Western medicine certainly has its benefits when it comes to emergency care, as advancements in technology are generally effective when it comes to saving one’s life in the event of traumatic injury. Preventative care, on the other hand, is essentially nonexistent in most Western nations. Simple, every day treatments aren’t all that safe, either.
Treatments such as pharmaceutical drug prescriptions, routine dental checkups and non-life threatening surgeries often turn out to be just that: life threatening. Harm caused by medical error is a lot more common than you might think.
In fact, an estimated 1.6 million Americans have died as a result of medical errors over the last decade and a half. In fact, death via medical error is so common, that it’s now considered the third leading cause of death in the U.S., below heart disease and cancer.
