Thanks for your comment on my own meager blog. Yes, of course I understand that kidney pathologies due to sexual activity is a real thing. But I think the neurosis of which I speak is not in proportion to the actual incidence of the pathology.

Your blog is very interesting! I am looking forward to reading more of it over time.

Best,

Kaz

Gary Null is tangential to my points

Except that you devote a little over half of your article to repeating his assertions.

So it’s actually not him, if you follow me

Actually, it is him, as he routinely misrepresents sources and makes things up.
He’s not able to understand the scientific literature but cites it as a smokescreen.

I suggest that you obtain a copy of the first reference listed (Lazarou, Pomeranz et al) and give it a really thorough read.

I found it, although you cited it incorrectly. After reading it I can only conclude that you don’t understand it very well and/or that you are adopting Null’s tactics and simply citing a bunch of articles in order to make people believe that your pre-formed opinions have some kind of scientific backing.

According to the very article you cite, your chart is wrong (and not very useful, as it contains no numbers).
The article does expose adverse drug reactions (in patients in 1994!) as a “serious clinical issue”. Do you think that clinical practice might have evolved a little since then? Maybe as a result of the self-criticism by “conventional medicine” practitioners of which this article is a fine example? Try to absorb this point: this very self-correction, based on science, is what distinguishes “conventional” medicine from “alternative” medicine, and is why the former works and the latter, for the most part, is not effective, as it retains its basis in superstition and wishful thinking. Where is the article in which the “alternative” practitioners discuss and quantify the harm done by their own procedures, so that they can improve?

Finally, what does it mean when a patient dies from an adverse drug reaction, or from any medical intervention? It’s not as if doctors break in to your house and force you to swallow pills. You’re in the hospital being given serious medicine because you’re very sick and might die from your condition if the doctors don’t do something. Adding up all the people who die as a result of an attempt to help them and treating this number as “death from conventional medicine”, and then comparing the number with deaths from heart disease, etc., really makes no sense, unless you (1) subtract lives saved from the number of deaths; (2) exclude people who would have died anyway; (3) learn something about statistics, etc. If that’s not clear, here is an example: suppose you wind up in the hospital, unconscious and with some kind of infection that’s about to kill you. The doctors have to do something, so they give you a powerful antibiotic that you happen to be allergic to; you die from the allergic reaction. In what column do you put the “cause of death”? Did you die from the infection? From whatever you did or whatever other disease you had that led to the infection? From your failure to wear a medical alert necklace listing what you were allergic to? Did “conventional medicine” kill you because they took the course that was most likely to save you, and it failed? Should they have brought in an acupuncturist?