Physicians dispense about four billion prescriptions for drugs every year in the United States (about thirteen prescriptions a year for every man, woman, and child). So why change your diet and lifestyle when you can just use conventional medicine? Unfortunately, modern medicine isn’t nearly as effective as most people think. Doctors excel at treating acute conditions, such as fixing broken bones and suppressing infections, but for chronic diseases, which are the leading cause of death and disability, modern medicine doesn’t have much to offer and, in fact, can sometimes do more harm than good.

1. Modern medicine isn’t nearly as effective as most people think. For example, when it comes to cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood thinning drugs, the chance of even high-risk patients benefiting from them is typically less than 5 percent over a period of five years (Modern Medicine Effectiveness)
2. Medicine and our existing healthcare system is the third leading cause of death (Medical Error)
3. Side effects from medications given in hospitals kill an estimated 106,000 Americans every year, and this number reflects only the number of deaths from taking the drugs as prescribed. (Ref3)
4. In outpatient settings – your doctor’s office among others – prescription drug side effects alone may result in 199,000 additional deaths. (Ref4)
5. Getting a chest CT scan is estimated to inflict the same cancer risk as smoking 700 cigarettes. (Ref5)
6. Taking antioxidant supplements may be more than just a waste of money. People given 500 mg of vitamin C a day were found to end up with more oxidative DNA damage. The natural antioxidants in food work synergistically; it’s the combination of many different compounds working together that tends to protect you, not high doses of single antioxidants found in supplements. (Ref6)
7. Pilots eating a mix of phytonutrients, concentrated in a variety of such plant foods as citrus, nuts, seeds, pumpkins, and peppers had the lowest levels of DNA damage in response to the radiation they were bombarded with every day from the galaxy (Ref7)
8. Green, leafy vegetables such as spinach and kale appear to have an edge over other vegetables and fruits when it comes to radiation protection (Ref8)
9. White blood cells blasted with gamma rays suffered less DNA damage when the cells had been pretreated with phytonutrients from ginger root. The ginger compounds protected DNA nearly as well as the leading radiation sickness drug at 150 times lower the dose. (Ref9)
10. Physicians dispense about four billion prescriptions for drugs every year in the United States (about thirteen prescriptions a year for every man, woman, and child) (Ref10)
11. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that doctors make nearly a million more referrals every year than they would have if they were not personally profiting. (Ref11)
12. One unifying diet found to best prevent and treat many of these chronic diseases is a Whole-food, plant based diet, defined as an eating pattern that encourages the consumption of unrefined plant foods and discourages meats, dairy products, eggs and processed foods (Plant-Based Diet)