Dr Obomsawin responds

There has been some criticism of the information showing that both the incidence or and mortality from infectious diseases had declined substantially prior to vaccination. I will be posting more data on this issue later on today, but in the meantime, I am very happy to be able to present Dr Obomsawin's response to Orac's comments that were posted to this blog 2 days ago.

These graphs are still in the draft stage and were shared with a limited number of people for feedback. Someone (unknown to me) sent the graphs out to a wider audience without my actual knowledge and control.

With reference to your comments on the measles table, the data was not selectively "cherry picked", but rather consistently spaced giving accurate data for every 12th year running from 1935 to 1983, a period which is roughly equivalent to a half century.

The software that I was using to create the graph did not allow for the creation of either a blank space or a dotted line between 1959 and 1968. There was no intent to be dishonest about this, and thanks to your blog, I will make it a point to specifically note on the graph that there is an absence of incidence data in this period.

The over 85 articles, reports, policy documents, presentations, and publications alluded to in my CV were never stated to have been published in mainstream medical journals. A significant number of these documents were in actuality written for Canadian public sector and civil society sector consumption.

I don't appreciate your considerable bias in alluding to the traditional medicine of indigenous peoples as "nonsense". To say such is analogous to the ill informed and arrogant assumptions of some 19th century missionaries who considered European society as singularly representing humankind's apogee of knowledge, while considering the rest of the world as enshrouded in heathen ignorance.

My maternal grandmother (an Oneida midwife) gave my mother the Oneida name of Sunbeam and her twin sister Moonbeam. Such are not "new age" names.

Your blog observations (and the comments of many of your readers) suggest that virtually all of the significant historical health outcome improvements attained in the western world are attributable to the brilliant and heroic strides of conventional medicine. I do not believe that the facts bear this out.

A prominent London Medical School public health epidemiologist observes that (emphases my own):

"The epidemiology of medical care and its effect on health have received little attention over the years. The exception is McKeown's Role of Medicine, based on cause-specific mortality reports for the century ending in 1971. Life expectancy had increased by 23 years during the first half century, but McKeown was able to attribute no more than a year or two to advances in medical care. He presented no data on the harm that medical care might incur, but his conclusion that medical care had contributed little to health was interpreted by many as an attack on medicine, and it was linked by many to Ivan Illich's claim that medicine does more harm than good. Illich's Medical Nemesis: The Appropriation of Health, published in 1975, and McKeown's Role of Medicine, published the following year raised questions that have remained largely unanswered to this day."

"The implications for public health of McKeown's and Illich's books have been largely ignored or considered irrelevant by clinicians, who are busy taking care of patients one at a time. Basic scientists appear not even to have noticed their existence... [Despite the fact that] Age-adjusted death rates were reported to be greater in countries with greater numbers of doctors, and presumably with more medical care. Equally difficult to explain, death rates for diseases amenable to treatment were reported to be greatest in areas with the most medical care resources.... Iatrogenic mortality may similarly help to explain. that greater numbers of doctors and medical resources, and presumably more discretionary medical and surgical care, are associated with higher death rates. Iatrogenic mortality is also reflected in the observation of brief but dramatic decreases in population death rate[s] when doctors strike and surgery for elective (but not emergency) operations are suspended."

Source: J.P. Bunker, Symposium: The role of medical care in contributing to health improvements within societies, International Journal of Epidemiology, 2001, No. 30, pp. 1260-1263.

Even more alarming is the documentation contained in the 2005 book Death by Modern Medicine: Seeking Safe Solutions, co-authored by Carolyn Dean M.D. (Dalhousie Univ.). In your interest, I've attached an article entitled Death by Medicine which essentially serves as a condensation of the book. The data indicates that the leading cause of death today in the United States is iatrogenesis. ( See PDF document found online at: http://www.webdc.com/pdfs/deathbymedicine.pdf)

Thomas McKeown, while serving as Chair of the World Health Organization (WHO) - Advisory Group on Health Research Strategy pointed out that clear evidence on genuine health determinants is available from a number of developing world countries that have "advanced rapidly in health": China, Costa Rica, Cuba, India (Kerala State), Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and some others. The improvements in their health status were almost entirely due to a lessened prevalence of infectious diseases. In his words (emphasis my own):

To assess priorities in health policies. the chief requirement is therefore to come to a conclusion about the reasons for the decline of the infections... All the countries that advanced rapidly achieved a substantial improvement in nutrition, which led to increased resistance. Indeed in some countries this was the only important direct influence. It is perhaps surprising that immunization appears to have contributed relatively little to the advances... the reduction in mortality occurred during a period when vaccine coverage was still low. To anyone who has traveled extensively in the rural areas of the third world, the common causes of ill health may seem self-evident. Many children are visibly malnourished, sanitary conditions are primitive, drinking water is unclean, the food... is contaminated. Our conclusions concerning the determinants of health can be epitomized by the simple statement that people must have enough to eat, and must not be poisoned.

Source: McKeown T., The Road to Health, World Health Forum, Published by the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, Vol. 10, 1989, pp. 410 and 411

I do believe that there are safer and sounder approaches to treating a number of conditions, e.g. the intelligent use non-toxic traditional plant medicines, and lifestyle medicine which has demonstrated considerable efficacy in the reversal of certain degenerative diseases.

Sincerely,

Raymond Obomsawin