9 scary things your doctor won't tell you

In modern civilization, we tend to trust doctors without reservation. They are authoritative figures and we usually adopt their opinions without question. What we don't take into account is that many doctors either have no idea about important information that could threaten our lives or are trying hard to hide it. If you think what I'm saying is a bit sensational, just take a look at the following facts - facts that your doctor knows but forgets to mention when you sign the prescription.

1. Cancer isn’t always cancer

One of the biggest mistakes a doctor makes in his or her job is misdiagnosing cancer. People are always afraid when they hear the word cancer. Sometimes people even feel taboo about mentioning this word. However, there is a creed that the medical team relies on: early diagnosis. In other words, the earlier cancer is discovered, the easier it is to treat. But such enthusiasm can easily lead to false positives, and it is extremely dangerous to treat a disease that does not exist in our body.

We didn't make that up. Mammograms can easily misdiagnose breast cancer because any small abnormality in the breast could be mistaken for a tumor. The most common misdiagnosis is ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). Despite its “malignancy,” DCIS never becomes truly cancerous; it only rarely becomes cancer, and almost all people with it survive, regardless of the treatment they receive.

But when doctors count cancer cases, they usually include ductal carcinoma in situ, which currently accounts for 30% of breast cancer "cases" in the United States. In addition, when diagnosed with the disease, most people choose "unnecessary or even unhealthy treatments", which, according to relevant statistics, causes far more harm to the human body than "cancer" itself.

2. Some vaccinations fail

In 2012, the United States experienced its worst whooping cough outbreak since 1955. This outbreak is quite strange considering that we have been using the whooping cough vaccine for 50 years. There are two bacteria that cause whooping cough, B. pertussis and B. parapertussis, but the pertussis vaccine - the DTaP vaccine - only targets B. pertussis. That doesn't seem bad. Fighting a pathogen is better than doing nothing, right?

In fact, this view is not entirely correct. Over the years, we have always been specifically committed to fighting some diseases, and at this time another disease will take the opportunity to become active, so that vaccination can increase the lung infection rate of Bordetella parapertussis to about 40 times the normal level.

And recently, the vaccine has not been as effective as expected. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommended a double dose of the pertussis vaccine, saying that if the vaccine is to be effective, people who initially received three doses should receive three more doses.

That's because these vaccines actually strengthen the germs in the body. They can't reconstruct the human genome (you might dismiss the idea that vaccines might cause autism as alarmist nonsense), but they can stimulate mutations in pathogens. China learned this the hard way when they discovered that their hepatitis B vaccine caused the bacteria to mutate at twice the normal rate. We see the same thing with the flu virus—the vaccine essentially provides fuel for the germ to reproduce.

3. Prescription drugs can cause diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is caused by a relative lack of insulin produced in the patient's body, or by the inability to effectively secrete insulin in the body. This causes an increase in glucose, or sugar, in the bloodstream, and over time this added sugar can damage nerves and blood vessels. In the United States, there are approximately 2.3 million people with type 2 diabetes, and this number is increasing year by year.

Results suggest that many common prescription drugs, such as antidepressants, may cause diabetes. In 2011, 46.7 million prescriptions were given for depression in the UK alone. Based on these numbers, researchers at the University of Southampton found that people who took two of the more commonly prescribed antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and tricyclic antidepressants, were twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who did not take either drug. Of course, those findings weren’t published until 2013, but we’ve known about the link between prescription drugs and diabetes since 2008, yet millions of people — or more — still regularly take prescription drugs every month.

It's even worse -- some commonly prescribed drugs used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children can triple the risk of developing diabetes. Moreover, it is most likely an incurable lifelong disease, but the child does not even have the choice to refuse.

4. Some drugs increase the risk of cancer

Now that we've eased your concerns about cancer, let me get on with it and put all those anxieties into place.

Blood pressure medication almost triples the risk of developing invasive breast cancer. With an estimated 58.6 million people taking blood pressure medication in the United States alone, you'd think the link between blood pressure medication and cancer would be more well known.

The research team that discovered the link between blood pressure medication and cancer surveyed 1,763 women with breast cancer. Women who take a particular type of blood pressure medication called calcium channel blockers are two and a half times more likely to develop breast cancer than the general population, research suggests. Older women over 55 are at greater risk of developing breast cancer because calcium channel blockers prevent cell death. If cells cannot complete their normal life cycle, their activities will become uncontrolled and eventually become cancerous.

But that's not a big problem unless the dose of the prescription drug is too high. In a review of one hospital, we found that 150 of 161 doctors were prescribing calcium channel blockers to their patients. But how many doctors told their patients about the risks? Only eight. That is a potentially fatal mistake in their work.

5. Aspirin can cause internal bleeding

The advice we often get from doctors is to take a small dose of aspirin every day. This maintenance treatment prevents the formation of blood clots, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes. But what your doctor won't tell you is that doing this can also cause severe internal bleeding.

Researchers found that out of 10,000 people who took a daily dose of aspirin, 46 would be fine over the next 10 years. But at the same time, they also found that 49 of these 10,000 people suffered from gastric bleeding, and another 117 people had signs of gastrointestinal bleeding. So we cannot deny the benefits of aspirin, but at the same time it may make the situation very worse.

Besides, aspirin doesn't work for everyone. There are individual differences in the antiplatelet effect of aspirin, and some patients have aspirin resistance, which negates all the positive effects of aspirin. But since we have no way to test that, even doctors themselves don't know whether the treatments they are recommending to their patients are working.

6. Heartburn Medications Have Deadly Side Effects

One of the main problems with drugs is that while they are effective in treating the conditions they are designed to treat, they are often followed by horrible side effects. Even though it is doctors' job to tell you about the side effects of those drugs, sometimes they avoid talking about them. For example, proton pump inhibitors, a type of heartburn treatment marketed under the brand names Nexium and Prilosec, may cause bone aging and birth defects, and they can also cause permanent nerve damage by preventing the body from absorbing vitamin B12.

In addition, the most prescribed drug by doctors in 2012 was Nexium, and in most cases, it didn't even work. Aspirin is often prescribed to treat Barrett's esophagus, a condition caused by excess stomach acid burning the esophagus, but the pills have no effect at all. Pediatricians have even begun prescribing the drug for infants and young children, despite studies showing that doing so can actually cause permanent intestinal disturbances.

7. “Safe” X-rays Can Also Cause Cancer

It is well known that gamma radiation and X-rays have a risk of causing cancer. Nowadays, we often expose ourselves to radiation in order to survive. Therefore, when your doctor checks your broken bones or gives you a mammogram, he will explain to you the principles of "safe exposure" to X-rays. Radiation is measured in sieverts, and you're exposed to about 2.4 millisieverts of background radiation per year; by comparison, a mammogram exposes you to just 0.7 millisieverts.

The difference between the two, however, is that medical X-rays inject radiation into your body within a few minutes, while background radiation takes you a full year to absorb. That's a huge difference, even among low-radiation "safe" X-rays. In the UK, diagnostic X-rays lead to around 700 cases of cancer each year. Even worse - some researchers claim that most cancer cases are caused by medical X-rays, or that medical X-rays make cancer patients' conditions worse.

What's more, if a woman undergoes an X-ray during pregnancy, there is a high chance that she will give birth to a child with cancer. And the CT scan (computerized tomography) that's the diagnostic tool of choice for kids is, as you might guess, just another style of X-ray.

8. Doctors get paid to sell certain drugs

Conspiracy theorists are not afraid to expose the evil deeds of Big Pharma. But conspiracy theories are one thing, and documentary evidence is quite another. After a more careful observation, Harvard Law School realized that if people pay a little attention, they will find that doctors can get considerable compensation from a certain prescription drug, even though sometimes the prescription drugs they prescribe are harmful to the human body.

In a recent case, Dr. Joseph L. Biederman prescribed strong antipsychotics to a two-year-old with bipolar disorder, even though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has stated that such drugs cannot be used in children under 10 years old. The manufacturer of the antipsychotic drug paid him $1.6 million. Another example is Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, who treats depression with an abortion pill—he owns a $4.8 million stake in the company that makes the drug.

Then there was Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, who was paid $500,000 for advertising a drug that caused epilepsy and paralysis, claiming that the drug was safe. In fact, doctors are allowed to prescribe any medicine for any disease, regardless of the condition they are prescribing. We can't generalize and say that all doctors will prescribe questionable medications in order to get paid - but how do you know which doctors will do so?

9. The flu panic was overblown

Who could forget the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009 and 2010? When the World Health Organization declared a global influenza emergency, the world went into a tailspin. Long lines waiting to get vaccinated stretched for several blocks, and doctors everywhere urged people to seek medical attention promptly.

In nearly 10 months, pharmaceutical companies easily raked in $6.5 billion (equivalent to $10.5 billion in 2010 dollars) from vaccine sales. Physicians who were in cahoots with vaccine manufacturers were 8.4 times more likely to recommend vaccination to their patients than the average physician. And it wasn't just advice -- they were even more likely to blatantly exaggerate the dangers of flu in the media. And oddly enough, doctors who were paid by drug companies were more likely to volunteer information to newspapers. That may not seem like much of a difference, but we tend to trust what the newspapers say when they quote experts. As a result, nearly 17,000 people died from H1N1 influenza, while 46,000 died from the common flu. This, of course, is thanks to mass vaccination—not, say, the flu itself being just an ordinary genetic mutation that was artificially exaggerated to alarming proportions.