In his 2012 book Unaccountable Dr.Marty Makary,a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researcher, shows how mining sickness for profit makes everybody “unaccountable”—hence the book’s title. The book goes on to outline a description of how hospitals are a major cause of death, and how at least 30% of conventional ‘healthcare’ is unnecessary and leads to deadly harm. Almost half of what doctors do is not in synch with the published research evidence, and the resulting mistakes are the fifth leading cause of death—prescription drugs stand at second, depending on which data bases are consulted. The cause? “The corporatization of health care. We need to change the culture of medicine,” says Dr. Makary.
On Toxic Testing and the Corporatization of Medicine A major contributing cause of death is known to be over diagnosis
(actually: misdiagnosis) from tests that claim to serve “prevention” —including the PSA test for prostate cancer, and mammography screening for breast cancer. Both of these tests have resulted in many false positives and unnecessary surgeries. Furthermore, the risk of cancer has been proven to increase in women who get regular mammographies, due to repeated exposures to radiation. (The levels of radiation have now been reduced after U.S. radiologists themselves raised hell about it. The level are still too high, though—radiation on human tissue is bad, period.)
In fact, one of the many seismic shifts in medicine occurred when the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an editorial by Cochrane Collaboration researcher, Peter C.Gotzsche, on October 22, 2011, in which he stated: “The best method we have to reduce the risk of breast cancer is to stop the screening program.”The drug, medical device, and testing industries—as well as thefood and chemical industries—have succeeded in corrupting prescribing behaviour, medical guidelines, entire medical specialty groups,and the government and professional regulatory authorities.
These industries also “support” patient support groups. For example, the American Association of Pediatrics openly invites corporate sponsorship, endorses corn syrup products and their manufacturers, and now is fighting at the international level to stop the removal of mercury from vaccines and other medicines. Similarly, Health Canada protects the proprietary rights of ADHD drug producers despite the growing number of children who have died from taking these drugs.
(Note:Adults don’t die from ADHD drugs, but 600 kids in Canada have died in the past couple of years alone!) Meantime, medical journals continue to run drug advertisements.But thankfully, journals such as PLOS Medicine that don’t accept drug ads have overtaken the others in prestige and readership. PLOS is now the biggest science journal in the world—and the most respected
In medicine, business as usual is no longer an option: there are too many dead bodies and the carnage is too expensive. So, for example, America’s largest insurance group, Kaiser Permanente, began conducting the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) study. ACE has produced more than 60 major research papers showing how much more financially efficient and effective psychiatric intervention can be when first considering one of the major sources of mental health problems—emotional trauma—before handing out ultimately inefective, almost certainly toxic, and very costly drugs.
