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The US medical system is such a disaster and so very expensive it's now under scrutiny. Most of the dersion is aimed at the pill houses.
Our surgical knowledge has increased phenomenally and we can give you a new liver, heart and two lungs in one day when even the prospect of medium term survivability from merely a heart transplant 40 years ago was 50/50 at best.
But the drugs? omfg. They're a disaster and a half.
o Most of them don't work. call me when you can cure a cold
o They all have side effects. Without exception. There's a reason.
o Patents and $$$ drive research, not health. They replace drugs with new ones that don't work as well but enjoy patent protection.
o They pimp them badly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQZ2UeOTO3I
o The biggest fines ever handed down by the US justice department were exclusively for the pharma industry.
This is the ProPublica report John Oliver mentioned in the video above:
http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/bigpharma
Surgical errors are fairly small, it's the rest that make "iatrogenic illness constitutes the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.[2]"
That is: "iatrogenic disease" which is the medical system itself - kills more people than anything in America except heart disease or cancer. There are those medical doctors that assert the way we treat diseases such as heart and cancer is fundamentally unsound and I don't know if that's true but in the event that it is it means the medical system is actually responsible for the first three leading causes of death in the US today. It can also be shown it is almost certain millions of people are dying from medicines that work but are not subject to patent licensing. So we ignore them and the bodies mount.
Oh and you won't find that statistic about Iatrogenic disease in Wikipedia any more, not because it's not true now but because the pharma industry spends a lot of money on Wikipedia.
Archive.org has it though:
And the reference:
[2] Starfield B (July 2000). "Is US health really the best in the world?" (PDF). JAMA 284 (4): 483–5. doi:10.1001/jama.284.4.483. PMID 10904513.
Wikipedia's resources pertaining to medicine are the exclusive work of the patent medicine industry and are false and misleading in many cases. Greed perpetuates this but you only get to say "of unknown biochemistry" for so many years - when decades go past these non mysteries start to show.
Antibiotics are slowing down, pain pills have made junkies out of half the south, cancer meds are absurdly priced and ultimately useless - that entire industry has made no progress in 80 years and has a cure rate as low as 02% for some drugs the net a 9B profit a year from as one brand and now deaths are *up*. As are profits. And tax exempt "research" to make more of this crap.
So if costs are skyrocketing and deaths are increasing, is there a limit as to how long that goes on unchecked?
Negative progress in pharmaceutical medicine along with brilliant advances in surgery doesn't tell me this was a technical problem or one that science can't answer. Who's brave enough to ask the guy that founded biochemistry and molecular biology and DNA and ask him what he thinks? If that frightens you a little - gotcha.
Any any rate public advocacy groups have pushed this to the wall with the government who now admit it's fucked and getting fuckeeder.
If you've seen "Thank you for smoking" then you'll recognize the spin doctors in the media as they go to work for this.
Millions have died and continue to do so and billions are made while that happens. These people kill more than all the terrorists and natural disasters combined by far, and charge a hell of alot money for a slim chance at a cure to boot.
When pushed, the guvmint will admit it's true. That's a good thing, if they covered this up and we found out... we'd be going for the CDC/NIH budgets. Be aware the percentage of funding to these venerable institutions from the pharma trade is quite high - as it is in medical schools. Harvard walked out because of this a couple of years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/03medschool.html
See also:
1) How drug firms hoodwink medical journals
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/dec/07/health.businessofresearch
Pharmaceutical giants hire ghostwriters to produce articles - then put doctors' names on them.
2) ACADEMIC fraud
Lacasse JR, Leo J (2010) Ghostwriting at Elite Academic Medical Centers in the United States. PLoS Med 7(2): e1000230. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000230
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000230
3) 47 out of 52 milestone cancer studies can't be reproduced
Ref: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html
4) Johns Hopkins
Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/doubts-about-johns-hopkins-research-have-gone-unanswered-scientist-says/2013/03/11/52822cba-7c84-11e2-82e8-61a46c2cde3d_story.html
"The numbers didn’t add up.
Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.
He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.
“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”
This is the closest we have to a medical profession whistleblower:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science
https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe
According to Science Times, the Tuesday science section in The New York Times, scientific retractions are on the rise because of a "dysfunctional scientific climate" that has created a "winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct."
But elsewhere, audacious, falsified research stands unretracted - including the work of authors who actually went to prison for fraud.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9049-why-are-these-fraudulent-papers-not-retracted
5) Up to 90% of medical papers are wrong:
Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269
So, the government admitted it because they had to, they've been ignoring it for years but now theres some focus on pharmaceutical performance and during that time the drugs had got no better, become more expensive and are now killing more people.
Progress, as things have changed, but not for the better.
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