Terrorist attacks killed 2,996 people in 9/11. This is counting the unfortunate passengers on the four airliners and it has since been said that was the most tragic day in the history of the U.S.

Four commercial jets crashed that day……. Let’s imagine if six jumbo jets crashed every day in the US. That would claim the lives of over 750,000 people every year? No one could disagree that it would be a worse tragedy even than 9/11.

This tragedy is happening right now. Over 750,000 people actually do die in the United States every year, although not from plane crashes. They die from something far more common and rarely perceived by the public as dangerous: modern medicine.

Dr’s. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith concluded a report in 2003 called ‘Death by Medicine’. It showed that more than three quarters of a million people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes which is the equivalent of six jumbo jet crashes a day for an entire year.

Peter Charalambos

I don’t think that anyone has gotten to the bottom of this yet, but I also think that it can only be a good thing for consumers to be seeking as much information as they can find (even if it’s inaccurate or incomplete) and talking about it with their friends, family, social networks . . . and yes, their doctors.

Doctors have as much to learn in these conversations as they do to teach.

Diverse professionals bring valuable points of view, experience, and ideas to health onversations: medical librarians, pharmacists, farmers herbalists, physical therapists, exercise scientists, medical researchers, anthropologists, and others.

Much of the best health information comes from ordinary laypeople who share the deep, concrete knowledge that comes from living and coping with illness, or whose stories of personal change can motivate others to adopt health-promoting behaviors.

This site has as its mission blowing the whistle on conflicts of interest and misinformation. (Jeff should be happy with this instance of citizen journalism.)

http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/

If the professional parts of the medical information system can’t be trusted why think that the areas aimed at the general public will be any better?

From this sentence alone we can conclude that the Observer is at least 33% inaccurate.

I’d trust the results of a Google search before I trusted what a newspaper said.

My GF is a nurse, and she has to be very careful with what she tells patients, because they regularly misinterpret advice. We all have different allergies, different medical conditions, different genes. What works for one patient could have disastrous consequences for someone else.

I think lawsuits are the biggest barrier to what you’re prescribing here.

[As an aside, it appears that the article itself is at least 50 per cent inaccurate when citing the estimate of those web sites dealing with nutrition in that they cannot be both 45 per cent and 89 percent inaccurate at the time.]

What is doesn’t show is the results of studies that test the accuracy of medical journal articles and doctor’s advice regarding cancer and nutrition. There is simply no way a physician can keep up on the release of new information on either topic.
Is there anyone who doubts that doctors would give out at least as variable the percentages cited for web sites?

Even Jeff’s suggestion in his book that doctors create their own websites and curate the information is not a panacea. Looking at just the issues of cancer and of nutrition there are various and (apparently) growing numbers of schools of thought about each and which contradict each other more with the passage of time rather than less.

With the expansion of information on the internet, even with 100 per cent adoption of Jarvis’s curated scheme, the role of any treating physician as the font of wisdom will continue to fall. The “priesthood of medicine ” is toast and the sooner both the priests and the parishioners realize that the better.