War against natural medicine - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Pinch me - I must be dreaming! I never thought I would read such an excellent article on the suppression of natural therapies from the ABC but here it is. Congratulations go to Sarah Schwager for doing such a great job and to the Drum for having the courage to publish an article that tells the truth even though it goes against the powerful pharmaceutical lobby!

War against natural medicine - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

Why is a group of prestigious doctors and scientists who have the backing of the most profitable industry in the world according to Fortune 500 – the pharmaceutical industry – targeting a few poorly-funded natural medicine courses?

The official line of the group is that these "alternative medicines" are making Australia look bad and "trashing" the universities' reputation. But is that really the reason? With all the countries and all the universities in the world that provide alternative medicines?

...FSM has accused what it labels as Australia's "lesser" universities that offer alternative medicine courses of "putting the public at risk".

However, this is a difficult notion to fathom when you compare the tiny number of injuries inflicted on natural medicine patients compared to the hundreds of thousands of deaths recorded each year due to medical errors.

WHO estimates that one in 10 hospital admissions leads to an adverse event while one in 300 admissions leads to death. WHO puts medical errors as among the top 10 killers in the world. According to the US's Institute of Medicine, preventable medical errors kill 98,000 people in the US alone each year and injure countless more.