A First Duty of Government is to Protect the Public.
Did you grow up trusting that our government will defend the lives of our country’s population?
In his 1995 book Bad Medicine,[i][ii] Australia’s author, John Archer used some of the medical data about medical harm to guesstimate that each year in Australia; some 50,000 lives are lost due to medical treatment as distinct from the patient’s disorder. Termed iatrogenesis, it is a global leading cause of death, yet no government can publishes its true toll.
AHPRA, the government body that oversees the safe functioning of Australia’s registered health practitioners cannot know the details of Australia’s guesstimated 50,000 iatrogenic deaths, which are missing from the government annual report Cause of Death.
In 2004, Null et al used “all available”, public domain medical literature to claim that in the USA: “The total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year. It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US.”
Both of those publications should have triggered every MP in Australia into action to protect the public by requiring:
That the government immediately starts collecting the data relating to iatrogenic deaths and have AHPRA apply forensic thoroughness to reporting, recording and reducing the incidence of all iatrogenic deaths.
That the law demands the truthful reporting of all iatrogenic deaths on death certificates.
That the government dis-associates Australia from using the deceptive World Health Organisation guidelines for signing death certificates.
That the responsible medical doctor be legally obliged to state truthfully the actual cause of death.
That it becomes illegal for the responsible medical doctor to substitute other than the actual cause of death.
That the government provide a truthful annual report of the causes of death that includes deaths due to iatrogenesis.
That Australia’s government immediately ceases concealing, and begins revealing, this leading risk of permanent harm or death.
The generations of public patients who comprise Australia’s annual iatrogenic death toll could receive no published forewarning of their impending collective peril. Instead, our government’s publication Cause of Death accounted for all deaths without recognising Australia’s thousands of iatrogenic deaths per year.
Please forward a copy of this article to your MP. Ask your MP; 1) Whose interests is our government serving by not informing public patients about Australia’s magnitude of iatrogenic risks to ensure that they are adequately informed to make life or death decisions?
2) Please explain; what the government’s purpose is for failing to publish Australia’s true total annual iatrogenic death toll?
If your MP responds please share that response with our readers.
Illustration courtesy of myaccountancyplace.co.uk
[i] [i] Archer, John. Bad Medicine: How Safe Is Modern Medicine. Simon and Schuster Australia, East Roseville, NSW. 1995. P184