This is spit and polish ten second rework of pages 18 and 19 in the Australian Paediatric Surveillance Unit's report of 2004. Quite why it took a whole 7 years to rewrite the same unsubstantiating witterings, with no updating, or new additional crimes to report, is anyone's guess. My question is, "Were the peer reviewers, and the editor of Arch Dis Child drunk when this passed over their desk?" .
Already the first missile has been fired right back by three doctors from Germany, pointing out just a few bits of fiction from this truckload of tripe these "scientists", indulged in. It's just a shame that Seifart's last grovelling paragraph was inserted, - but no doubt, one must never bite the hand that feeds one. However, Seifert et al made very good points and showed a few of the many examples why Lim's work was flunk, not fact.
I'm sure readers have the brains to see the wild and whacky "science" for themselves, so I won't elaborate further. Besides....someone else has already covered the salient points.
The bigger picture is .... why is it, that doctors have to manipulate definitions and data to suit themselves, yet ignore their own hypocrisy?
And when is a reaction, a reaction? After a vaccine, a reaction is always coincidence.
According to Lim et al, an adverse reaction is failure to use conventional medicine, and even seeking opinions from people who use conventional medicne. The pick of the bizarre "adverse events" listed, was:
35. Confused and complex grieving process Opinion from chiropractor regarding aetiology of disease after perinatal asphyxia
Hmmm.
Is a diagnosis from your doctor, which you worry about for months until it later turns out to be wrong, or the unnecessary heart ache so many people are put through at the hands of corporate medicine until they find out the truth, or work through the short comings of hospital staff, ever listed as an ..... "adverse event"?
NEVER.
That's.... a "system's failure".
Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) have an excellent record of safety. Both CAM and conventional doctors are human.
The difference is, that the arsenal of drugs a conventional doctor can persuade a blissfully unaware sheeple to take, are .... by way of comparison with CAM , infinitely more dangerous.
Typically, "ordinary" people who land up with CAM, are there because the system has either messed them up so badly that they've become cynical, or they have a problem for which the medical profession has nothing to offer in the first place.
When it comes to Lim's definition of an "adverse reaction" the hypocrisy is galling. Conventional doctors brush aside concerns over disability and deaths caused by drugs, hospital acquired infections, new superbugs which are spawned from drugs they prescribed, and something called "preventable medical error".
The most dangerous thing you can do in this country, isn't getting in a car slightly drunk.
It's walking cold sober into a hospital and being treated by cold-sober members of the medical profession. Medical errors are huge killers and maimers in this country, but you try and find accurate New Zealand statistics for medical stuff ups on line.
Go on. Try it, and see how far you get.
The attached are the ONLY media clippings I've ever seen on the issue, and when I rang the Herald to ask for the data after the earliest item, they told me that they couldn't give it to me, because it was a leaked report.
What's the data today? Why do we never see it amongst the Hospital discharge and annual year book data? We don't know how many medical errors are committed each year, primarily because as Merry and Chamberlain pointed out in 2008, if staff don't report it, it doesn't get counted ... and that's why they think less than 1% of NZ "incidents" are known.
In April this year, new revelations came out about USA hospital errors being ten times higher than previously thought.
It wouldn't suprise me if errors are more than 100 times higher than reported in this country, because I've yet to meet one person who doesn't have at least one hairy story about something done to them in the medical system, which has either done them damage, or nearly did, which might be why people are voting with their bums and trying out Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
And maybe that's the rub. The "money" is going somewhere... else.
Holt et al don't like it. Perhaps it's not about whether people have the right to seek something with a lower mortality rate than corporate medcine, at all.