Second Opinion
This is the first of a new series of articles by medical writer and researcher Peter Wilberg MA. Peter Wilberg is the founder of a new form of existential and humanistic counselling for medical patients called ‘Life Medicine’. He is also the author of several books on medicine including The Illness IS the Cure - an introduction to Life Medicine and Life Doctoring, a new existential approach to illness. The English edition, available from Amazon, has been translated into Czech and Slovenian by Eugenika.sk, and can be ordered in the Czech Republic and Slovakia from online bookshops under the title Nemoc Léčí.
- Death by Medicine
What is the leading medical cause of death? Cancer? Heart disease? Traumatic injuries? Many readers may be surprised to learn that the single biggest medical cause of death is in fact medical treatment itself - and medically prescribed drugs in particular. We are speaking, in other words, of what is called ‘iatrogenic’ illness’ - illnesses of a sort caused or generated by iatro- (Greek for physicians or medicines). The fact that modern medicine kills is not just a wild conspiracy theory. Peer-reviewed, evidence-based articles in prestigious medical journals like the BMJ (British Medical Journal) and JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) admitted this fact decades ago - and comprehensive supporting evidence and statistics can be found also in Death by Medicine by Gary Null. Yet this research has been consistently ignored in order to maintain the profits of the Medical-Industrial Complex and Big Pharma.
Is the huge fatality rate resulting from medical treatment and prescriptions only an American or UK phenomenon? Not at all. And what about the Czech Republic in particular? Here is just one example - one of very many - of negligent, dangerous or even life-threatening medications prescribed by doctors in Prague. In this case they were given to a patient who I know very well. He has a severe and chronic respiratory disease (emphysema), had recently had a myocardial infarct or ‘heart attack’ needing immediate surgery, had symptoms associated with a highly enlarged prostate - including passing a lot of blood and blood clots in his urine. He also suffers from loss of sleep because of frequently waking and needing to urinate in the night. One evening, he was taken to the emergency department of two very known Prague hospitals, or which we went to for urinal bleeding, the other because he was very worried about what are medically recognised symptoms of severe heart failure (high blook pressure combined with extreme weakness dizziness and coldness in his hands, feet and legs) that he had experienced in the morning. Yet because the symptoms had subsided and no longer registered on a heart monitor by the time he was taken to hospital, his fears were ridiculed by the doctor he saw. But - and here the story begins to bite - the three prescriptions he was given were:
- Five tablets of a brand of ‘sleeping pills’ - even though the patient had no problems going to sleep at night, but was only losing sleep because of frequent night time urination (nocturia). Checking out this prescription I discovered that it was among the most addictive type of prescription drugs (benzodiazepines) that exist - called Xanax in the United States. Benzodiazepine type drugs like Diazepam and Xanax (Alprazolam) have caused an epidemic of involuntary addiction and dependency for over half a century now, starting with Valium - ‘Mother’s little helper’ - which was first marketed by a member of the now infamous billionaire Sackler family - the same family whose pain killing drugs also caused the recent and massive opioid addiction crisis in the US. But just five pills of Xanax are easily enough to cause lifelong addiction.
- A drug for pain. Why? The patient had not himself complained of any pains - even chest pains - which are not a primary symptom of heart failure. But if he had used this drug to suppress chest pains that were signs of another heart attack, this could have been very dangerous or even fatal. This particular pain-killing drug has also been banned or more than 40 years in more than 30 countries - including the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and most of Western Europe - because it can and has killed patients by destroying their red blood cells.
- A drug to stop the patient's urinal bleeding. This drug is sometimes given to women who bleed a lot during menstruation, but it is extremely dangerous - and could also be fatal - to give to a patient who is passing not only blood but blood clots in his urine. Suppressing the release of these clots could lead to them becoming an embolism that blocks an artery instead of coming out in urine. The same drug would also have worked directly against the effect of a heart medication the patient was taking, by promoting instead of preventing the creation of dangerous blood clots or embolisms.
Patients are generally advised to read the information leaflets that come with their medical prescriptions very carefully - or at least they are told to do so in the leaflets themselves. But it seems that most doctors don’t feel they need to do this themselves - as if they had an encylopaedic memory of all drug information, or else feel their own existing expertise makes it unnecessary.
As a result of this attitude, however, they often also do not give any time to check and remind themselves of what are called ‘contraindications’ - illnesses that can make it very dangerous to prescribe a drug to patients with particular illnesses such as heart disease, or particular symptoms such as high blood pressure, difficulty breathing or passing urine etc. Most doctors also do not spend any time checking for possible or dangerous interactions between different drugs taken by the same patient. This is a very serious failure, because so many patients, particularly elderly ones, are taking multiple prescription drugs at the same time. All these all-too-common forms of medical negligence by doctors are a veritable prescription for ‘ADRs’ (Adverse Drug Reactions) many of which can and do result in fatalities, but are also negligently unreported by doctors themselves, even if patients themselves report them.
As a medical researcher, I cannot count the number of times I have been shocked, bewildered and even left speechless by the sheer medical ignorance of doctors themselves. Unfortunately, this ignorance can result in dangerous medical negligence. It often goes together also with a sort of authoritarian professional arrogance that many or most patients - naively believing that ‘doctor knows best’ - just surrender to, agreeing without question whatever their doctor suggests.
That is why an important part of my own work as a new type of counsellor for medical patients (see my book on Life Medicine) is to research all the drugs, test procedures and treatments that doctors or medical specialists have prescribed or recommended to a particular patient - and offer them a Second Opinion. Without such medically researched advice patients may take prescribed medical drugs, accept medical treatments or simply allow types of medical examination which carry a lot of risks in themselves - but which could make their symptoms or illness worse - or even lead to death. That said, there is an even more fundamental way in which modern medicine ‘kills’. For in becoming a mere clinical object of medical investigation, examination and treatment - and no matter how friendly their doctors may be on the surface - the individual ceases to be seen and treated as a person with a life beyond their body - and becomes just another, more or less anonymous ‘patient’. That is why the entire process of medical hospitalisation is often experienced as a process of radical depersonalisation of the individual - who in many ways is killed off as a living flesh and blood person under the gaze of medical professionals and their standardised, almost quasi-automated procedures and prescriptions. As another Czech friend of mine put it recently: “I felt treated like a lump of meat.”
Note: If you are a medical patient and wish for counselling and/or researched advice and a Second Opinion on the relative risks and benefits of your prescription drugs or of any recommended tests or treatments - or those of a friend or family member - Peter Wilberg can be contacted by email at pwilberg76@gmail.com
© Peter Wilberg, MA Oxon
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