Doctors today commonly assert that they practice "scientific medicine," and patients think that the medical treatments they receive are "scientifically proven." However, this ideal is a dream, not reality, and a clever and profitable marketing ruse, not fact.
The British Medical Journal's "Clinical Evidence" analyzed common medical treatments to evaluate which are supported by sufficient reliable evidence (BMJ, 2007). They reviewed approximately 2,500 treatments and found:
• 13 percent were found to be beneficial
• 23 percent were likely to be beneficial 13 percent were found to be beneficial
• Eight percent were as likely to be harmful as beneficial
• Six percent were unlikely to be beneficial
• Four percent were likely to be harmful or ineffective.
• 46 percent were unknown whether they were efficacious or harmful
In the late 1970s, the US government conducted a similar evaluation and found a strikingly similar result. They found that only 10 percent to 20 percent of medical treatment had evidence of efficacy (Office of Technology Assessment, 1978).
Doctors like to point to the "impressive" efficacy of their treatments in real serious diseases, like cancer, and doctors (and drug companies) are emphatic about asserting that anyone or any company that says (or even suggests) that they have a treatment that might help people with cancer are "quacks." However, do they maintain this same standard when evaluating their own treatments? Even a recent issue of Newsweek highlighted the fact that "We Fought Cancer, and Cancer Won" (Begley, 2010). Despite the truly massive amounts of money that doctors, hospitals and drug companies are effectively extracting from patients, employers, insurance companies and governments, we are certainly not getting our money's worth.
Even when there is "proven efficacy of treatment" in studies, the bigger question is how common is this proven efficacy utilized in medical care today? Be prepared to be shocked.
"Quackery" is commonly defined as the use of unproven treatments by individuals or companies who claim fantastic results and who charge large sums of money. Although modern physicians may point their collective finger at various "alternative" or "natural" treatment modalities as examples of quackery, it is conventional medical treatments today that are out-of-this-world expensive, and despite real questionable efficacy of their treatments, doctors give patients the guise of "science."
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Today in America, every man, woman, and child is prescribed around 13 prescription drugs per year (and this doesn't count the many over-the-counter drugs that doctors prescribe and that patients take on their own) (Kaiser, 2006). Just 12 years earlier, Americans were on average prescribed less than eight drugs per person, a 62 percent increase! The fact of the matter is that drugs are not tested for approval in conjunction with other drugs, and the safety and efficacy of the use of multiple drugs together remains totally unknown.
This practice of "polypharmacy" is increasing substantially, and Big Pharma is pushing it hard and benefiting from it in a big big way.
According to a 2008 nationwide survey, 29 percent of Americans used at least five prescription medications concurrently (Qato, Alexander, Conti, 2008), while just three years previously, 17 percent took three or more prescription drugs (Medscape, 2005). Even conservative publications such as Scientific American can no longer deny the increasing serious problems from pharmaceuticals. A recent article highlighted the fact that there has been a 65 percent increase in drug overdoses leading to hospitalization or death just in the past seven years (Harmon, 2010).
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