The #1 Cause of Accidental Death in America

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/11/24/modern-medicine-disease-treatments.aspx?e_cid=20111124_DNL_art_1

EXCERPT:

With all its designer drugs and state-of-the-art machinery, you'd think modern medicine is the perfect fix for providing patient-focused care.

You might also expect that Americans would be the healthiest people on Earth, seeing that the U.S. is the epicenter of all this technology, and especially since we spend more on health care than any other country in the world.

Yet, every year in the U.S., seven out of 10 deaths are due to preventable chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, stroke, and obesity.

How can that be?

How is it that we're not just chronically ill, but also lagging behind most industrialized nations in life expectancy?

The answer lies in how we approach health care: like it or not, the real focus of modern medicine is on selling disease and making money, not making you well.

In her book, "Death by Modern Medicine," Dr. Carolyn Dean talks about how, for well over a century, the definition of health care has been pills-and-drugs. It's a deliberately schemed and manipulated paradigm that's been packaged and sold through:

• The insurance industry's (including Medicare's and Medicaid's) methodology for payment, which doesn't recognize nutritional care or proven naturopathic approaches to health care
• Direct-to-Consumer advertising
• Influencing physicians and other health care providers through gifts, honoraria for speaking engagements, and financial support for training programs, which is simply another form of advertising
• Intense lobbying by PhRMA and individual drug makers such as Merck and Pfizer

Big Bucks for Buying Doctors' Attention

When it comes to making payments to physicians it wants to influence, the pharmaceutical industry is very generous, Pharma Marketing Blog notes:

"Last year (2010) a mere dozen pharmaceutical companies paid $760 million to physicians and other health care providers for consulting, speaking, research and expenses, according to ProPublica's 'Dollars for Docs' project."

These "gifts" ranged from $50 to $2,000 for a single meal, to thousands of dollars for speaking fees, ProPublica said. In fact, one pain specialist, Gerald M. Sacks, allegedly racked in $270,825 from four different Big Pharma companies in one year! Whether that bonus income influenced Dr. Sacks' prescribing practices is unknown, but what we do know is that just between 1997 and 2005, the amount of five major painkillers sold in the U.S. jumped 90 percent – and in 2011 prescription drug overdoses replaced car accidents as the No. 1 reason for accidental deaths in the U.S., with painkillers topping the list.

It's scandalous how this happens, Dr. Dean says, because when it's all said and done, the advertising and marketing aren't even based on science!