienced by your ancestors and family members, the possibility that you may have allergies and dozens of other stressors in the environment, food or water that may be causing the symptom you're experiencing.
And the doctor will continue researching and working with you until identifying the cause of your rash, pain, fatigue, swelling, dizziness, numbness or whatever symptom you have. When he determines the cause of your symptom, he will prescribe a more nutritious diet, vitamin supplements, antibiotics, exercise and other things that help your body defeat the stress that is causing the symptom. On the other hand, he may recommend you discontinue eating certain foods or work on a plan of eliminating toxins from your diet or your environment that may be stimulating the symptoms.
The approach a doctor takes to eliminating the underlying problem will look more like the Five Step Naturopathic Approach to Healing and Perfect Health described in chapter 16 of this book. It will not include prescription of toxic drugs that trigger reactions in your body to cover up the symptoms you have.
A good place to look for a doctor who will take this approach to healing is in the listings of Naturopathic Doctors, or ND's.
For the same reasons it wasn't such a good idea to cover up the annoying red light on the dashboard of the car, it might be best if your doctor didn't give you a pill to cover up the symptom because if the symptom is gone, it will make it harder to identify the underlying problem.
Cholesterol lowering drugs are a good example of a toxic maintenance drug you should never take. First, your doctor determines that your blood cholesterol level is at a level that the medical and pharmaceutical industries have published as being excessive. Then he or she prescribes a toxic cholesterol lowering statin drug that changes the chemistry of the liver and the blood by reducing the liver's ability to make cholesterol and other essential life supporting compounds such as Co-Q-10.
Does it really make sense to take a drug that interferes with the production of several compounds that are necessary for the life support functions of the body?
Your liver is busy making cholesterol, apparently because your body thinks it needs the extra cholesterol. But the doctor thinks the medical and pharmaceutical industries know more about how much cholesterol you need than does your body. Or he simply wants to keep his job as simple as possible. So he writes a prescription for statin drugs and you begin taking pills that attack the liver's enzyme producing function, enzymes and products important in the body's hormonal balance and energy production.
What if your body was right? What if your body knows a lot more about how much cholesterol it needs than those who publish medical guidelines for doctors, people who have never even seen you? Your doctor didn't look at anything but the cholesterol level. He never even considered that the body might be making the extra cholesterol for a reason.
Cholesterol is used in the production of a myriad of crucial life sustaining substances including vitamin D, testosterone, estrogen and many other hormones that regulate body functions. Cholesterol is a powerful antioxidant that fends off free radical damage such as is caused by free radicals in unsaturated vegetable oils. Cholesterol is used in the production of bile, and cholesterol helps give structural support to cells. Cholesterol aids in the fight against cancer. And, cholesterol is the material the body uses to patch small fissures in the coronary arteries caused by years of inflammation from excessive carbohydrate(sugar) consumption and exposure to various other chemical compounds added to our artificial food supply. (See chapter four for more about the important functions of cholesterol.)
If the doctor truly believed high cholesterol is an important symptom that must be addressed, he would try to determine the underlying problem. And once he determined the cause of the symptom, he could eliminate the cause, your cholesterol level would automatically drop and you wouldn't have to take a toxic pill every day.
But instead, he simply read the report from your blood test then followed the rules of his job, acted as agent for the pharmaceutical industry and sold you a daily dose of toxic pills that make it impossible for the liver to make as much cholesterol and other important life sustaining compounds as it once did.
Taking drugs to attack the liver's cholesterol production capacity is fighting against the natural and necessary healthful operation of the body's mechanisms. Because death from all causes is lower when you have high cholesterol, it's obvious the body does know what its doing when it makes extra cholesterol.
The scientific tests pharmaceutical companies use to demonstrate the effectiveness of statin drugs have nothing to do with cholesterol. Along with the dangerous interference with the liver's normal production of important cholesterol and enzymes, statin drugs also reduce inflammation of the coronary arteries. Inflammation is the real cause of coronary heart disease. But, this inflammation can be easily reduced by supplementing the diet with vitamins C and E, reducing the consumption of carbohydrates (sugar) to get blood insulin levels under control and cutting back on eating foods with trans fats found in all foods made with vegetable oils.
Instead of using natural means to eliminate inflammation in the body, ways that make the body stronger, toxic cholesterol lowering statin drugs attack the body's normal function of the liver and cause several problems.
First, because the body uses cholesterol to repair coronary arteries caused by inflammation, the body's coronary artery maintenance system is weakened.
Second, because cholesterol is important for the maintenance of cell structure, the entire body will be weakened if the extra cholesterol was being made by the liver to overcome a problem that affected cell membranes.
Third, because statin drugs reduce the production of Coenzyme Q-10, the muscles of the body, including the heart muscle, have less energy. Less energy causes fatigue.
Fourth, cholesterol is used by the body to make many important hormones including all the sex hormones, and others that fight cancer.
Fifth, Cholesterol is used by the body to make vitamin D. Reducing cholesterol potentially reduces the body's ability to produce sufficient amounts of this important vitamin that's already deficient in most people because of sun-fear and living in climates where for most of the year the sun isn't strong enough to help our bodies convert cholesterol to vitamin D.
Sixth, cholesterol is manufactured by the liver for use as an antioxidant. Therefore, reducing the amount of cholesterol increases the risk of cancer and other diseases caused by free radicals.
Seventh, the body was intentionally making extra cholesterol to improve the functioning of the body, to overcome an underlying problem that it faced. Taking statin drugs interferes with the body's natural system of health maintenance.
The underlying problem that most often leads to heart disease is inflammation. Instead of worrying about your cholesterol level, instead of worrying about the material your body intentionally makes to prevent heart attacks, start worrying about your insulin levels and getting enough vitamins to eliminate the inflammation, especially vitamin C.
Don't take expensive toxic pills every day that only make the symptoms go away and give the body more problems while the original underlying problem keeps working against the body. Find out what is causing the symptom. Find out the underlying problem, then eliminate the nutritional deficiency that is causing the problem, remove the stressor in food or the environment that is making life difficult for the body, eliminate the bacteria or virus that may be causing the problem, get more exercise, or do a combination of all of these and the symptom will automatically disappear or become more tolerable.
An MD cannot make a single dollar until you are sick. So, they have absolutely no training in medical school on what you should do to stay healthy.
So, stop relying on MD's for health and nutritional information.
I have 27 years investigating nutrition and nutritional cures. If you want a complete guide to getting healthy and staying healthy, visit us at [http://www.PerfectHealthInstitute.com]
The government issues the license of Certified Public Accountant (CPA) to designate people qualified to perform investigations of the finances and operations of corporations and to give opinions on these finances and operations.
As a CPA conducting financial and operational examinations for a government agency that regulates corporations, and later as a CPA doing financial examinations for a multi-billion dollar international corporation, Springer personally experienced how people who are "just doing their job" unknowingly support institutional greed or have no feeling of responsibility or wrongdoing. Moreover, after generations of employees coming and going, the immoral consequences of policy are completely lost within a menagerie of procedures done repeatedly without thought by employees who can say with all honesty, "I just work here".
In 1981, Springer began investigating the discrepancy between the claim of the American Medical Association that taking vitamins just made "expensive urine", and the claims of several medical doctors who were using vitamins to effectively cure and treat many diseases and sickness.
His investigation of nutrition and nutritional cures spanned 28 years and included critical analysis of more than 40 books and hundreds of other publications with an investment of over 4,000 hours. Because this study required more than 13 times the time required to obtain his bachelor degree in accounting and CPA license, Springer considers himself a nutritionist first, and a CPA second.
They're Making You Fat and Sick is his report on this 28 year investigation.
The finding of this investigation is that health and profit are competing interests. Because the corporate profit motive is one of the most powerful forces in our nation, profit is winning this competition. As a result, the food industry and the health care industry are the most profitable industries but both fail in promoting good health.
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