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| Alternative and Conventional Medicine Risks | If the person has selective thinking he can easily focus on cases where surgeons amputate the wrong limb, remove the healthy part of the brain, or kill a patient by taking too much anesthetic or radiation. Many people ignore the millions of patients who are still alive and well today thanks to the surgery or drugs. They focus instead on the cases of patients which didn’t get recovery from "long routine" surgery, who are permanently disabled because of a side effect to a drug, or who are killed by a careless unprofessional nurse acting as a self-appointed "mercy" killer.
This fear to die or being wrongly treated and skepticism regarding drug treatment, hospitalization, and surgery is not without foundation. Some harm is caused by malpractice; some is really tragic but inevitable result of unpredictable reactions to drugs or surgery. Because there are often legal issues involved, physicians and hospitals are often not forthcoming with details of patient deaths for which they might be responsible. The trust in medical treatment is ruined with each report of "therapeutic misadventures."
Do these "therapeutic misadventures" happen rare? There has never been a national study of the issue. There was research done in New York, which found that nearly 4 percent of patients were harmed in the hospital and 14 percent of these died most of them from their hospital inflicted injuries. Each year about 180,000 of Americans may be dying of medical injuries suffered at the hands of medical stuff, doctors, and nurses. It could be compared to the three jumbo-jet crashes every two days.
On the other hand, the risks of being harmed by an "alternative" practitioner such as osteopath, for example, are marginal when compared to the risks of being harmed by a conventional physician taking every day powerful drugs and risky surgeries. This is because an osteopath is not intervening in any significant way. The doses of treatment are not likely to have any effect on anyone. An osteopath or homeopaths aren’t likely to ever kill a patient by mistake. "Alternative" medical treatments are essentially non-interventionist and their risks are generally negative. The harm to the patients comes not from positive intervention but from not getting treatment, which would improve their health and prolong their life span.
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