Excerpted from <http://www.mercola.com/2000/jul/30/doctors_death.htm>

Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US, Causing 250,000 Deaths Every Year
 
This article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is the best article I have ever seen written in the published literature documenting the tragedy of the traditional medical paradigm.
If you want to keep updated on issues like this click here to sign up for my free newsletter.
This information is a followup of the Institute of Medicine report which hit the papers in December of last year, but the data was hard to reference as it was not in peer-reviewed journal. Now it is published in JAMA which is the most widely circulated medical periodical in the world.
The author is Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and she desribes how the US health care system may contribute to poor health.

ALL THESE ARE DEATHS PER YEAR:
• 12,000 -- unnecessary surgery 8
• 7,000 -- medication errors in hospitals 9
• 20,000 -- other errors in hospitals 10
• 80,000 -- infections in hospitals 10
• 106,000 -- non-error, negative effects of drugs 2
These total to 250,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes!!

What does the word iatrogenic mean? This term is defined as induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially of a complication of treatment.

Dr. Starfield offers several warnings in interpreting these numbers:
• First, most of the data are derived from studies in hospitalized patients.
• Second, these estimates are for deaths only and do not include negative effects that are associated with disability or discomfort.
• Third, the estimates of death due to error are lower than those in the IOM report.1

If the higher estimates are used, the deaths due to iatrogenic causes would range from 230,000 to 284,000. In any case, 225,000 deaths per year constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from heart disease and cancer. Even if these figures are overestimated, there is a wide margin between these numbers of deaths and the next leading cause of death (cerebrovascular disease).

...continued on the linked site