Is it true, doctors are third leading cause of death, after heart-attack and cancer in USA.?

Yes, it's true, but the number is a little off. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive... says it should be 225,000 (between unneccessary surgeries, medication errors in the hospital, other errors in the hospitals, etc).

It specifies:

"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

These total to 225,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes!!"

SkepDoc, the JAMA is the source. The same article above lists http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=... (an abstract from July 26, 2000;284(4):483-5). But you are right that it has nothing to do with Alternative Medicine except to encourage people to look for healthier options and preventative measures instead of letting things degrade to the point where they have to go to the hospital where one of these "errors" could occur. I hope this helps!

[edit]: The article also mentions the 44,000 to 98,000 deaths as a result of medical errors... that's included in the numbers above that I listed. It's not lies at all and it's fully verified by the AMA and JAMA (although they may list it in different ways so you sometimes have to read closer). It also points out that the U.S. is an average of 12th (out of 13) on a list for 16 available health indicators... the article as a whole is an interesting read that is cited so I'd read through the whole thing.

Wow. That's like Republican math there.

Even if 100,000 people per year died from medical errors (that is all sources, not just doctors), you fail to account for the hundreds of thousands of people, every year, who are saved by caring, intelligent, competent, sometimes brilliant doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals doing their jobs correctly.

Go back and recalculate now.

No, that's a lie. One very easy to reveal.

As pointed out, the source is a JAMA article. However in reality it says 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical errors.

The people who can easily check their claim are those with institutional access to journals (JAMA is not open access), usually doctors and scientists. These are also the least likely people to believe their tripe. The general public simply cannot check the validity of their claim, so they get away lying about it.

In reality far more people than that would have die in the absence of an evidence based medical system. This is trivial to show. Look at any undeveloped nation.

It gets worse for them though. The entire point of the article was to show the US medical system is inferior to other industrialized nations that happen to use the same evidence based "allopathic" medicine.

So, they are lying about the number, what it means, and what the alternative is. Alternative "medicine" pushers are dishonest charlatans.

Assuming the high estimate, medical mistakes are the 6th cause of death, lower than accidents and above diabetes. The low estimate puts them at 10th, below kidney problems and above sepsis.

Malpractice is not a cause of death per se.

Even if 250,000 people suffer from malpractice and die as a result annually, that doesn't mean that most of them would've lived if they had received the best care money can buy.

If a person has cancer, but his doctor misses it, and that person dies, did he die from malpractice, or did he die from cancer?

If the doctor had found out about his disease and put him on the best treatment possible, would he have made it?

These questions are impossible to answer with a statistical study, so statements like "doctors are third leading cause of death" will forever remain unproven.

One thing is certain: 250,000 people suffering from deadly diseases and getting crappy treatment annually is unacceptable, even if you can't neatly place it on the "leading causes of death" table.

No, these deaths can be also be attributed to the medical system as well, hospital staff mistakes etc, and misuse of pharmaceuticals.

You fail to mention the hundreds of millions of lives that are improved or saved each year thanks to doctors and pharmaceuticals, so your question is misleading, and is not evidence for the efficacy of any alt med, including your homeopathy, which saves zero lives.

Skep and Wiese have given great answers. I have nothing to add. It's fallacious to list the negatives, without listing the benefits. How many people owe their lives to conventional medicine? So it's automatic question FAIL to start with.

But I'll bite..even with the deaths, you need to taken into account those who would have died without medical treatment anyway, and it's easy for the quacks to manipulate data.

Example: If an insulin dependant diabetic dies from hypoglycemia, this is technically a drug related death. However, without insulin, a type one diabetic would die anyway.

Human error is no reason to ignore conventional medicine and turn to AltMed which has never been demonstrated to work.

cite your source please. That number has been quoted by many Alties, but I've yet to see them tell me where they got it from.

But to answer your question, no, that is not true at all, though I realize it has become "canon" in Alt Med circles. I've been trying to find the post at Science Based Medicine where that particularly canard was taken on and quite thorougly trashed, but I can't find it at present. I'll post later if I find it, or if others recall the one I'm refering to. As I recall, essentially it was a wild guess based on dubious and incomplete data from the early 1990's., but has been circulating and repeated ad nauseum by Alties ever since.

The thing that is always missing from these random numbers is the other side of the equation. How many of the people who die while under a doctors care would have died anyway or who would have died sooner without getting medical care?. Yes..sometimes people do die of their illness in spite of our best efforts...but these people would have 100% death rate without medical intervention. Yes sometimes people do die as a result of medical errors or accidents. It is unfortunate that happens, but the only reason you know about it is because the medical profession documents these in an effort to improve quality of care. There is no such formal process in the entirety of Alt Med.

Lastly, how is this a question about Alternative Medicine? It is simply a baiting troll question designed to get a rise out of people, designed to sow doubt with people, and to spread misinformation and rumor. Repeating something over and over doesn't make it true.

The main problem with that number..whatever we quibble about the true deaths from medical errors, is it doesn't take into account the millions of lives saved by medical science every year.

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this isn' the article I was thinking of, but it is a good review of the claims of Altie non-doctor, non-scientist, non-statistician Gary Null cited by the equally dubious thenoseknows. Gary Null runs the most ridiculously over the top garbage website known...Whale.to

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=136

I would not doubt it, also remember that many if not most cancer deaths are caused by toxic chemical "treatments" rather than the disease itself. Cancer researcher Dr.Hardin Jones concluded in the 1950's that, left untreated, cancer patients will not get any worse, and many of them actually improve. His findings were never refuted, though of course they were ignored by the cancer industry and its financial backers. In view of these findings, and reflecting on the fact that doctors routinely and unquestioningly prescribe the toxins that kill cancer patients, your question should be modified to ask whether MDs are the SECOND leading cause of deaths in the United States. And who knows what role over prescribing of meds may play in incidences of heart attacks.

It's nice to know one of the "skeptics" with extremely questionable motives for being in this section has set every ones mind at ease by "verifying" through very dubious sources that the "correct" death rate is "just" 44,000 to 98,000 per year. Now we shall all sleep easier tonight thinking of that paltry statistic. Ditto for the gibberish from another seller that all those people may have expired through other causes, they would have died anyway, etc. Claptrap.

If you mean death by malpractice, then considering the number of arrogant, incompetent bastard doctors I've had the misfortune to encounter over the years I'd say that's true.

Yes. Read "Death by Medicine" by Dr. Gary Null. It's quite shocking. Actually the death toll is in excess of 700,000 (or more) and that's only the ones that are REPORTED. Many cases aren't.

Worldwide it's in the millions.