About The Project
The Why Behind the Medical Wisdom Project
Medically Wise Key Premises
- Medical mistakes are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US (250K-400+K Americans each year).
- If properly calculated, iatrogenic deaths (medically induced) could well be the leading cause of mortality in the US.
- The American medical system costs twice as much as any other in the world, but is the most dangerous
- Well-educated people are most likely to become victims of overdiagnosis, overtreatments, dangerous drug and unnecessary procedures.
- Our broken medical culture is populated by caring individual providers but dominated by profit-fueled, aggressive medicine.
- Following a well-meaning doctor’s ill-informed advice may shorten your life.
- The entry paths to becoming an iatrogenic early death statistic are:
- Getting over diagnosed and becoming a permanent patient with a “chronic condition”.
- Taking most any prescription drug long-term.
- Frequent use of high-tech imaging and well-person mass screenings.
- Treating “cancers” that will never go anywhere aggressively.
- Use of most forms of interventional cardiology in a sub-acute context.
- Going to the hospital without an advocate.
- Turning common complaints, a likely mind/body component, into medical search and destroy missions.
- Failing to plan to die well at home.
- Mainstream media tends to concentrate coverage on news that does not cross their sponsors (Big Pharma).
- The leading cancer centers typically recommend the most aggressive therapies which may be unjustified.
- Protocols established by medical associations may not be in the patient’s best interests. Clinical judgement would be better.
- There is zero evidence that prophylactic heart stent procedures reduce mortality.
- Ignorance-based treatments have always caused harm, harmful treatments have has ballooned, not decreased, over time.
- A $75,000 heart bypass procedure in the US costs $10,000 in Singapore, and $1500 in India –with similar outcomes.
- The coronary artery bypass procedure is effective over the long term in only a tiny minority of patients and should be retired.
- By age 50, most Americans are on prophylactic, symptom-suppressing or potentially unnecessary and harmful medications.
- Disease diagnosis thresholds have consistently been lowered in favor of potentially unnecessary drugs and treatments.
- Disease over-diagnosis is a major epidemic; risk benefit analysis is under utilized.
- Most drugs are approved based on studies of short-term use; effect of long-term use is understudied, if studied at all.
- Immunosuppressants are massively over prescribed, with many long-term consequences, and don’t treat disease causes.
- Tens of millions are being medicated because of borderline test numbers despite unfavorable risk/benefit ratios.
- Risk of “incidentalomas” being lethal cancer is often less than 1%, and treating them aggressively is unwise.
- “Blood thinners” are massively overprescribed given the real risk/benefit ratios and are hard to get off safely.
- Cancer pathology reports seem definitive but are often difficult and understandably biased toward an invasive cancer diagnosis.
- High-tech imaging can create more questions than answers, and lead to unnecessary radiation or chemically related harm.
- More screenings can lead to more unnecessary harm than lead to better prevention.
- There have been no independent research on whether the millions of prostate biopsies spread malignancy.
- The benefits of most prescription pharmaceuticals are marketed using relative risk numbers, not actual risk, a misleading practice which subverts informed consent.
- The death rate from colonoscopies is roughly equal to the number of cancer deaths averted through early detection.
- Canadian colon cancer protocols recommend use of fecal occult blood and DNA testing and one less invasive screening at age 60 versus more frequent invasive protocols recommended in the US.
- Far more women have unnecessary treatment as a result of mammography than are saved by early detection of a lethal cancer.
- Chemotherapy and radiation both increase your risk substantially for other conditions later in life.
- Diagnosis of of biopsies is an inexact science with a potentially high rate of uncertainty.
- A cancer diagnosis should not be thought of as a binary situation, in other words, always requiring aggressive treatment.
- Dominant theories about diet-related heart disease and cholesterol are incorrect, even harmful.
- Interventional cardiology in America is hugely overused, largely ineffective, and dangerous for patients.
- Heart attacks are only peripherally connected to coronary artery disease and remain unpredictable.
- Somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 hospital patients die unnecessarily every year. After 15 years of reform attempts, the numbers are still growing.
- Approximately one out of every three operations performed in US hospitals is unnecessary.
- If you learn about the common mistakes in drugs and procedures and take a trained advocate with you to the hospital, your chances of dying are much less.
- Digestive symptoms that are usually anxiety, stress or diet driven, typically lead to full GI workups and result in a medical diagnosis, medications, and permanent patient status.
- Pain can often have a mind-body component, and be greatly mitigated without medication.
- Most common complaints do not need to be treated with prescription medication or surgical procedures.
- Over-consumption of processed foods and subsequent obesity correlates highly with the rise of so many chronic conditions in the US.
Overdiagnosis and Overtreatment
Allowing yourself to get caught in and harmed by today’s broken American health system is relatively easy: simply let yourself be diagnosed with something that has never caused you symptoms and will never lead to your death. You will not be alone. Americans today are overdiagnosed by the millions. Then they are treated, mostly with drugs, but also with procedures. Many experience harm. All experience the subtle psychological change that moves them from well person to patient.
Medical Mistakes
After Makary’s work brought medical errors into the mainstream, CNBC reporter Ray Sipherd did a commendable follow-up in February of 2018 pointing out that appeals to the CDC to change the way it collects data from death certificates to include iatrogenic causes have not been answered. To the date of this writing, no changes have been made. The CNBC report also points out that the 250,000 deaths include only hospital-related deaths, so it substantially underestimated the issue by any measure, perhaps by an order of magnitude. This had already been recognized by the Journal of Patient Safety. In 2013, the Journal put the inpatient and outpatient total of preventable deaths in the US at more than 400,000 per year. And then medical columnist Dr. Gary Kohls points out that even these numbers do not take into account the 50,000 opioid overdose deaths annually, many of which were prescribed by health care providers.
Nor do the numbers account for the thousands of suicides associated with psychiatric drugs, the thousands of heart attacks from NSAIDs, or the thousands of premature deaths from chemotherapy, which are currently included in the cancer death category. Says Dr. Kohls, “One also wonders that if accurate figures were available, combining inpatient and outpatient iatrogenic deaths together (a rational approach) it would cause heart and cancer deaths to drop to number 2 and number 3.”
Mission Statement
We are called to help millions of Americans caught in today’s profit-fueled system of medical over-diagnosis, over-treatment and medical mistakes and to see their lives transformed from permanent patient to well person through unbiased wisdom, discernment and healthy living.
Vision Statement
We see an America where every person has access to both unbiased medical knowledge and the experiences of their follow Americans in today’s healthcare delivery system – an America where iatrogenic (medically-induced) diseases is on the decline and longevity once again is on the increase.
Our Pledge to You at Medically Wise
- We will remain independent, not tied to any large institution with a financial interest in products or procedures, large institutions which dispense virtually identical advice.
- We will remain evidence-based. We will never tell you facts that we cannot back up with legitimate medical research.
- We will not be marketing-driven – make you invest large you amounts of time before you even get to what you’re selling. We will not create complex layers of offerings.
- We will put most of our best information where you can easily access it.
- We pledge to do our best to help you partner with your doctor in a wise and informed way and stay away from many of the unnecessary, profit-driven medical advice, devices, drugs, and procedures that shorten your life.
- We pledge to stay focused on you the consumer of medical care, and not to become medical-industrial complex reformers, even effective reformation is long overdue.
- We pledge to see the good in most kinds of alterative medicine, while keeping our eyes mainly on the mainstream allopathic medical system which does the most harm today.
Medically Wise Strategic Goals
- Build a base of thousands of people who understand the dangers of overdiagnosis, overtreatement and medical mistakes and know how to be medically wise.
- Offer them increasingly valuable services such as blogs, newsletters and personal advocate services.
- In the future… build a network of healthcare service providers willing to help our members with conservative medical advice and treatment based on clinical judgement for best outcomes, not rigid protocols.