Back in the premodern medicine times, hospitals were death traps. Only the poor went there and when they did, they usually died of infection. Well we are on our way back to that now. Think I am crazy? 12,000 Canadians die a year from mistakes and problems in hospital. 100,000+ in the US.
So why do we go? Often to have surgery that we don't really need. Often because we have chronic illness that they cannot cure anyway. We think that hospitals are safe and that they are good for us. They are neither. We should go as a last resort.
Here are a few more details of the risks.
Dr. Saul co-authored Hospitals and Health with Dr. Steve Hickey, and Dr. Abram Hoffer, the famous Canadian psychiatrist who, in 1953, demonstrated that high doses of niacin could cure schizophrenia and other similar mental disorders.
"Dr. Hoffer, in his study of biochemistry... noted that over the years there had been attempts to treat psychiatric illnesses by communities that didn't have hospitals. One was the Quaker community. And the Quakers, Dr. Hoffer said, found that if they took the mentally ill; put them in a nice house, gave them good food, and gave them compassionate care, they had a 50 percent cure rate," Dr. Saul says.
"Dr. Hoffer commented that drugs have about 10 percent cure rate. He was thinking that drugs might actually be going in the wrong direction, and hospitals give a lot of drugs... When people go into the hospital, they're going to have problems... Statistically, there are so many errors in hospitals that the average works out to one error per patient per day at the minimum. If you're in a hospital for four days, you can expect four medical errors in that time."
According to the 2011 Health Grades Hospital Quality in America Studyii, the incidence rate of medical harm occurring in the United States is estimated to be over 40,000 harmful and/or lethal errors each and EVERY day.
Hospitals have become particularly notorious for spreading lethal infections. In the United States, more than 2 million people are affected by hospital-acquired infections each year, and a whopping 100,000 people die as a result. According to the Health Grades report, analysis of approximately 40 million Medicare patients' records from 2007 through 2009 showed that 1 in 9 patients developed such hospital-acquired infections! The saddest part is, most of these cases could likely have been easily prevented with better infection control in hospitals—simple things such as doctors and nurses washing their hands between each patient, for example.
Hospitals, home and nursing home care account for over one-third of the $2.6 trillion the United States spends for health care.iii This is TRIPLE what we surrender to drug companies. It wouldn't be so bad if we actually received major benefits for this investment, but, as Dr. Saul's book reveals, this oftentimes is not the case...
