Death by Modern Medicine identifies the tragic aspects of a medical system that, in its short history of about eighty years, has managed to kill tens of millions of victims. Dr. Dean, in her widely circulated paper, "Death by Medicine", written in November 2003, was the first to identify the extent of these casualties. She confirmed that from 1990-2000 about 7.8 million victims suffered - Death by Medicine. By 2014 the numbers had escalated to over 1 million unnecessary deaths at a cost of over 280 billion dollars.
    Many people are shocked by this figure, but our eyes have been opened to the full horror of modern medicine. There have been 140,000 fatal or near fatal reactions to Vioxx; one third of the millions of women who took fen-phen, the weight loss drug, suffered heart and lung damage; heart disease is caused by Celebrex and all the other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs; Prozac is causing suicides and homicides as well as heart disease. The list is seemingly endless. Beta blocker drugs have been responsible for an additional 800,000 needless deaths in a 5-year period in Europe, we don’t even have statistics for North America [2012] Death by Modern Medicine: Seeking Safe Solutions (Book)

Interestingly, this way of covering up the reality of deaths and damage caused by pharmaceutical corporations is becoming more common — In the UK, the case against Dr Andrew Wakefield, the whistleblower in the case of MMR (manufactured in part by GSK), was presented to the public as one of ethics, while the real issue of a damaging vaccine which harmed thousands of children was completely sidelined. If Witty and GKS did learn anything from this case, it was how to get away with culling the population of thousands, this part of their operation went very well but next time they might hope to dodge the fine for undeclared safety data. It makes me sick to my stomach, that while every high school shooting, every soldier killed in a foreign country, every notorious murder is religiously reported by the US media, GSK gets away with killing thousands without a single adverse word. And where are our gallant reporters in all this, whose going to sue them for fraudulent reporting, nothing could be a clearer sign that the media and it’s feather bedded journalists have crossed to the other side of the corporate tracks.
    Getting away with murder II.(in two parts) Because of clever media manipulation, most people don’t understand what this ‘fine’ involved in the GSK mass murder case. It has been presented to the public as a case of fraud. Every news item makes clear that GSK failed to disclose certain safety data for three drugs which they produced. The penalty for this fraud, however, was only a portion of the overall ‘settlement’, the great majority of it was a straightforward claims settlement for deaths and injury caused to people who took the drugs after they had been licensed on fraudulent safety data (I know only about Avandia, for one of the other drugs see Fiona Hackman’s question below).It’s a little like an automobile company knowingly producing cars with faulty brakes, which ultimately kill thousands of people, being fined for failing to alert industry regulators to an apparent production fault. The reason why all media have reported this settlement as one of fraud is clear, had it been reported as a claims settlement even the most docile of the public would have raised eyebrows, asking the question, ‘How can a company falsify safety data, obtain a license for a drug and watch it kill and maim thousands of people?’ Mr ‘witty’ Witty, the Chief executive of GSK was able to brush off the whole settlement with the aside ‘We’ve learned from our mistakes’, when the sad fact is that it was thousands of others who learned by GSK’s criminality.---Martin Walker MA  Martin Walker

[2009] THE DR. STARFIELD INTERVIEW By Jon Rappoport  the findings on the relatively poor health in the US have received almost no attention. The American public appears to have been hoodwinked into believing that more interventions lead to better health, and most people that I meet are completely unaware that the US does not have the 'best health in the world'. ......Even though there will always be adverse events that cannot be anticipated, the fact is that more and more unsafe drugs are being approved for use. Many people attribute that to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is (for the past ten years or so) required to pay the FDA for reviews---which puts the FDA into an untenable position of working for the industry it is regulating.
....They (my findings) are an indictment of the US health care industry: insurance companies, specialty and disease-oriented medical academia, the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing industries, all of which contribute heavily to re-election campaigns of members of Congress. The problem is that we do not have a government that is free of influence of vested interests. Alas, [it] is a general problem of our society-which clearly unbalances democracy......Yes, it (FDA) cannot divest itself from vested interests. (Again, [there is] a large literature about this, mostly unrecognized by the people because the industry-supported media give it no attention.
.....Please remember that the problem is not only that some drugs are dangerous but that many drugs are overused or inappropriately used.  The US public does not seem to recognize that inappropriate care is dangerous---more does not mean better.  The problem is NOT mainly with the FDA but with population expectations.
... Some drugs are downright dangerous; they may be prescribed according to regulations but they are dangerous.
...It was rejected by the first journal that I sent it to, on the grounds that 'it would not be interesting to readers'!