We now spend more on health care than ever before, and the medical profession is apparently more scientific and better equipped than ever before, so there is a savage irony in the fact that we have now reached the point where, on balance, well-meaning doctors in general practice and highly trained, well-equipped specialists working in hospitals do more harm than good. The epidemic of iatrogenic disease which has always scarred medical practice has been steadily getting worse and today most of us would, most of the time, be better off without a medical profession.
Most developed countries now spend around 8% of their gross national products on health care (the Americans spend considerably more – around 12-14%) but through a mixture of ignorance, incompetence, prejudice, dishonesty, laziness, paternalism and misplaced trust doctors are killing more people than they are saving and they are causing more illness and more discomfort than they are alleviating.
Most developed countries now spend around 1% of their annual income on prescription drugs and doctors have more knowledge and greater access to powerful treatments than ever before, but there has probably never been another time in history when doctors have done more harm than they do today.
It is true, of course, that doctors save thousands of lives by, for example, prescribing life-saving drugs or by performing essential life-saving surgery on accident victims.
But when the medical profession, together with the pharmaceutical industry, claims that it is the advances in medicine which are responsible for the fact that life expectancy figures have risen in the last one hundred years or so they are wrong. It is, for example, commonly claimed that modern scientific medicine has led to improvements in life expectancy in most developed countries from around 55 at the start of the century to over 70 today.
The evidence, however, does not support this claim.
Any (small) improvement in life expectancy which has occurred in the last hundred years is not related to developments in the medical profession or to the growth of the international drug industry. However, the increase in iatrogenesis is related to both these factors.
Whichever facts you look they at seem to support my contention that although doctors may do a limited amount of good, they do a great deal more harm.
If doctors really did help people stay alive then you might expect to find that the countries which had the most doctors would have the best life expectation figures. But that isn’t the case at all.
Hellbound and Down 