years. In 1976, Los Angeles County registered a sudden reduction of its death rate by eighteen percent
when many medical doctors went on strike against the increase of health insurance premiums for
malpractice. In a study by Dr. Milton Roemer from the University of California, Los Angeles, 17 of the
largest hospitals in the county showed a total of 60 percent fewer operations during the period of the
strike. When the doctors resumed work and medical activities went back to normal, death rates also
returned to pre-strike levels.
A similar event took place in Israel in 1973. Doctors staged a one-month strike and reduced their daily
number of patients from 65,000 to 7,000. For the entire month, mortality rates in Israel were down 50
percent. This seems to happen whenever doctors go on strike. A two-month work stoppage by doctors in
the Columbian capital of Bogotá led to a 35 percent decline in deaths. This practically makes the medical
profession, together with hospitals, the leading cause of death.
6. Hospitals—A Major Health Threat
In 1995, a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) said that, “Over a
million patients are injured in U.S. hospitals each year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a
result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic death rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident
mortality rate of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined.” These statistics
have become a lot worse since 1995. Unless you require an emergency treatment, it is better to avoid
hospitals altogether. Many hospitals today may pose a major risk to your health for the following reasons:
- They are filled with infection-causing bacteria that cannot be found anywhere else. Hospitals,
which often house very large numbers of sick people, are the ideal breeding environment for the
sometimes deadly bugs. Hospital patients generally have a lower level of immunity and offer little
or no resistance to them. Many of the microbes are passed on to the patients through the cooling
towers, air conditioning and heating systems in hospitals. The hospital staff, due to constant
exposure to the bugs, are fairly immune to them, but may pass them on to patients by touching
them or their food, bedding, clothing, or medications. - Contrary to common belief, hospitals are among the most contaminated places in the world. In
fact, it is virtually impossible to keep hospitals spotlessly clean, and it does not take much dirt to
become a breeding place for billions of deadly infectious bacteria. - Doctors can be the worst transmitters of disease in hospitals. Most doctors do not wash their hands
except before an operation, when they wear sterilized gloves and gowns anyway. They may
sometimes touch many dozens of patients within several hours, one after the other, without
washing their hands even once. Even the doctor’s white gown is not as clean as it looks. It is only
clean if it is washed every single day, which rarely happens. When it is washed, it comes into
contact with the dirty laundry from the operating room, bed covers, pillowcases, etc. Many
extremely harmful bugs survive the washing machine and dryer. - Bed sheets may be clean, but mattresses and pillows are not. The chance of being infected by bugs
living in them is 1 in 20. - Fifty percent of all infections in hospitals occur because of the patient’s contact with non-sterile
medical instruments such as catheters and intravenous infusion installations. Before they were in
common use, such infections occurred only very rarely. - In the United States, over 90,000 people a year die from hospital-acquired infections. This figure
does not account for those who are considered to be dying, or are already weakened by an
operation. Yet they, too, are killed by a hospital-acquired infection.