36,666/mo die from smoking, 1/3 of deaths related to Dr's. Iraq???

[The Straight Story]

Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

ALL THESE ARE DEATHS PER YEAR:

* 12,000 -- unnecessary surgery
* 7,000 -- medication errors in hospitals
* 20,000 -- other errors in hospitals
* 80,000 -- infections in hospitals
* 106,000 -- non-error, negative effects of drugs
http://www.mercola.com/2000/jul/30/doctors_death.htm


Smoking:
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/s/smoking/deaths.htm

Troops in Iraq - 2400 to date.

What does this lead folks to conclude? Where does it lead us in the discussion?

Doctors, diet, life choices all kill far more than bush's war.

Is it any wonder people don't care?

[serryjw]

1. Would you feel better if the war killed 50,000 (Americans)

like VietNam? :shrug:

[The Straight Story]

3. No, just pointing out

that we kill ourselves at a greater rate than the Iraq war has done.

If Americans see all these stats (as they probably often do in the Scary news of the day) than the war in Iraq and our losses will seem like nothing compared to the other causes of death. Which may be why so many seem so complacent about it all.

[serryjw]

4. Human nature is such that people will

eat, drink and make merry....that is their choice. * sending kids to die is not their choice.No one says it is bright but I smoke, I lost my mother to lung cancer.???

[TomInTib]

5. Medical mistakes occur at a horrifying rate. But lies are lies.

And when a series of lies leads us into an illegal and unnecessary invasion of a sovereign country...

[serryjw]

6. I never understood the purpose of the OP??

However stupid; I have a right to kill myself.

[The Straight Story]

13. My point was/is this:

People here in the US hear about death daily - whether from loved ones passing on from accidents, cancer, heart issues, kidney failure, etc to Iraq.

So a soldier dies in Iraq, or thousands die in a Tsunami - do they really care? My mom died on 12/31/2004 and then the Tsunami hit. Which one impacted me more?

I am not trying to belittle the deaths in Iraq - or the injuries there. They suck and were not needed to secure our country. I am saying that we hear about death so much from all sides (personally and the news) that we may well have grown insensitive to it - which is why touting the numbers of US dead in Iraq is not really doing much.

If it does not impact one personally people tend to blow it off. Which is sad to me, but it is reality.

Millions die in the US from a variety of issues (murder, negligence, personal choice, accidents, abuse, et al) so trying to push the fact that less than 3000 have died in a war lasting a few years does not seem to me like it would accomplish much.

I don't know anyone who has died in Iraq. I have known 6 people (off top of head) whom have died in the last 16 months from a variety of issues - smoking, kidney issues, drinking, cancer, accidents.

I am guessing - but I think often people see folks in the military as having signed up knowing the risks they would take, and Iraq is but one of those risks.

I am not saying it is all right or wrong. Just trying to put into perspective how few have died there compared to here (ie, more americans are killed here than there yearly) and why it might seem like not much compared to life in general here. IE - bush's war is less damaging to americans than we are to ourselves.

It's sad, and selfish - but I think it is a root cause for the complacency we see.

[DanCa]

2. All these deaths yet we have an over population problem in this counry?

I wonder how many unborn children are killed in a month? :sarcasm: I find this number highly suspect.

[REP]

11. Mercola Is a Well-Known Quack and Charlatan

While medical errors, including prescription errors, iatrogenia and nosocomial infections do kill a large number of people each year, if Mercola said that water was wet, I'd ask for two other sources before I'd believe it.

[DanCa]

12. look at the last three numbers 666

That's all I have to read to know that this "report" is fake.

[Erika]

7. Our troops are dying under a pretense of war.

Why do you put them down by not acknowledging their committment and comparing them to non-war related death stats?

[Emit]

8. U.S. casualties vs. wounded

RE: U.S. casualties

Ninety percent of U.S. wounded survive
In Iraq, firepower increases, deaths decrease
By William J. Cromie
Harvard News Office

Better, faster medical care has reduced deaths from the more than 10,000 war injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan to the lowest percentage of any war in American history. In World War II, 30 percent of U.S. soldiers died from wounds received in combat; in Vietnam, 24 percent of the wounded died. In Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the horrific increase in the destructibility of weapons, mortality has dropped to 10 percent.


Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande's investigation of wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan shows the lowest death rate of any war in U.S. history, but, he says, it has its price. (Staff file photo Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office)

But that's not entirely good news for the survivors. Injuries from suicide bombs and land mines often leave lifetime disabilities. Surgeons report a depressingly high incidence of blindness. Amputations, seen almost weekly on television, raise distressing questions about how survivors and their families will adapt and function.

Both sides of the story are told in an article in the Dec. 9 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine written by Atul Gawande, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who gathered data on casualties and talked with surgical teams that served near the front lines. He concludes that the "military medical system has made fundamental - and apparently effective - changes in the strategies and systems of battle care, even since the Persian Gulf War." In that 1990-91 conflict, 24 percent of the wounded died, or more than twice the rate in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

~snip~

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/12.16/11-wounds.html



And we're talking some with very serious injuries, such as TBI's, missing limbs, etc.

[Sinti]

9. What about the numbers of civilian Iraqis? Did they have a choice?

I guess folks don't really think about them. I've actually heard the argument that it's a relatively small number of casualties, seeing as how it's a war and all, we'd expect more, blah, blah, blah. One was too many.

[The Straight Story]

14. Indeed you are correct- people don't care about them

they are just 'the enemy'.

I think about them myself, being a dad. And I wonder - what if it was someone invading here to oust our government?

To me it is all conditioning. We put out totals on deaths by X. And people see cancer and heart disease as more of a threat to life than war. Odd.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

10. You forgot the 140,000+ Middle Eastern civilians that have died...

...since Herr Busch began the NeoCon crusade in the Middle East? How many more will die before somebody escorts that evil being out of the White House?

Maybe you don't care, but I do.